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Ask HN: Will Google ever launch a successful new product again?
Because I'm struggling to think of anything in recent years, and most of the things they do try to launch tend to flop, even if the initial idea is pretty good.
Meanwhile, all their successful products and services have been around a while now. Search was 1997, Blogger was 1999 (not initially by Google), Gmail was 2004, YouTube and Maps were both 2005, Google Docs was 2006 and both Android and Chrome were 2008. So where's the next big hit? Is one even possible with Google's attitude of "if it doesn't succeed in a few months, kill it"?
What is likely to be their next successful story out of the things they worked on recently?
- snowwrestler 4y agoIf you don't provide clear criteria for what counts as a "product launch" and "successful," most of the discussion will be people arguing over those definitions. Why is Cloud Platform not on your list, for example?
- rrdharan 4y ago[infrastructure bias] Kubernetes and TensorFlow should count, and are successful. AlloyDB is IMO most likely to be successful (especially since AWS Aurora already proved the market): https://cloud.google.com/alloydb https://cloud.google.com/alloydb Since this question seems to be much more about the consumer side, I think both Google Home and YouTube TV are independently considered successful though I have no doubt many people will chime in to note how much they hate either or both of those things.
- plorkyeran 4y agoKubernetes isn't a product.
- rrdharan 4y agoStrongly disagree. Kubernetes is not a Google product. But it is "a" product, and it was successfully launched as a commoditize-your-complement / cannibalize-yourself kind of thing. GKE meanwhile is a Google product, and is successful, and wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Kubernetes.
- dangus 4y agoWhat about GKE?
- lake_vincent 4y agoIt's interesting how legacy companies are not making exciting consumer/commercial products anymore, but infrastructure and technical projects are booming. Google TensorFlow and DeepMind, Microsoft WSL2, Meta AI, etc. Also worth mentioning the many quiet efforts to get quantum computing off the ground.
- formercoder 4y agoI work at Google, but just want to say that AlloyDB is really cool.
- davewritescode 4y agoSeems like Google's version of AWS Aurora?
- formercoder 4y agoI don’t know the details of Aurora, but AlloyDB separates compute and storage for Postgres. Masters can scale up and down with no downtime, and storage is provisioned in real time. Only pay for what you use. There is also a columnar engine cache, basically BigQuery, for OLAP queries.
- makestuff 4y agoYeah that is similar to Aurora. Basically a query engine on top of S3. Not sure if it is based on postgres or not though. It wouldn't shock me if it was as I know AWS Redshift is a forked version of postgres.
- formercoder 4y agoRedshift is a columnar database like BigQuery, so wouldn’t be based on an OLTP DB like Postgres. More I work for Google disclosures, but I think BQ kicks Redshifts butt.
- makestuff 4y agohttps://stackoverflow.com/questions/34853204/is-aws-redshift-to-postgresql-the-same-as-aws-aurora-to-mysql https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34853204/is-aws-redshift... Looks like I was mistaken. It uses some parts of postgres 8, but it is heavily modified. I agree Redshift isn’t that great though and it is super expensive for what you get. In the past when I have used Redshift I have not been that impressed. Although one nice feature of Redshift is how well it works with other AWS services (COPY command from S3, firehouse can dump data into it, etc.)
- grepLeigh 4y agoMy most basic definition of a product is: Something I can insert money into, which solves a more expensive problem. Kubernetes and TensorFlow are extraordinary technologies - and very important to the work I do daily. I don't think they're products though, certainly not successful products.
- rrdharan 4y ago> Something I can insert money into, which solves a more expensive problem. Right. I would argue that "public cloud infrastructure" is such a product; GCP/AWS/Azure specifically. (See below also) Kubernetes enabled the existence of EKS/AKS/GKE all of which I believe are considered successful. Separately, TensorFlow enabled Azure Machine Learning, TensorFlow on AWS and Google Cloud TensorFlow Enterprise, and generally expanded (IMO) the market for IaaS.
