6 ms·

It seems to be more complacency on the part of the Google. They became larger and larger without really delivering anything new. When was the last time they lau

It seems to be more complacency on the part of the Google. They became larger and larger without really delivering anything new. When was the last time they launched a major new product that truly had a lasting impact on the level of Search, Maps, Gmail, Android? It has been a while. Too many of their resources seem to be focused inwards on hypothetical questions like AI ethics that keep them from actually building things.

o8o8o8o 4y ago
I remember when Stadia was going to light the gaming world on fire the way Gmail did for email.. The product its self was good and they were maybe the only company in the world besides Microsoft with the resources to deliver it, but they bungled the launch and then let it rot for 3 years. In my opinion that product is the perfect distillation of Google's problems.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  > I remember when Stadia was going to light the gaming world on fire Really? All I remember is huge amounts of skepticism that Google would really commit to it, and as we know in the end they didn't.
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    That’s the point isn’t it? Google has trashed their image within tech circles so much that that a product like Stadia is DOA because its EOL is a self-fulfilling prophecy if everybody believes Google won’t commit. MS used to have this trust problem too (remember windows 8?), but they’ve turned it around. I’m happy to use VSCode because I’m sure it will exist many years in the future. If there were a GoogleCode, would anybody use it, or would it be DOA for the same reasons as Stadia?
    - aleph_minus_one 4y ago
      > If there were a GoogleCode, would anybody use it, or would it be DOA for the same reasons as Stadia? There was Google Code, a service that was similar to GitHub. Google Code was closed down on January 15, 2016 (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google_Developers&oldid=1132401784 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google_Developers...).
      - zarzavat 4y ago
        True but I meant GoogleCode as an analogy to VSCode i.e. a Google text editor / IDE. It’s very telling that Google has never entered that market: the closest is Android studio which is just JetBrains.
        aleph_minus_one 4y ago
        > True but I meant GoogleCode as an analogy to VSCode i.e. a Google text editor / IDE. It’s very telling that Google has never entered that market Google did at least one attempt of creating an IDE (I can not judge from the outside, though, how serious this attempt was): Google Collide YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gq12bLbm54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gq12bLbm54 (jump to 1:45 to see it in action). Well, Google open-sourced it in 2012 (i.e. shot it down): https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google-open-sources/ https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google-open-sources/ A fork of Google Collide on GitHub (its last commit was from end of 2018, though): https://github.com/WeTheInternet/collide https://github.com/WeTheInternet/collide
        LordDragonfang 4y ago
        Google actually did build an IDE that they use internally called Cider, but it's so tightly integrated with their weird monolithic VCS that it wouldn't make sense to release it publicly.
    - awad 4y ago
      I haven't seriously used Windows in a long time and vaguely remember some rumblings between Vista <> 7 <> 8 but have Microsoft ever really had a trust issue with respect to supporting their software? That's kind of their whole thing isn't it?
  - michaelt 4y ago
    There was certainly skepticism - but it wasn't only about being cancelled. Plenty of it was around questions like "will the latency be good enough?" and "what's with this buy-games-outright-then-also-pay-monthly pricing model?"
  - serial_dev 4y ago
    Maybe I'm moving only in "Google fan boy" circles, but so many of my friends said that Stadia will be a game changer, that I started to think I'm stupid to see what they see because "I'm just not a gamer". Many of my friends and colleagues were so hyped about it that I kept reading about Stadia just to understand what I'm missing. (well, it turns out I didn't miss anything)
