[hanief]

Apple is a victim of their own success. It's a dilemma really. Their culture vs public interest.

I am sure they are exploring new spaces like VR, AR, cars, etc but they haven't finished a decent product yet so they don't announce it. They are the opposite of Google, where they announce every new project only to kill it later (Ara, Fiber, Glass, etc).

They don't really like to announce a product before it's ready. The root is their hardware background. They need to nail the product in the first iteration or it will fail. Move fast and break things don't apply to them.

[Balgair]

Don't Forget Wave !

... I really liked Wave...

On Apple's culture: Ship has sailed. Tim doesn't have the gravitas to ensure a new 'Wow!' product is going to ship. He's a damn good manager, but not a superb innovator. Unfortunately, Apple is at it's heart, a 'Wow!' company. I suppose Apple has 'topped off' now and is a mature business state. This is a good thing though! More room for innovations!

[wlesieutre]

And GOOG-411 (didn't have a smartphone yet when they killed this, it was still useful), Google Labs (public access to experimental features in Gmail and other services), Buzz (jk nobody misses that), Reader, Code Search, Q&A, iGoogle portals, and plenty of others.

[vram22]

Didn't know that Google Labs was shut down. Some of the Gmail Labs were useful - and some have probably gone mainstream by now. The one that reminds you if you use a word like "attached" in your email, but have no attachment, comes to mind. I tried at least half a dozen of them, may have only kept using one or two. Still, the Labs idea was good.

[mcintyre1994]

Undo send originated there as well.

[throwaway1892]

I've been using it for years, so I did not realised they had closed Labs in the interim.

[vram22]

Right, good point. That has saved me a few times from accidentally sending an incomplete email - luckily not anything worse :)

[chx]

Google Questions. I know it's been long ago and there were problems but when you needed it for real it worked wonders.

[WWLink]

"Wow!" products usually don't happen overnight though. Take the iPhone for example! Apple was playing around with ideas for tablets, handhelds, PDAs, and other stuff for decades before they launched that. A lot of "what if" prototypes were made and dead end projects ensued.

Google kinda had the right idea with 20% time, I think. In order to make truly ground breaking ideas, you have to have a little bit of margin for playing with ideas. If you make your entire business about trimming fat, making synergies, and maximizing the efficiency - squeezing it out of everyone involved, you're no longer an innovator, you're just an assembly line.