7 ms·
Google fucks up 90% of their products, why do you think Gemini is in the 10%?
by timmmmmmay 8mo ago
Google fucks up 90% of their products, why do you think Gemini is in the 10%?
- xmprt 8mo agoBecause Google has the money to build 10 different versions/iterations of Gemini and can essentially force one to work. They have most people's data and most people use them for mail/search/browser/maps as well. In my opinion though this is a race to the bottom rather than a winner takes all situation so I don't think anyone is coming out ahead once the dust settles.
- kingkawn 8mo agoThis was the same argument made for Google Wave and Google+ and both completely tanked
- thewebguyd 8mo agoThe tech behind wave eventually made its way into Google docs though and pioneered collaborative document editing, so wasn't a complete failure even though the product itself was killed. No comment on Google+, Google has a storied history of failure on any kind of social media/chat type products. Where Google wins is just simply having enough money to outlive anyone else. As the saying goes "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" In this case, Google is the market and they can just keep throwing money at the wall until OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. go under.
- hackingonempty 8mo agoSocial media has strong network effects that keeps competitors at bay. What network effects are OpenAI/Anthropic/etc accumulating?
- heavyset_go 8mo agoYes, but Gemini is actually good and so are their APIs.
- stouset 8mo agoGoogle built ten different chat products, how did that go?
- XorNot 8mo agoDoes it matter? Microsoft won by default with Teams because it actually turns out no one cares about chat or even has a choice in it: employees use whatever the company picks.
- pragmatic 8mo agoIt's bundled with office and no serious business can live without excel.
- thevillagechief 8mo agoThe world, other than the US, runs on WhatsApp. Business, support and payments are done there. So people do care.
- deaux 8mo agoIf you're going to say "other than the US" then you've got to say at a minimum "other than the US and China", but really "other than the US and China and Japan and Korea and Taiwan and Thailand and Russia and most of Central Asia". Only mentioning the US is wildly americentric even by HN standards.
- mvdtnz 8mo agoGosh doesn't that sound familiar.
- deaux 8mo agoNo one uses Teams for personal use. LLMs are used daily for personal use by hundreds of millions of people at this point.
- infecto 8mo agoAgree. Look at how miserably MSFT has failed at integrating AI tastefully in their business. Google makes money selling ads. Nothing else matters.
- measurablefunc 8mo agoThey target those ads by ingesting as many signals as possible from as many input devices & sensors as they can possibly convince people to use. They make a lot of money from advertising b/c they have managed to convince the most number of people to give them as many behavioral signals as possible & they will continue to do so. They kill products only when the signal is not valuable enough to improve their advertising business but that's clearly not the case w/ AI.
- root_axis 8mo agoBecause the product quality doesn't matter if the competition isn't making any money.
- H8crilA 8mo agoGoogle has barely released a successful product in 20 years.
- Hamuko 8mo agoI thought that the likes of Android, Google Docs, Google Translate, etc. were fairly successful. Chrome and ChromeOS also seem fairly popular too.
- gregable 8mo agoA lot of those are getting pretty close to 20 years ago.
- atlimar 8mo agoThis year: chromeos is 17 android is 18 chrome is 18 google docs is 20 google translate is 20
- stock_toaster 8mo agoIn retrospect, it is wild how good/successful google was 17-20 years ago!
- rvnx 8mo agoFew years ago, we had Google Bard, the ancestor of Gemini, which was supposed to be an AI LLM, and when you right-clicked the page, it was a fake page with hardcoded sentences in a .js file...
- staticman2 8mo ago> was supposed to be an AI LLM Are you claiming Bard wasn't an LLM???
- signatoremo 8mo agoNone of them looks like their original form, none would survive without google’s enormous investment.
- afavour 8mo agoDo they though? Google does things I hate with their products. But the money printing machine keeps going whrrr faster and faster.
- dlahoda 8mo agorace to the bottom. google in house cheaper inference hardware. anthropic buys it.
- dlahoda 8mo agogoogle the only ai which invests mixing llm ai with real ai, and it seems work well.
- longfacehorrace 8mo agoThe conclusion Google is engaged in consumer capitalism is wild. They're engaged in computing research and merely engage in consumer capitalism as a consequence of political and social constraints. Products are a means to an end not the goal. OpenAI and Anthropic are product companies and are more likely to fail like most product companies do as they will lack broad and wide depth. Google has experience in design, implementation, and 24/7 ops with every type of SaaS there is. They can bin LLMs tomorrow and still make bank. Same cannot be said for OAI or Anthropic.
- davnicwil 8mo agowell, it's basically existential, so the incentive is there to not only get it very right but also to limit the delta with how right anyone else gets it. The same can't really be said of the long tail of products Google have done. Look to GCP as an example. It had to be done, with similar competitive dynamics, it was done very well. Look to Android as another.
- sekai 8mo ago> well, it's basically existential, so the incentive is there to not only get it very right but also to limit the delta with how right anyone else gets it. The same can't really be said of the long tail of products Google have done. I've yet to see anything that threatens Google's ad monopoly.
- davnicwil 8mo agoI mean I guess this is classic disruption theory. It's not that a dominant position goes away overnight. In fact that would be precisely the impetus to spur the incumbent to pivot immediately and have a much better chance of winning in the new paradigm. It's that it, with some probability, gets eaten away slowly and the incumbent therefore cannot let go of the old paradigm, eventually losing their dominance over some period of years. So nobody really knows how LLMs will change the search paradigm and the ads business models downstream of that, we're seeing that worked out in real time right now, but it's definitely high enough probability that Google see it and (crucially) have the shareholder mandate to act on it. That's the existential threat and they're navigating it pretty well so far. The strategy seems balanced, measured, and correct. As the situation evolves I think they have every chance of actually not being disrupted should it come to that.
- bad_haircut72 8mo agoThe threat to Google is that browsers themselves get displaced.
- mountainriver 8mo agoYou must not know the stories of why GCP came to be. It was an idea from the creators of Kubernetes and the execs at Google fought it the whole way
- XorNot 8mo agoPersistence. Google has a lot more endurance then OpenAI does in this game. The current AI market is going to destroy anyone who's specialized into it compared to having alternative revenue streams to subsidize it.
- moonlighter 8mo agoDoes Alphabet/Google have any other significant alternative revenue streams though besides their ad revenue? And won't that decrease significantly the more people use AI tools for research than firing up a google web search? I find myself using Claude more and more doing web research and comparing products/reviews...without getting a single ad served up from Google.
- port11 8mo ago0% interest to defend Big Don’t Be Evil, but success rates for most businesses, new or existing, are low. Succeeding at 10% of their ventures isn’t that bad, considering they add up to the trillions of dollars of valuation for big G.