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Perhaps broadly. But I was at the Google Next event when I think they announced Stadia and there were some serious gamer stars associated with it.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  They had the resources, but the Venn diagram of gamers and people familiar enough with Google to doubt their commitment had a lot of overlap.
- Aunche 4y ago
  Stadia is a perfect example of Google's risk aversion. Microsoft invested billions on the XBox from the start, and spent over a billion dollars just to buy Minecraft, but Stadia didn't make an effort to secure even a single AAA exclusive. The same goes for YouTube exclusives. Netflix and Amazon spent hundreds of millions on flops like Marco Polo and Rings of Power. Meanwhile, the only notable series that came out of YouTube was Cobra Kai, and even that got sold off despite being a cult hit. In retrospect, this was the correct business decision as all streaming platforms seem to be hemorrhaging money, but you can't expect to win big with that attitude either.
  - itsmartapuntocm 4y ago
    Microsoft learned the hard way that the platform doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have the games to bring people to it. It’s why they’ve spent billions left and right to acquire studios and publishers.
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      It's also why Microsoft is downright legendary when it comes to Windows backwards compatibility. They are very aware Windows is nothing without the literal decades of software available for it.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Hardcore gamers are basically a niche market. Not a trivial one as with power users of other types but how is Apple doing without (other than casual) gamers?
      - pixl97 4y ago
        Console gamers are a niche market? I think you're statistics might be a little broken.
  - josephjrobison 4y ago
    The problem is that Google’s core business model is too profitable, that nothing else can ever compete for attention and resources. But you’re right, they need to take the burn for awhile until escape velocity. I think they did with YouTube in general until the ads money hit. They’re also more geeky and not that creative of a company, nor do they really get design, so some of their blind spots can hurt them from time to time, although that’s separate from their AI issues which yes they have bungled their lead do to fears of the feds.
- majormajor 4y ago
  I remember Stadia as being a late-to-the-party (OnLive and others beat them to launch by a decade) me-too offering that claimed that it would be way better than alternatives because of unique Google infrastructure advantages and resources... but didn't deliver on those claims. Hype instead of actual product abilities. Then when the hype didn't win the market in the first year, they didn't have the stamina to keep going like Microsoft did with the Xbox.
  - SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
    > they didn't have the stamina to keep going This is key to my current perception of Google. I don't get invested in any new Google product for the same reason I don't get invested in any new Netflix show, it's a coin flip whether they will cancel it while I'm in the middle of it. Search, Gmail, Android and Maps are the only things I regularly use, all of which I'd be happy to replace with another offering, some of which I'm already starting to replace.
- bastardoperator 4y ago
  The entire point of stadia was never to have a decent gaming experience. It was to get in bed with gaming companies so they could act as middlemen and milk streamers for playing games. Google was clear, they didn't think it was fair for streamers to play games created by big companies without sharing that profit back with the game creators. As soon as they realized no one was having that, stadia went fully lame.
- OJFord 4y ago
  > [Google] were maybe the only company in the world besides Microsoft with the resources to deliver [a product like Stadia] Nvidia beat them to it with GeForce Now, even offered it for free (in a perfectly functional as far as I could tell 'beta') for ages, and it is still available.
- pantalaimon 4y ago
  This already happened with Google+ back in the day. There was a massive hype… then they didn’t deliver after launch. Facebook wasn’t just as dominant back then and Google could have had perfect integration with Android - but they didn’t, in the end it was just another isolated Google project left by the wayside.
