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Both Maps and Earth were acquisitions. MOST Google products are. The only two real big success products to come from Google that are still around are Search an

Both Maps and Earth were acquisitions. MOST Google products are. The only two real big success products to come from Google that are still around are Search and Gmail. Maybe you can count Scholar but it’s really just a type of search. Workspace was assembled from various acquisitions, YouTube they bought, Cloud is just a Jack Ma-esque “copy whatever Bezos is doing” initiative. Most home grown Google products have either failed or been killed in the cradle. G+, Stadia, etc etc 20% was always a myth.

gniv 3y ago
> Both Maps and Earth were acquisitions. This is technically true, but Maps before Google was nothing like what you see now. Most of the innovation happened at Google. Earth hasn't changed that much, but it's not really the killer app that Maps is.
United857 3y ago
Google Chrome seems like a success as well.
- linkgoron 3y ago
  Also forked from something Apple made (Webkit)
  - zbowling 3y ago
    1) using that test, Apple didn't make webkit either. It's a fork of KHTML and why everything still uses LGPLv2 2) very little of what goes into making a browser successful is just the render. In WebKit and now Blink make up only a small percentage of the total browser.
    - linkgoron 3y ago
      Chrome/Chromium was developed for quite a while using Webkit. Chromium was created in 2008 and only after Google had already captured a third of the browser market share (according to Statista) did they fork it (April 2013). The fact that basically all of the big companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple) use Webkit or Chromium shows that it's very difficult to build and maintain one successfully IMO. I think that Mozilla are essentially the only ones developing something that's somewhat competitive, not to mention that most smaller companies (e.g. Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Island etc.) all use Chromium. I'm not saying that it's easy to succeed with a product even after you've bought it, or started it from a fork (see less successful Chromium/Webkit forks). I'm just saying that it was not something built from the ground-up in Google. For example, v8 was and really changed a lot of things in the JavaScript world including Node, Deno etc.
      - taylortbb 3y ago
        > Chrome/Chromium was developed for quite a while using Webkit. Chromium was created in 2008 and only after Google had already captured a third of the browser market share (according to Statista) did they fork it (April 2013). I think you missed the point, there's two forks in the history of Blink (Chromium). Yes, Blink is a fork of WebKit, but WebKit is a fork of KHTML. So it's not like it originated at Apple either, it originated at KDE.
        linkgoron 3y ago
        I did not miss the point, I just don't see why it's relevant. This isn't a thread about Apple's products and their success. The fact that Apple started from KHTML is not really relevant. However, it's clear that at the beginning Google was very dependent on Webkit and Apple, and there's a good reason why it took them five years of gaining development expertise and market share before forking Webkit. I've already stated that Chrome's success is not just because that it was forked from Webkit (e.g. v8, and other things that people mentioned here as well), but it was a huge jumpstart for them, and it would've taken them much longer to get a leading browser without it. e.g. Microsoft basically gave up on developing their own engine after failing with IE and the original Edge - and are now also based on Chromium. Chrome is (IMO) much better than Safari, Maps is (IMO) a great product, Youtube is a a huge success and much bigger than it was when they bought it (homegrown Google Video failed), Android was also essentially an acquihire, as others have mentioned (using a lot of Google's resources) and is hugely successful. It doesn't change the fact that most existing Google products today are acquisitions that they improved, and not home-grown products from the "20% do your own thing" era - which is what the original comment talked about.
      - reissbaker 3y ago
        I think v8 and the multi-process model were the big differentiators of Chrome when it first launched, and how it originally got marketshare! Regardless, I think "ground-up" building isn't a great way to measure product building; after all, macOS is "just" a BSD fork, as others have pointed out Webkit was originally a KHTML fork, etc. And just about any web product runs on Linux and is effectively a wrapper around libc, which wasn't ground-up built by any modern tech co.
  - sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago
    And Apple forked WebKit from KDE!
  - dilyevsky 3y ago
    That’s like saying os x was just a fork of bsd
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    The original genius in Chrome was not the renderer built out of webkit. It was: 1. The V8 JavaScript engine, which blew away everything else. 2. The sandboxed, multiprocess, threading model. Those were the two things emphasized in the original Chrome "comic" at launch, if I recall: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
    - thanksgiving 3y ago
      Kind of easy to forget the true innovation of Google chrome these days. I will try to remember this again any time I see an aww snap on my web browser because it would have been all tabs all windows dead at once before Google chrome. Firefox only declared it completed electrolysis in 2018, nearly a decade after this comic.
- thanksgiving 3y ago
  My guess is Google Chrome spends well over a billion dollars a year and comes up with ridiculous rules like this https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay#media_engagement_index https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay#media_engagement_... because Google Chrome is Google first and a web browser second. It will collapse under its own weight if Google stops spending billions of dollars on it every year.
