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by 1996 2173 days ago
I'd say less bluntly that Google is not as innovative as it once was. Old large companies ossify, and Google is not an exception. It failed on the social network (facebook), it failed on the instant messaging (whatsapp), it failed on the picture meme (snapchat), it failed on the video meme (tiktok), it failed on videoconference (zoom) ... you may see some kind of pattern there.

If asked whether google will succeed at something new (say, Fuschia), given those priors, my response will be: "no. it would be a surprising first in many many years. the company is on decline"

What we're missing is the connection between the services of the large companies: Google, Amazon, Microsoft all have an offering made of devices (hardware), websites (software) and cloud services. There seems to be a synergy, where you benefit from doing all 3 things in-house to reduce costs on your core product or to capture consumer minds. Microsoft is getting back in phones, with an Android offering. Amazon is not giving up on Kindle.

Notice how Apple is missing on the cloud services part here. They have some internally (for Siri) but they do not sell them.

Even if they don't start a cloud offering, they may sell their CPUs to others who will, before eventually rolling their own hardware.

This will give time to people who adapt existing server software to work better on Apple ARM CPUs (recompiling is the tip of the iceberg, thing about the differing architecture, what can be accelerated etc.)

We are seeing SIMD/AVX optimization for database like computation just now. It may take a while.

2 comments

Apple is not missing out because it doesn’t jump on every bandwagon that is not part of its core competency. It’s still the most profitable out of all the tech companies.
If youtube is considered a failure vs tiktok then I don't know what success would be.

Same with Hangouts and video calling.

Tiktok and zoom are both flash in the pan fads.

Different use cases and monetization profiles.

Youtube requires a lot of server space compared to tiktok (<10 min means no ad money, so people make videos at least 10 min long!), and Zoom requires almost no space, while it can sell corporate subscriptions.

The only reason youtube still enjoys some success now is because it wasn't made in house, and the acquisition wasn't too badly managed. Grandcentral (parts of which still live as google voice) was a different story.

But it only shows how the last success google made "in-house" was a long, long time ago. The alphabet rebranding changed nothing. Since youtube, Google has turned into another yahoo for startup: a place they go to shrivel and die.