DeRock 4y ago
The only changes I have noticed as a user of search and maps over the past few years has been the intrusion of more and more ads. The MBAs are truly in the driver seat.
_8j50 4y ago
MS had same problem under ballmer. Complacency starts at top.
- mrkramer 4y ago
  Ballmer at least brought us Bing and sticked to it. So he wasn't that bad except missing trillion dollar opportunity called non-Apple mobile operating system that turned out to be Android not Windows Phone.
kansface 4y ago
It’s a classic innovator’s dilemma no matter how successful they are at building stuff - there is no way Google will launch a product that eats 40% of their own lunch.
- RigelKentaurus 4y ago
  Great point. Another one is 'judo economics', where a smaller, nimble competitor can dominate a new market quickly as it doesn't have the baggage of existing products and users.
dataflow 4y ago
> When was the last time they launched a major new product that truly had a lasting impact on the level of Search, Maps, Gmail, Android? When was the last time Microsoft did that (prior to the AI rush of the last few months)?
- crop_rotation 4y ago
  Azure is a functioning newish business. The difference is Microsoft already has a very diversified revenue stream. Google only has search.
  - dataflow 4y ago
    In what sense is Azure "newish"? It started around 2008 IIUC, just like Android.
    - crop_rotation 4y ago
      It is newish in the sense of business size. It might have been created in 2008 but it has grown only recently to a point where it can be seen as a separate independent business.
    - nunez 4y ago
      It "started" in 2008 as just an app platform for .NET apps in the cloud called Windows Azure. The move to become a cloud provider happened, I want to say, in 2015-ish. You couldn't even get VMs on Azure for the longest time, and their VM service reached parity with AWS very recently.
      - dataflow 4y ago
        I went to look this up, and [1] says "virtual machines for Windows and Linux were introduced in 2012". [1] https://studysection.com/blog/history-of-microsoft-azure/ https://studysection.com/blog/history-of-microsoft-azure/
- rvnx 4y ago
seydor 4y ago
They delivered the Transformer. They "delivered" deemind and alphafold. It's just mindboggling that they can't deliver an uber-superior AI experience right here, right now. But maybe they are preparing a bombshell or something
- hikingsimulator 4y ago
  I could see such a project being killed internally because it'd be seen as bad optics to work on a product aimed to kill the very cash cow of the company.
- onion2k 4y ago
  But maybe they are preparing a bombshell or something The release of Bard rules that out in my opinion. No one would unveil a product that's clearly worse than their competitor, damaging their brand, their share price, and the morale of the entire staff, if they had a better version ready to launch soon. The only way this could be true is if Google has more than one AI division and there's no comms between them. Which, I guess, is possible with Google given their competing chat products.
  - plonk 4y ago
    > The only way this could be true is if Google has more than one AI division Google Brain and Deepmind? Not sure about the "no comm" part, but their HQs are in different countries.
    - hcrisp 4y ago
      In another HN article comment someone mentioned that it took Google Brain over a year to replicate the DeepMind AlphaZero code even though they are part of the same company. Yeah, I think there are barriers to communication there.
      - nostrademons 4y ago
        Also JAX came out of DeepMind and is being used by Search even though TensorFlow came out of Brain, moved to Core, and is being used everywhere else. The first time I was at Google (~2010) you could send an e-mail to any engineer in the company and you'd get response offering to collaborate within an hour, and usually a CL under review by day's end. The second time I was at Google (present), it takes multiple quarters to get teams that report up through the same director to agree on who's doing which work.
reaperducer 4y ago
They became larger and larger without really delivering anything new Google has delivered a good number of really good, big products. And then it abandoned them like a kitten after her new chew toy has lost its new catnip smell.
sebastianconcpt 4y ago
Google Plus?
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Money is tight and we are seeing real competition finally.

