I wish this was a joke. Turns out, Google turned into a joke. I was really rooting for them; They had everything in place to be the top dog. From people to research to hardware to internet.zip (and video.zip and emails.zip and newsgroups.zip and code.zip and android.zip etc..). I don't want to sound negative and what they built is probably great in its own right, but what was expected of them and what they have delivered so far, I can definitely say that they blew it hard. They did manage to turn gemini into search 2.0 on google.com and it does work.. but, come on. Where's the google of yesterday? Seems they put a ton of weight that's not on the level of people that were there before and I don't want to offend anyone there, but it sure looks like that.
The same was true 15 years ago when the cloud started hyping up and Google missed that in similar ways as well, so I’m not sure whether the “Google of yesterday” is who you think it is.
This is the Google of yesterday, they didn’t change.
Fair point
A good % of the Google of yesterday is now in working in frontier labs, crushing it.
> I was really rooting for them
may I ask why?
The only good products Google has ever built in-house are search and GMail. Everything else is acquisition or crappy product.
So we should ask “why would it be different this time.”
IMO google maps and google earth were revolutionary when they came out. And maps stayed well ahead of competition for many many years.
I'm one of those few that liked Google Wave!
There are ones of you!
Maps was originally an acquisition.
Both were acquisitions.
Google finance was an incredible portfolio tracking and research tool. Until they released v2 which took away all the functionality and replaced it with a news feed.
Youtube, hate it or not, is really good. The amount of data they have to handle everyday is on different level.
For sure. It was an acquisition, though.
Isn't Waymo the state of the art?
They’re still the same price as an uber and there’s no way to actually order one, it’s all random. I don’t understand why… like I actively would prefer them. If they were available so instead I find myself reaching for the cybercabs instead at half the price.
Uh, use the Waymo app?
Chrome was pretty great as well, it was desperately needed.
Google Chrome didn't start from scratch. Blink came from WebKit which came from KDE's KHTML. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML
Entirely irrelevant - Chrome really stepped up both security and speed over WebKit at that time.
The comment you replied to was: "The only good products Google has ever built in-house are [...]"
I don't have enough information to judge how much of Chrome was original work and how much was pre-existing work. Though I guess by now, after nearly 20 years, Chrome's codebase looks absolutely nothing like KHTML.
App Engine was good for its time, and I don't think that was an acquisition. Similarly, Cloud Storage and Google Cloud in general are pretty good products.
I started using AWS when EC2 and S3 first came out, but was forced to switch to Gcloud by the most recent company I joined. I was pleasantly surprised. In many ways it's more techie-focused than AWS, which is more enterprise-focused. And their managed Kubernetes is second to none.