Oh yeah for sure, I can only imagine Adobe in its early days was just as exceptional as Microsoft or Apple back then. I would have thought another Google would

Oh yeah for sure, I can only imagine Adobe in its early days was just as exceptional as Microsoft or Apple back then. I would have thought another Google would come along in the last 25 years, but weirdly/arguably it was Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft that out-competed them! (in mobile, e-commerce, and cloud) Those companies are all older than Google! And there's definitely a timing issue play. The market in the early 80's was "ripe" for the PC boom and Apple, and the market was ripe for desktop publishing and Adobe. The Internet was likewise "ripe" in the early 2000's. It feels like the last 10 years have been full of grasping at straws for the next big thing: - google glass was definitely a "jump the shark" moment - VR / metaverse seems to be "forced" - there was a bunch of hype around 3D printing for consumers, rather than for industrial use - In 2023, self-driving cars have achieved 1% or less of what people thought they would in 2013 or 2016 - crypto and NFTs also feel "forced". Bitcoin is 15 years old now. Whatever you think of it, it's not like the PC era or the Internet era. 15 years in, those were way more impactful. - I mentioned generative AI above -- it's interesting, but it also has big question marks in terms of BOTH the product and business. Google had neither of those. It's also 11 years in to deep learning. Of course, this could be just an old guy talking ... and probably missing a lot of what's useful and new. But it does seem like Google was singular -- both the right thing, and the right time. I'm sad to see how bad the products have gotten and how disappointed people are in the brand