o8o8o8o 4y ago

I remember when Stadia was going to light the gaming world on fire the way Gmail did for email.. The product its self was good and they were maybe the only company in the world besides Microsoft with the resources to deliver it, but they bungled the launch and then let it rot for 3 years. In my opinion that product is the perfect distillation of Google's problems.

rippercushions 4y ago
> I remember when Stadia was going to light the gaming world on fire Really? All I remember is huge amounts of skepticism that Google would really commit to it, and as we know in the end they didn't.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  That’s the point isn’t it? Google has trashed their image within tech circles so much that that a product like Stadia is DOA because its EOL is a self-fulfilling prophecy if everybody believes Google won’t commit. MS used to have this trust problem too (remember windows 8?), but they’ve turned it around. I’m happy to use VSCode because I’m sure it will exist many years in the future. If there were a GoogleCode, would anybody use it, or would it be DOA for the same reasons as Stadia?
  - aleph_minus_one 4y ago
    > If there were a GoogleCode, would anybody use it, or would it be DOA for the same reasons as Stadia? There was Google Code, a service that was similar to GitHub. Google Code was closed down on January 15, 2016 (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google_Developers&oldid=1132401784 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google_Developers...).
    - zarzavat 4y ago
      True but I meant GoogleCode as an analogy to VSCode i.e. a Google text editor / IDE. It’s very telling that Google has never entered that market: the closest is Android studio which is just JetBrains.
      - aleph_minus_one 4y ago
        > True but I meant GoogleCode as an analogy to VSCode i.e. a Google text editor / IDE. It’s very telling that Google has never entered that market Google did at least one attempt of creating an IDE (I can not judge from the outside, though, how serious this attempt was): Google Collide YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gq12bLbm54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gq12bLbm54 (jump to 1:45 to see it in action). Well, Google open-sourced it in 2012 (i.e. shot it down): https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google-open-sources/ https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google-open-sources/ A fork of Google Collide on GitHub (its last commit was from end of 2018, though): https://github.com/WeTheInternet/collide https://github.com/WeTheInternet/collide
      - LordDragonfang 4y ago
        Google actually did build an IDE that they use internally called Cider, but it's so tightly integrated with their weird monolithic VCS that it wouldn't make sense to release it publicly.
  - awad 4y ago
    I haven't seriously used Windows in a long time and vaguely remember some rumblings between Vista <> 7 <> 8 but have Microsoft ever really had a trust issue with respect to supporting their software? That's kind of their whole thing isn't it?
- michaelt 4y ago
  There was certainly skepticism - but it wasn't only about being cancelled. Plenty of it was around questions like "will the latency be good enough?" and "what's with this buy-games-outright-then-also-pay-monthly pricing model?"
- serial_dev 4y ago
  Maybe I'm moving only in "Google fan boy" circles, but so many of my friends said that Stadia will be a game changer, that I started to think I'm stupid to see what they see because "I'm just not a gamer". Many of my friends and colleagues were so hyped about it that I kept reading about Stadia just to understand what I'm missing. (well, it turns out I didn't miss anything)
- ghaff 4y ago
  Perhaps broadly. But I was at the Google Next event when I think they announced Stadia and there were some serious gamer stars associated with it.
pwinnski 4y ago
They had the resources, but the Venn diagram of gamers and people familiar enough with Google to doubt their commitment had a lot of overlap.
Aunche 4y ago
Stadia is a perfect example of Google's risk aversion. Microsoft invested billions on the XBox from the start, and spent over a billion dollars just to buy Minecraft, but Stadia didn't make an effort to secure even a single AAA exclusive. The same goes for YouTube exclusives. Netflix and Amazon spent hundreds of millions on flops like Marco Polo and Rings of Power. Meanwhile, the only notable series that came out of YouTube was Cobra Kai, and even that got sold off despite being a cult hit. In retrospect, this was the correct business decision as all streaming platforms seem to be hemorrhaging money, but you can't expect to win big with that attitude either.
- itsmartapuntocm 4y ago
  Microsoft learned the hard way that the platform doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have the games to bring people to it. It’s why they’ve spent billions left and right to acquire studios and publishers.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    It's also why Microsoft is downright legendary when it comes to Windows backwards compatibility. They are very aware Windows is nothing without the literal decades of software available for it.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Hardcore gamers are basically a niche market. Not a trivial one as with power users of other types but how is Apple doing without (other than casual) gamers?
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Console gamers are a niche market? I think you're statistics might be a little broken.
- josephjrobison 4y ago
  The problem is that Google’s core business model is too profitable, that nothing else can ever compete for attention and resources. But you’re right, they need to take the burn for awhile until escape velocity. I think they did with YouTube in general until the ads money hit. They’re also more geeky and not that creative of a company, nor do they really get design, so some of their blind spots can hurt them from time to time, although that’s separate from their AI issues which yes they have bungled their lead do to fears of the feds.
majormajor 4y ago
I remember Stadia as being a late-to-the-party (OnLive and others beat them to launch by a decade) me-too offering that claimed that it would be way better than alternatives because of unique Google infrastructure advantages and resources... but didn't deliver on those claims. Hype instead of actual product abilities. Then when the hype didn't win the market in the first year, they didn't have the stamina to keep going like Microsoft did with the Xbox.
- SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
  > they didn't have the stamina to keep going This is key to my current perception of Google. I don't get invested in any new Google product for the same reason I don't get invested in any new Netflix show, it's a coin flip whether they will cancel it while I'm in the middle of it. Search, Gmail, Android and Maps are the only things I regularly use, all of which I'd be happy to replace with another offering, some of which I'm already starting to replace.
bastardoperator 4y ago
The entire point of stadia was never to have a decent gaming experience. It was to get in bed with gaming companies so they could act as middlemen and milk streamers for playing games. Google was clear, they didn't think it was fair for streamers to play games created by big companies without sharing that profit back with the game creators. As soon as they realized no one was having that, stadia went fully lame.
OJFord 4y ago
> [Google] were maybe the only company in the world besides Microsoft with the resources to deliver [a product like Stadia] Nvidia beat them to it with GeForce Now, even offered it for free (in a perfectly functional as far as I could tell 'beta') for ages, and it is still available.
pantalaimon 4y ago
This already happened with Google+ back in the day. There was a massive hype… then they didn’t deliver after launch. Facebook wasn’t just as dominant back then and Google could have had perfect integration with Android - but they didn’t, in the end it was just another isolated Google project left by the wayside.

