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> I don't mean to say it was a waste of talent, because clearly some of these things were a huge success. Nothing apart from search, ads, maps, Gmail, Chrome a

> I don't mean to say it was a waste of talent, because clearly some of these things were a huge success. Nothing apart from search, ads, maps, Gmail, Chrome and Android was a huge success. They essentially created their own monocultural ecosystem. Most of everything else was a short-lived fad. Plus, Wave, Reader, Chat and Glass, to mention a few.

AlexCoventry 3y ago
The AI research wasn't a commercial success, but it did have a huge impact.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Yep, the parent comment is the part of the iceberg "above the surface", but there is also a bunch of influential stuff "below the surface", like their AI research, and things like colossus, borg, bigtable, mapreduce, and a few others.
  - _bohm 3y ago
    Would add: Go and protobuf/gRPC
baud147258 3y ago
I'd add Youtube as a huge success, even if I don't think if ever brought in much money
- squarefoot 3y ago
  Google acquired YouTube, they didn't make it, just like Android. At the time Google had Google Video which was terrible in comparison, and although Google was already the most used general purpose search engine, YouTube was so much better that it had already become the standard for publishing and/or searching videos.
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    They also acquired Android, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and many of the precursors of Maps & Ads. There's value in scale. The YouTube founders themselves said they couldn't have grown YouTube without help from Google infrastructure and other business functions. In the mid-00s people were just figuring out how to run an Internet business with billions of daily users; this is a service now externalized through Cloud providers (including Google), but back then "not falling over when you got Slashdotted" was a key competency that Google had but many of the thousands of other Internet startups did not.
- chpatrick 3y ago
  YouTube made $8 billion in ad revenue in Q3 2023, that's more than 10%: https://www.shacknews.com/article/137516/google-googl-q3-2023-youtube-ad-revenue https://www.shacknews.com/article/137516/google-googl-q3-202...
- EasyMark 3y ago
  With all these other video services adding frequent commercial breaks, consuming youtube premium is looking better every day. I absolutely hate-hate-hate commercials while I'm engrossed in a movie, may as well just watch short content on youtube premium.
wyclif 3y ago
I felt like Wave had potential, but they killed it too soon.
_bohm 3y ago
GCP started turning a profit last year.
fancyfredbot 3y ago
"Apart from all the many succesful products, everything they did was a failure" is an empty statement which can be applied to any company. So yes, you can say that about Alphabet. You can also mention that they have a market cap of $1.8 trillion and are the fourth most valuable company in the world.
- bluetomcat 3y ago
  Their successful products are vertically-integrated to provide a walled "convenient" experience to users. You use an Android smartphone to open their browser, searching for stuff and viewing ads, using Maps to find the location of businesses appearing in the ads. The rest of their contributions are welcome side-effects that have enabled running that software and hardware infrastructure.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    Amazon, Apple, Meta, heck Microsoft and IBM in their heydays all do this. All of tech does this.
    - EasyMark 3y ago
      Meta doesn't really belong in there, not much vertical integration there, it's very horizontal with instagram, whatsapp, facebook, threads (lol!) serving similar and sometimes overlapping audiences. They don't really provide a service beyond social media (unless you count the OSS / free software they release for devs)
  - parthdesai 3y ago
    > Their successful products are vertically-integrated to provide a walled "convenient" experience to users Isn't that a selling point of Apple ecosystem as well? Everything just works

AlexCoventry 3y ago

The AI research wasn't a commercial success, but it did have a huge impact.

sanderjd 3y ago
Yep, the parent comment is the part of the iceberg "above the surface", but there is also a bunch of influential stuff "below the surface", like their AI research, and things like colossus, borg, bigtable, mapreduce, and a few others.
- _bohm 3y ago
  Would add: Go and protobuf/gRPC

baud147258 3y ago

I'd add Youtube as a huge success, even if I don't think if ever brought in much money

squarefoot 3y ago
Google acquired YouTube, they didn't make it, just like Android. At the time Google had Google Video which was terrible in comparison, and although Google was already the most used general purpose search engine, YouTube was so much better that it had already become the standard for publishing and/or searching videos.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  They also acquired Android, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and many of the precursors of Maps & Ads. There's value in scale. The YouTube founders themselves said they couldn't have grown YouTube without help from Google infrastructure and other business functions. In the mid-00s people were just figuring out how to run an Internet business with billions of daily users; this is a service now externalized through Cloud providers (including Google), but back then "not falling over when you got Slashdotted" was a key competency that Google had but many of the thousands of other Internet startups did not.
chpatrick 3y ago
YouTube made $8 billion in ad revenue in Q3 2023, that's more than 10%: https://www.shacknews.com/article/137516/google-googl-q3-2023-youtube-ad-revenue https://www.shacknews.com/article/137516/google-googl-q3-202...
EasyMark 3y ago
With all these other video services adding frequent commercial breaks, consuming youtube premium is looking better every day. I absolutely hate-hate-hate commercials while I'm engrossed in a movie, may as well just watch short content on youtube premium.

wyclif 3y ago

I felt like Wave had potential, but they killed it too soon.

_bohm 3y ago

GCP started turning a profit last year.

fancyfredbot 3y ago

"Apart from all the many succesful products, everything they did was a failure" is an empty statement which can be applied to any company. So yes, you can say that about Alphabet. You can also mention that they have a market cap of $1.8 trillion and are the fourth most valuable company in the world.

bluetomcat 3y ago
Their successful products are vertically-integrated to provide a walled "convenient" experience to users. You use an Android smartphone to open their browser, searching for stuff and viewing ads, using Maps to find the location of businesses appearing in the ads. The rest of their contributions are welcome side-effects that have enabled running that software and hardware infrastructure.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  Amazon, Apple, Meta, heck Microsoft and IBM in their heydays all do this. All of tech does this.
  - EasyMark 3y ago
    Meta doesn't really belong in there, not much vertical integration there, it's very horizontal with instagram, whatsapp, facebook, threads (lol!) serving similar and sometimes overlapping audiences. They don't really provide a service beyond social media (unless you count the OSS / free software they release for devs)
- parthdesai 3y ago
  > Their successful products are vertically-integrated to provide a walled "convenient" experience to users Isn't that a selling point of Apple ecosystem as well? Everything just works