- kro 4y agoFlutter also comes to mind
- wanderingstan 4y agoAs a user, I can say that Google home has become a dumpster fire after starting out rather well. I’ve sworn off buying any future Google hardware.
- theandrewbailey 4y agoThat depends on whether there's a critical mass of Googlers dedicated to the product who want to see it through to success, not only initially, but in 10-20 years. You'd think that Reader wouldn't take much effort to keep going, but no one was interested.
- jeffbee 4y agoThis is not accurate. There were tons of people who would have willingly developed it but Vic Gundotra did not tolerate products that had social aspects and were not part of Google+, so he had it murdered.
- johannes1234321 4y agoIt's not about a mass of googlers interested in it, but about leadership being interested in such a small consumer product.
- vishnugupta 4y agoWhat is their last successful consumer product? Pixel? Chrome?
- superfrank 4y agoI'd argue it's Youtube TV
- the42thdoctor 4y agoI have heard about in this thread genuinely interested. Specially if it's included in YouTube Premium. In fact, they could release Google Prime and give us a lot of free products for a reasonable price .
- pyb 4y agoFirst time I hear about it, looks like a US-local service.
- superfrank 4y agoI do believe it's US only, which I didn't consider when posting. That being said, it's the most adopted "TV for cord cutters" service in the US. https://nscreenmedia.com/why-youtube-tv-is-the-number-1-vmvpd-in-america/ https://nscreenmedia.com/why-youtube-tv-is-the-number-1-vmvp... It hasn't taken the world by storm, but it's become big enough that I would consider it a success.
- pyb 4y agoI see, thanks!
- eachro 4y agoSuccessful consumer product? Probably not. Google's competitive advantage is their technical infrastructure and scaleability, which are helpful to have for but not really what makes/breaks a consumer product.
- jmyeet 4y agoLet me ask you a question: why does it matter if a new successful product comes from an acquisition or is homegrown? Everything on your list other than Gmail and Chrome (which relied on Webkit FWIW) were acquisitions. Some acquisitions just mean billion of dollars spent for nothing and these get a lot of attention. Remember when AOL bought BeBo for $850m? But every acquisition is a gamble. Most won't pay off but some will, spectacularly. Like in 2022 can you really believe that Google paid less than $2 billion for Youtube? Is that not the biggest bargain of the century? Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion. Were it a separate company, at least until the last couple of years, it probably would be worth 100x that. Most ideas don't turn into billion (or trillion) dollar companies. Expecting a company to do that multiple times is like expecting to win the lottery twice. Taking a $1 billion company and turning it into a $100+ billion business is itself a massive success. I'm not sure why the homegrown product is assumed to be somehow more virtuous.
- soperj 4y ago> which relied on Webkit Which relied on KHTML.
- danans 4y ago> Which relied on KHTML. Which was built on the QT toolkit created by Troll Tech [1]. QT was designed originally inspired by folks working on a cross-platform application for ultrasound imaging [2]. Turtles all the way down. 1. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/06/ars-at-wwdc-interview-with-lars-knoll-creator-of-khtml/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/06/ars-at-wwdc-intervie... 2. https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_History https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_History
- megaman821 4y agoI would love to see Tech Journalist Sentiment vs Tech Company M&A to see who got it right more often. I distinctly remember tech journalists lambasting Facebook for spending so much money on Instagram. That said Google should bring back Google Labs. They are tarnishing their main brand by cancelling so many projects. Tell people anything that graduates to the main Google brand gets at least a 10-year support cycle.
- crconover 4y agoI feel like Google Photos is a pretty incredible product.
- nyrulez 4y agoThey still don't have folders and have ignored years of feedback. The only reason I don't use it.
- dudus 4y agoI use albums pretty heavily. Never really missed the ability to create folders.
- matart 4y agoThe fact that I can search for anything I want means I don't need to really organize it besides albums. The search is amazing and scary. I was looking for some pictures I took mid renovation and searched `wood` and they came up. I can search for lakes and trees. Quite impressive.