DeRock 4y ago

The only changes I have noticed as a user of search and maps over the past few years has been the intrusion of more and more ads. The MBAs are truly in the driver seat.

_8j50 4y ago

MS had same problem under ballmer. Complacency starts at top.

mrkramer 4y ago
Ballmer at least brought us Bing and sticked to it. So he wasn't that bad except missing trillion dollar opportunity called non-Apple mobile operating system that turned out to be Android not Windows Phone.

kansface 4y ago

It’s a classic innovator’s dilemma no matter how successful they are at building stuff - there is no way Google will launch a product that eats 40% of their own lunch.

RigelKentaurus 4y ago
Great point. Another one is 'judo economics', where a smaller, nimble competitor can dominate a new market quickly as it doesn't have the baggage of existing products and users.

dataflow 4y ago

> When was the last time they launched a major new product that truly had a lasting impact on the level of Search, Maps, Gmail, Android? When was the last time Microsoft did that (prior to the AI rush of the last few months)?

crop_rotation 4y ago
Azure is a functioning newish business. The difference is Microsoft already has a very diversified revenue stream. Google only has search.
- dataflow 4y ago
  In what sense is Azure "newish"? It started around 2008 IIUC, just like Android.
  - crop_rotation 4y ago
    It is newish in the sense of business size. It might have been created in 2008 but it has grown only recently to a point where it can be seen as a separate independent business.
  - nunez 4y ago
    It "started" in 2008 as just an app platform for .NET apps in the cloud called Windows Azure. The move to become a cloud provider happened, I want to say, in 2015-ish. You couldn't even get VMs on Azure for the longest time, and their VM service reached parity with AWS very recently.
    - dataflow 4y ago
      I went to look this up, and [1] says "virtual machines for Windows and Linux were introduced in 2012". [1] https://studysection.com/blog/history-of-microsoft-azure/ https://studysection.com/blog/history-of-microsoft-azure/
rvnx 4y ago

seydor 4y ago

They delivered the Transformer. They "delivered" deemind and alphafold. It's just mindboggling that they can't deliver an uber-superior AI experience right here, right now. But maybe they are preparing a bombshell or something

hikingsimulator 4y ago
I could see such a project being killed internally because it'd be seen as bad optics to work on a product aimed to kill the very cash cow of the company.
onion2k 4y ago
But maybe they are preparing a bombshell or something The release of Bard rules that out in my opinion. No one would unveil a product that's clearly worse than their competitor, damaging their brand, their share price, and the morale of the entire staff, if they had a better version ready to launch soon. The only way this could be true is if Google has more than one AI division and there's no comms between them. Which, I guess, is possible with Google given their competing chat products.
- plonk 4y ago
  > The only way this could be true is if Google has more than one AI division Google Brain and Deepmind? Not sure about the "no comm" part, but their HQs are in different countries.
  - hcrisp 4y ago
    In another HN article comment someone mentioned that it took Google Brain over a year to replicate the DeepMind AlphaZero code even though they are part of the same company. Yeah, I think there are barriers to communication there.
    - nostrademons 4y ago
      Also JAX came out of DeepMind and is being used by Search even though TensorFlow came out of Brain, moved to Core, and is being used everywhere else. The first time I was at Google (~2010) you could send an e-mail to any engineer in the company and you'd get response offering to collaborate within an hour, and usually a CL under review by day's end. The second time I was at Google (present), it takes multiple quarters to get teams that report up through the same director to agree on who's doing which work.

reaperducer 4y ago

They became larger and larger without really delivering anything new Google has delivered a good number of really good, big products. And then it abandoned them like a kitten after her new chew toy has lost its new catnip smell.

sebastianconcpt 4y ago

Google Plus?

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

Money is tight and we are seeing real competition finally.