| > But what is the one thing or service that you use from Google which was launched in the last 5 years and are widely used? Nothing. Project Fi? Launched 2015, unsure of subscriber count. Google Cloud Platform? Launched in 2011. TensorFlow? Launched in 2015. Kubernetes? Launched in 2015. > Why are they not dominating anything else but a few software services that help them sell their core product, the ads? A lot of it comes down to first mover advantage. Lets take your payment tech example. Paypal was founded to accept online payments within months of Google being incorporated. The way I recall the dotcom era, Paypal was paying customers 10 bucks to open an account. And that money was useful because virtually everyone on ebay accepted it. Network effects are critical there. Google Wallet tried that same trick and it doesn't really work because there's like a billion startups in the space competing to offer virtually the same API and customer UX. Venmo, Braintree, Android Pay, Google Wallet, fuck, even my own credit cards are now in promoting their services in the 'p2p payments' space. None of them are going to end up looking like a Paypal success, because the market is comparatively fragmented. Same goes for hosting services: AWS has something like a 5 year head start on customer acquisition, and many of them are locked in to AWS for the forseeable future. Between the AWS specific API deps, and the cost of cloud:cloud networking, they have their work cut out for them. And again, there's a fleet of startups flooding the market, as well as major companies: Oracle and AliBaba are bootstrapping cloud hosts in Seattle, where they're pretty transparently recruiting burnt out AWS engineers. Arguably, they're structurally at a disadvantage. Google's competitors can freely subsidize user growth, whereas Google doing the same would likely draw antitrust complaints today. It's already kind of a big problem for them, and other market incumbents. I just listened to a fairly level headed discussion on the FT podcast about why Amazon might need to be more strongly regulated. Going forward this restructuring is likely going to be the way Alphabet works: instead of directly innovating, they use the proceeds from Google to buy winners from those overcrowded markets, some of which they may have had VC funding rounds in. |