- aussiesnack 4y ago> I feel like Google Photos is a pretty incredible product. It was until they removed the Google Drive integration.
- whitewingjek 4y agoThere are many other products especially privacy focused, ente.io[1], PhotoPrism[2] that look interesting but as of this writing they can't touch Google Photos in many respects, which is why my wife and other family members still use it heavily. It's probably the only reason I'm still holding on to my google account. [1] https://ente.io/ https://ente.io/ [2] https://photoprism.app/ https://photoprism.app/
- selectodude 4y agoI think the more pertinent question is will Google ever launch a new product that actually makes money. If that firehose of ad money ever slows down, look out.
- superfrank 4y agoI think you're overlooking some decent wins because they weren't world changers for general consumers. For hardware, I think all of the following could be considered a success: - Pixel phone - Chromecast - Chromebooks (as school computers) For software: - Youtube TV seems to be a massive hit. - Google Classroom has a lot of users in the ed tech space. - Just in my social circle, I'm noticing more and more people using Google Photos in the past few years (even iOS users). I think might be due to growing usage of Google One.
- chasil 4y agoFor the moment, the Pixel phones are the largest family that supports an independent ROM that implements VoLTE. A vast swath of LineageOS supported devices have been retired for this reason, and Pixels are the largest family remaining. Oddly enough, if you want control of a device that minimizes Google's influence, then you probably want a Pixel.
- sudosysgen 4y agoActually that would be the Xiaomi/Redmi/Poco series.
- chasil 4y agoI see 12 devices from Google on the LineageOS 19 announcement page. Motorola/Lenovo has the next largest share, with 10. The eBPF subsystem is described as the main driver for ending so many devices, instead of VoLTE. https://lineageos.org/Changelog-26/ https://lineageos.org/Changelog-26/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- divbzero 4y agoI would also count the following as software successes: 2012 - Google Drive 2017 - Google Meet
- jeffbee 4y agoBut other than sanitation ... Google Photos was launched in 2015. Drive in 2012. App Engine in 2008. Many many other changes that you will obviously derogate as incremental even though they are real achievements.
- tootie 4y agoGCP was also 2008. But like, that's a shit ton of successful products across a lot of verticals to come out of one company. And they've done a stellar job at keeping those products at the cutting edge and relevant to their users. YouTube in particular was a niche product for cat videos when it was acquired and now it's a huge revenue driver that has at least much of a cultural presence as Twitter or Facebook. I think they'll continue to struggle in the consumer realm until they massively upgrade their marketing and branding. Android is the "cheap" option compared to iPhone. People don't show off Google-branded products the way they do with Apple and maybe never will. If they ever plan to try social again, it should be spun out of YouTube.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- burkaman 4y agoGoogle Cloud launched in 2008, but subproducts within it launch all the time. I don't use Google Cloud, but presumably some of these must have been successful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cloud_Platform#Timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cloud_Platform#Timeline Google Home/Nest is 2016 and has been fairly successful. Google Fi is from 2015 and still seems to be going strong, I use it and am happy with it. Chromecast launched in 2013, I think that has to be considered a success.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoIf today's Google was the one building and releasing Google Docs, would they have cancelled it in the first year or two?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- counters 4y agoI've been extremely satisfied with Android Automotive OS. So much so that the next family car replacement will probably shift to Volvo or some other OEM who is using AAOS for their infotainment system. One could argue AAOS isn't an entirely "new" product, but I vastly prefer it to running Android Auto off of a tethered phone.
- pmontra 4y agoActually Google didn't create YouTube. They bought it in 2006, 18 months after it was born. To be fair they grew it fairly well.
- joshuamorton 4y agoIt merged with the already existing Google video. Both made important contributions to the resulting product.
- jeroenhd 4y agoAs an end user, I never really saw much of Google Video's contributions. I'm sure they helped a lot in the backend, but the Youtube video player had all the core video features already when the two merged in my experience.