  - hardwaregeek 3y ago
    A billion dollars is cheap considering it saves Google from having to pay Apple or Mozilla more money to stay the default search engine. Google gives Apple 10 billion a year just in traffic acquisition payments.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    This is an interesting point. Can anyone from the inside estimate the annual budget for Chrome? A billion sounds like a lot. That implies: 1b / 250k = 4,000 (expensive) developers. I guess at least 1,000 well-paid people are involved, so hundreds of millions sounds more likely.
    - I_AM_A_SMURF 3y ago
      Mozilla at least at one point had 1,000 and is and always was chronically underfunded. 4,000 seems about reasonable. Keep in mind it's not 4,000 engineers, it's PMs, managers, UX, Infra, there's a lot more to software development that just line engineers.
    - gowld 3y ago
      Google engineers cost closer to $500K/head all in.
    - room500 3y ago
      250k is conservative for employee cost. A staff engineer at Google can reach 1 MM total comp. And add in all the overhead a company has (real estate, free food, perks, taxes, etc) 500k-700k is a little more realistic. 1500 employees across all domains (engineering, marketing, product management, customer service, etc) isn’t a huge number
dilyevsky 3y ago
Android was developed entirely at google (and redone midway after iphone came out) despite being originally an acquisition. Youtube basically just sold userbase + content. Chrome. Waymo. AppEngine precedes ec2 and heroku by some time. Most of hashicorp products (and dozen other startups) are basically copies of what google had internally. The theory that google hasn’t birthed any original products just doesnt hold any water
- billjings 3y ago
  This is a really off base characterization of Android within Google. Chet Haase wrote a book on those years, and while it is clear that Google gave them rocket fuel to meet their ambitions, their company culture was wildly different from the rest of Google. Shipping code on Android would not have passed muster for anyone at mainline Google; the process and standards were utterly alien from one another. There is no way Android happens without the acquisition.
  - versteegen 3y ago
    Yeah, when I first looked at the shocking source code for bionic (Android's libc) to figure out why my code wasn't working I couldn't believe it was written by Google. It wasn't really. (Nor did they (initially) borrow from any of the high-quality open source libcs out there.)
  - dilyevsky 3y ago
    A lot of teams at google had culture differences. And imho it was always more about andy's ego more than anything.
- commandersaki 3y ago
  Wasn't the idea of Android basically the acquisition of Danger Inc.
  - dilyevsky 3y ago
    Kind of - danger was bought by msft, then everyone left and joined Android/Google. I think their original plan more akin to those chinese all-in-one apps
lokar 3y ago
20% was very real, I saw it many times Googles main successful product was amazing infrastructure. Lots of real innovation. It enabled massive scale of everything else, including acquisitions. YouTube was about to hit the wall when they got acquired.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  By the time I got to Google in 2012, 20% seemed dead to me. If it had any meaning, it just meant "you can do some extra work on something management approves", not "I have a wild idea and want to go off and try it in my 20%" (as I naively understood it before coming there.) It was already the case, at that point, that 20% really just meant doing more of what Google was already doing. But maybe I just didn't know the right people or have the right connections or status.
  - lokar 3y ago
    Yes, by then it was org dependent. Some were not supportive, but some were. 2005 was still very open
- sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago
  100% - Google IS SRE. My favorite group of people to work with when I was there, a true honor, just amazing infra. But the people “leading” the place are trash.
binkHN 3y ago
Stadia was amazing.
RestlessMind 3y ago
> The only two real big success products to come from Google that are still around are Search and Gmail. Chrome. Photos. Hadoop. Kubernetes. Brain. Spanner. T in GPT (Transformers). And lots more. Google's real contribution was internet scale systems and how to run them reliably.
- pcdevils 3y ago
  Google photos was spawned from Picasa, which they bought https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109121493116979168 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109121493116979168
  - gowld 3y ago
    Photos totally replaced Picasa, including, you know, replacing a local desktop app with a web/cloud app.
- murki 3y ago
  Google Photos came from the acquisition of Flock (via Bump) which was a mobile photo organizing and sharing app https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/31/google-to-close-bump-and-flock-its-recently-acquired-file-sharing-apps/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/31/google-to-close-bump-and-f...
- dgacmu 3y ago
  Hadoop didn't come from Google, it came from more like Yahoo, who wanted an open source clone of Google's mapreduce framework. (Yahoo was paying Doug's salary, at least). MapReduce was deprecated inside Google several years ago in favor of Flume (think "apache beam" in the open source world). I point this out because google has had a lot of innovations that aren't necessarily now _products_.

gniv 3y ago

> Both Maps and Earth were acquisitions. This is technically true, but Maps before Google was nothing like what you see now. Most of the innovation happened at Google. Earth hasn't changed that much, but it's not really the killer app that Maps is.

