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Difficult to know. It would have been difficult for them to make money without adding an ads team. Without making money it would have been difficult for them to
by kybernetikos 3y ago
Difficult to know. It would have been difficult for them to make money without adding an ads team. Without making money it would have been difficult for them to create the infrastructure to process the large amounts of data and change that are a big part of how google search works these days. Would a two man company focused on search have created google maps or google earth? Probably not - gathering just the data for streetview was a pretty huge undertaking. Their geographic search capabilities would probably have been nonexistent.
- crabmusket 3y agoGoogle acquired both Maps and Earth, they didn't create them.
- kybernetikos 3y agoThat's interesting, but I don't think it diminishes the point - a two person company would have been pretty unlikely to acquire them, or stay two person if it did and needed to integrate them with their search product.
- crabmusket 3y agoAgreed, but why should we care whether Google was able to acquire service X or Y? (It's one of my pet peeves when people elide the massive amount of innovation that happens in small companies which then gets conglomerated under one of 5 massive brands.) I'd argue that Google's one major innovation is the ad-supported free business model for most of these services. From a casual skim, it looks like most of the revenue for the company that built what became Earth was from the military. Google took that and made it "free" for regular people.
- kybernetikos 3y agoI chose those because I think maps and street view and to a lesser extent earth are meaningful improvements to the Google search experience that wouldn't have been available to a smaller company.