- joshuamorton 4y agoA lot of the stuff YT video provided was market related, Youtube initially had no licensing with media companies. So what eventually became content-ID wasn't acquired if I understand the history correctly, and I doubt YT could have been successful without that. But yeah most of it was infrastructural it seems, both technologically and otherwise.
- Ferret7446 4y agoYouTube is 99.99% backend. The video player is peanuts to the infrastructure needed to process and serve the vomit-inducing amount of data. A quick search says 183 hours of video uploaded per minute and 694,000 hours of video watched per minute, served globally and rendered to dozens of resolutions and formats, and remember that unlike, say Netflix, this covers a much wider content library. (It's much easier to keep a few hundred gigs of data on global edge CDNs than god knows how many exabytes YouTube has.)
- sergiotapia 4y agoThe Pixel is a success to me. Terrific phone without the obscene price gouging of Apple.
- e40 4y agoThe low end Pixel 7 is $599 (save $100 listed on their site, don't know if this is with conditions). Low end iPhone 14 is $799. Apple supports their phones for much longer. Google for 3 years. Apple has recently supported phones for more than 6 years. If you factor in support, Google phones are more expensive. So, not gouging at all. EDIT: An iPhone 12 would have longer support than a Pixel 7 and it is $599 from Apple.
- joshuamorton 4y agoPixel 7 is 499 of I buy it on the store right now, and gets 5 years of security updates.
- dangus 4y agoAt the same time, Pixel phones represent a minuscule slice of marketshare. I doubt the Pixel division is making a significant chunk of profit for Google. Samsung sells 10x as many phones as of Q1 2022. Google is behind Samsung, Lenovo, and TCL in the US. The numbers are probably even worse in other regions where Huawei isn’t banned.
- SuhitAgarwal 4y agoI surely hope so, Project Fuchsia shows a lot of promise and there are also rumors of the return of Project Ara, so who knows
- prng2021 4y agoGoogle smart speakers Google wifi router
- pcthrowaway 4y agoGoogle Podcasts is pretty good, and definitely more recent than the ones you listed.
- zh3 4y agoLaunch - or acquire? I'm sure there's a list somewhere of what's actually homegrown and what's bene bough (youtube, streetview, doubleclick, ?).
- sgc 4y agoIf you have owned something for 85-90% of its existence and rewritten it several times while guiding its marketing and philosophy over the years, does it really matter if it was bought or started in-house? There are brick and mortar stores with similar histories, and I attribute their success to their current, long-term owners - because at a certain point maintenance and growth are far harder problems to solve than the initial MVP.
- zh3 4y agoFair point (thought experiment: what would have happened if MS had acquired Google for a million or two in the early days?).
- loudmax 4y agoThey might, but not under the current management. The product that stands out to me is Stadia. As a technical achievement, Stadia is impressive, but Google managed to maximize all of the downsides to fully online gaming and minimize all of the benefits. No amount of engineering is going to save a company if the management is deluded or consumed with infighting. One could also look at their history of undermining their own social or communication networks by throwing up a series of incompatible clients like Chat, Hangouts, Allo, or Duo. Same for Buzz, Orkut or Google+. Any of these could have been successful if they just stuck with it, but their behavior makes it extremely clear that we should expect these to be very short lived. There are major business opportunities out there and Google is in a sound technical position to capitalize on them. But this would require a a degree of foresight and backbone that's absolutely anathema to the current management culture.
- benlivengood 4y agoProbably? Unless ads, cloud computing, and android all die at once there will be money to pay for some new R&D, and success is relative. Is 10M customers success? 100M? 1B? Maybe an even better question is will Alphabet ever launch a massively profitable new product. I figure AGI is on the table with both Deepmind and Brain pumping out new SOTA models every few months.