United857 3y ago

Google Chrome seems like a success as well.

linkgoron 3y ago
Also forked from something Apple made (Webkit)
- zbowling 3y ago
  1) using that test, Apple didn't make webkit either. It's a fork of KHTML and why everything still uses LGPLv2 2) very little of what goes into making a browser successful is just the render. In WebKit and now Blink make up only a small percentage of the total browser.
  - linkgoron 3y ago
    Chrome/Chromium was developed for quite a while using Webkit. Chromium was created in 2008 and only after Google had already captured a third of the browser market share (according to Statista) did they fork it (April 2013). The fact that basically all of the big companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple) use Webkit or Chromium shows that it's very difficult to build and maintain one successfully IMO. I think that Mozilla are essentially the only ones developing something that's somewhat competitive, not to mention that most smaller companies (e.g. Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Island etc.) all use Chromium. I'm not saying that it's easy to succeed with a product even after you've bought it, or started it from a fork (see less successful Chromium/Webkit forks). I'm just saying that it was not something built from the ground-up in Google. For example, v8 was and really changed a lot of things in the JavaScript world including Node, Deno etc.
    - taylortbb 3y ago
      > Chrome/Chromium was developed for quite a while using Webkit. Chromium was created in 2008 and only after Google had already captured a third of the browser market share (according to Statista) did they fork it (April 2013). I think you missed the point, there's two forks in the history of Blink (Chromium). Yes, Blink is a fork of WebKit, but WebKit is a fork of KHTML. So it's not like it originated at Apple either, it originated at KDE.
      - linkgoron 3y ago
        I did not miss the point, I just don't see why it's relevant. This isn't a thread about Apple's products and their success. The fact that Apple started from KHTML is not really relevant. However, it's clear that at the beginning Google was very dependent on Webkit and Apple, and there's a good reason why it took them five years of gaining development expertise and market share before forking Webkit. I've already stated that Chrome's success is not just because that it was forked from Webkit (e.g. v8, and other things that people mentioned here as well), but it was a huge jumpstart for them, and it would've taken them much longer to get a leading browser without it. e.g. Microsoft basically gave up on developing their own engine after failing with IE and the original Edge - and are now also based on Chromium. Chrome is (IMO) much better than Safari, Maps is (IMO) a great product, Youtube is a a huge success and much bigger than it was when they bought it (homegrown Google Video failed), Android was also essentially an acquihire, as others have mentioned (using a lot of Google's resources) and is hugely successful. It doesn't change the fact that most existing Google products today are acquisitions that they improved, and not home-grown products from the "20% do your own thing" era - which is what the original comment talked about.
    - reissbaker 3y ago
      I think v8 and the multi-process model were the big differentiators of Chrome when it first launched, and how it originally got marketshare! Regardless, I think "ground-up" building isn't a great way to measure product building; after all, macOS is "just" a BSD fork, as others have pointed out Webkit was originally a KHTML fork, etc. And just about any web product runs on Linux and is effectively a wrapper around libc, which wasn't ground-up built by any modern tech co.
- sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago
  And Apple forked WebKit from KDE!
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  That’s like saying os x was just a fork of bsd
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  The original genius in Chrome was not the renderer built out of webkit. It was: 1. The V8 JavaScript engine, which blew away everything else. 2. The sandboxed, multiprocess, threading model. Those were the two things emphasized in the original Chrome "comic" at launch, if I recall: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
  - thanksgiving 3y ago
    Kind of easy to forget the true innovation of Google chrome these days. I will try to remember this again any time I see an aww snap on my web browser because it would have been all tabs all windows dead at once before Google chrome. Firefox only declared it completed electrolysis in 2018, nearly a decade after this comic.
thanksgiving 3y ago
My guess is Google Chrome spends well over a billion dollars a year and comes up with ridiculous rules like this https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay#media_engagement_index https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay#media_engagement_... because Google Chrome is Google first and a web browser second. It will collapse under its own weight if Google stops spending billions of dollars on it every year.
- hardwaregeek 3y ago
  A billion dollars is cheap considering it saves Google from having to pay Apple or Mozilla more money to stay the default search engine. Google gives Apple 10 billion a year just in traffic acquisition payments.
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  This is an interesting point. Can anyone from the inside estimate the annual budget for Chrome? A billion sounds like a lot. That implies: 1b / 250k = 4,000 (expensive) developers. I guess at least 1,000 well-paid people are involved, so hundreds of millions sounds more likely.
  - I_AM_A_SMURF 3y ago
    Mozilla at least at one point had 1,000 and is and always was chronically underfunded. 4,000 seems about reasonable. Keep in mind it's not 4,000 engineers, it's PMs, managers, UX, Infra, there's a lot more to software development that just line engineers.
  - gowld 3y ago
    Google engineers cost closer to $500K/head all in.
  - room500 3y ago
    250k is conservative for employee cost. A staff engineer at Google can reach 1 MM total comp. And add in all the overhead a company has (real estate, free food, perks, taxes, etc) 500k-700k is a little more realistic. 1500 employees across all domains (engineering, marketing, product management, customer service, etc) isn’t a huge number

dilyevsky 3y ago

Android was developed entirely at google (and redone midway after iphone came out) despite being originally an acquisition. Youtube basically just sold userbase + content. Chrome. Waymo. AppEngine precedes ec2 and heroku by some time. Most of hashicorp products (and dozen other startups) are basically copies of what google had internally. The theory that google hasn’t birthed any original products just doesnt hold any water

billjings 3y ago
This is a really off base characterization of Android within Google. Chet Haase wrote a book on those years, and while it is clear that Google gave them rocket fuel to meet their ambitions, their company culture was wildly different from the rest of Google. Shipping code on Android would not have passed muster for anyone at mainline Google; the process and standards were utterly alien from one another. There is no way Android happens without the acquisition.
- versteegen 3y ago
  Yeah, when I first looked at the shocking source code for bionic (Android's libc) to figure out why my code wasn't working I couldn't believe it was written by Google. It wasn't really. (Nor did they (initially) borrow from any of the high-quality open source libcs out there.)
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  A lot of teams at google had culture differences. And imho it was always more about andy's ego more than anything.
commandersaki 3y ago
Wasn't the idea of Android basically the acquisition of Danger Inc.
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  Kind of - danger was bought by msft, then everyone left and joined Android/Google. I think their original plan more akin to those chinese all-in-one apps

lokar 3y ago

20% was very real, I saw it many times Googles main successful product was amazing infrastructure. Lots of real innovation. It enabled massive scale of everything else, including acquisitions. YouTube was about to hit the wall when they got acquired.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
By the time I got to Google in 2012, 20% seemed dead to me. If it had any meaning, it just meant "you can do some extra work on something management approves", not "I have a wild idea and want to go off and try it in my 20%" (as I naively understood it before coming there.) It was already the case, at that point, that 20% really just meant doing more of what Google was already doing. But maybe I just didn't know the right people or have the right connections or status.
- lokar 3y ago
  Yes, by then it was org dependent. Some were not supportive, but some were. 2005 was still very open
sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago
100% - Google IS SRE. My favorite group of people to work with when I was there, a true honor, just amazing infra. But the people “leading” the place are trash.

binkHN 3y ago

Stadia was amazing.

RestlessMind 3y ago

> The only two real big success products to come from Google that are still around are Search and Gmail. Chrome. Photos. Hadoop. Kubernetes. Brain. Spanner. T in GPT (Transformers). And lots more. Google's real contribution was internet scale systems and how to run them reliably.

pcdevils 3y ago
Google photos was spawned from Picasa, which they bought https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109121493116979168 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109121493116979168
- gowld 3y ago
  Photos totally replaced Picasa, including, you know, replacing a local desktop app with a web/cloud app.
murki 3y ago
Google Photos came from the acquisition of Flock (via Bump) which was a mobile photo organizing and sharing app https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/31/google-to-close-bump-and-flock-its-recently-acquired-file-sharing-apps/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/31/google-to-close-bump-and-f...
dgacmu 3y ago
Hadoop didn't come from Google, it came from more like Yahoo, who wanted an open source clone of Google's mapreduce framework. (Yahoo was paying Doug's salary, at least). MapReduce was deprecated inside Google several years ago in favor of Flume (think "apache beam" in the open source world). I point this out because google has had a lot of innovations that aren't necessarily now _products_.