- wollsmoth 4y agoI'm pretty happy with Youtube TV, which I think is relatively new. I think with the size they don't have a lot of interest in running "small" businesses even if they have some traction. Something like Stadia was maybe just wholly unprofitable but maybe had some benefits if they developed remote gameplay tech that might be re-used in another product someday or offered as apart of their cloud offerings. I guess they'll eventually jump in on the upcoming AR war, but it might be hard to beat the offerings from Meta and Apple. Maybe they'll have the Android of AR?
- MivLives 4y agoGoogle Fi and Google Fiber both seem to be chugging along. I know Fiber isn't expanding but they also didn't shutter either. I don't know, I kinda like when big companies just throw stuff at the wall. They have the talent might as well experiment. If it doesn't work and it was actually something that had potential, a smaller company could make something similar avoiding some of google's pitfalls. After Google killed off the rss reader, how many other companies doing rss suddenly got an influx of people. I wouldn't be using the old reader now if it weren't for that.
- joemi 4y agoI think at least part of why we consider these to be successes is because they've been around a while without being killed. So newer products aren't considered successes on the same level as those mentioned by OP because they haven't been around as long.
- bb88 4y agoYes, but they need a god tier PM that can beat back the infighting with a big enough stick.
- dangus 4y agoJust a reminder: not every company has to have a startup mode of operating where new products are important to the success of the company and the satisfaction of its customers. Exxon, State Farm, Keller Williams Realty, Five Guys, Morton Salt, your local dive bar, so many successful businesses out there have introduced almost nothing in terms of a new product in decades or sometimes even centuries.
- olvy0 4y agoExactly, I don't fully understand this mindset of always inventing new products when there are existing products. I'm more or less happy with their existing products which I do use (mostly gmail, drive, Android and youtube (kinda)). I would be very happy if they just continue to make them better, fix bugs, and slowly innovate inside the existing ones without breaking them too much.
- sambooka 4y agoFlutter has been great for me. Still think it would have benefited from focusing on only mobile/desktop and fixing some of those Github issues instead of web support. As a backend developer working on simpler apps it's been great. It's a product I would be more than happy to pay for.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- arisAlexis 4y agoIt could be the last invention of man though. (AGI)
- CrypticShift 4y agoDuring the last decade, Google has overextended itself in new ventures. This thread is full of "successful stories" from that era. there is sooooooo much potential for maturing what is in there already, and I think this is their mindset for the time being. What I'm really curious about is: if zuck has his metaverse fantasy and musk his twitter conquest, what about Brin and Page? All I remember from recently is some "Airy" stuff (literally): Sergey Brin’s airship startup grows rapidly (https://www.ft.com/content/ae625a25-d2ac-4bca-9508-a5f0d3c7dd09) Larry Page's electric air taxi startup is winding down (https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/22/tech/kittyhawk-larry-page/index.html)
- huijzer 4y agoBased on their acquisitions, I do expect something with robots from them (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisit...). See their Raxium and Vicarious acquisitions.
- the_arcadian 4y agoThis is a really important question and one that MBAs miss all the time (speaking as one myself). The value of a tech company isn't in its existing product portfolio and revenue stream, it is in its ability to create and launch new successful revenue-generating products in the future. Personally I do think Google has that history, starting obviously with Gmail, Maps, etc. But nobody can predict whether that will continue or if they'll end up like an IBM or Facebook, largely dependent on their legacy products.
- sys_64738 4y agoGoogle’s recent locking of user accounts without recourse made me nervous that I moved everything away from the service that I valued. Really, they botched it for me when they killed Reader.
- dev_0 4y ago
- night-rider 4y agoThey're too focused on the 'features' of their main products. They don't release Gmail-tier products anymore, they just iterate with features and improvements more than anything else.
- tomjen3 4y agoChrome might have been started in 2008, but it was tiny and unimportant at that time. It took almost a decade for it to get to 55%[0] of browser market share. If we take that as the baseline, we will have trouble identifying newer companies/products that will turn out to be a big deal in retrospect. [0]: https://nira.com/chrome-history/ https://nira.com/chrome-history/