[gkoberger]

Hey, 9 years is a pretty good run for any product, especially a ambitious one with no clear revenue model. And the shuttering is paired with a $10M donation to continue the support of the mission.

I know Google gets hate for shutting things down, but they have hundreds of products – I can't think of any other tech company with such a wide range of products. They make bets, and with bets comes a certain amount of failure. I'd guess they have a better "success" rate than, say, YC.

(Ugh, I hate defending Google, but alas)

[ehsankia]

Honestly this shouldn't even get put in the same pile. The whole point of X is to try moonshot ideas that are truly out there. By definition they are ideas that have a low chance of making it.

[7thaccount]

Does google have anything successful outside of: search, adsense, chrome, chromebooks, and android? Those are all large accomplishments to be sure, but it seems like they should have more products out there that people actually buy.

[ehsankia]

They have at least a dozen services that have over a billion users. Others not mentioned in your list: Youtube, Photos, Drive, Maps, Gmail, Docs. And probably slightly more trivial ones like translate, calendar, flights, news, finance, and other stuff that are kinda part of search. Their hardware/home line isn't doing that bad either.

[7thaccount]

I forgot about YouTube and Gmail (things I use daily), so thank you. Maps is amazing too.

My question wasn't to be a jerk. It was a legitimate question asked out if ignorance.

I still kind of feel like they could be in a lot of additional areas like logistics where they could put all their capital and software edge into becoming a global leader.

[ehsankia]

I think Amazon already has mastered logistic, and it's a pretty difficult field to get into. Similarly, Apple has decades of experience in hardware now. It is definitely hard to find a sector that is large enough yet under developed.

One example of a new one they're trying is Stadia. Gaming in general is an already large and growing sector, and while there have been some attempt at game streaming, none of been as serious. You can see it will be big by the fact that Microsoft (xCloud) and Amazon (Luna) both also jumped in a year later also.

As far as actual moonshots/X go, I believe they have (or had) a few around energy tech. They've funded quite a lot of research into various fusion tech [1]. They also have a lot efforts in Biotech, may it be with Verily, or just DeepMind doing interesting research, such as solving Protein Folding recently [2].

So I definitely wouldn't say they are lacking breadth, honestly if anything it's hard to remember everything they do, as you pointed out :)

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/05/29/135179/google-ha...

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4

[pnw_hazor]

Are any of those innovations?

It seems to me they are all boring, obvious, copied, or purchased products that complement their ad selling business.

[gkoberger]

I mean, maybe after 15 years they seem status quo. But almost all of these were revolutionary at the time... do you remember videos before Youtube, collaboration before Docs, email before Gmail or maps before Maps?

Yes, Google makes money off ads. But how does that discount them being innovations (which, btw, is a qualification you came up with... nobody above you even said they were).

[djrogers]

> email before Gmail or maps before Maps

Hotmail and Mapquest would like to chime in here...

[gkoberger]

I used both!

Hotmail was full of spam, insecure and you had to delete your emails when you were done with them.

Mapquest had directions but the maps were static and you couldn’t interact with them.

I’m not saying Google invented email or maps, but they did define how we currently think of them.

[pas]

Maybe the innovation is that Google bought some interesting new translation/mapping/phoneOS thing and made it robust enough to power half the world?

Sure, they bought it because they saw that it will go nicely with their adtech thing.

Or who knows. Really. Google is very big. They always has been quirky and enormously successful and profitable. It's very hard to attribute causality to its actions retroactively, especially because even the small numbers are in the billions range, but they are always dwarfed by the adtech blob.

But there's room for nuance. 74% of their revenue was from adtech in 2019 (11 months, 162B USD)

But that means they made 40+ billion from other "stuff" ( https://d3jlwjv6gmyigl.cloudfront.net/images/2020/04/Google-... ).

One of the big problems of Google is that anything that does not integrate with adtech just doesn't really makes sense for them. They have no real model of what to do with things that are not adtech. Chat apps? Whatever the current flavor is. Social network? Yeah, we tried to copy FB, made everyone put +1 buttons everywhere, but ... did not really matter, as it was an insecure hack and it did not really give that oompfh to adtech that they expected.

But they could have kept G+. There's a constant need for a FB alternative. Every time FB fucks up a bunch of people would have tried G+. I'm not saying G+ was good, but shutting it did not make much sense. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[always_left]

Travel, waze, voice, snapseed, meets/hangouts, chromecast is pretty popular too. And all the other stuff people mentioned.

[valvar]

They also have maps, gmail, docs, drive, translate, calendar, photos, scholar, and lately Stadia.

[Dylan16807]

Stadia's successful now? How many users do they have?

[meibo]

Cloud gaming is where we're headed, arguably Google might have been a little early - but they probably rather wanted to be too early than too late.

There's already a few players in this space that are well respected like Nvidia, growth is kinda unavoidable and arguably Stadia gives you the best experience since all games are optimized for it, with the trade-off of having to "rebuy" them outside of Steam.

[gkoberger]

Gmail? Youtube? GCP? Waymo? Maps? Calendar? Google Suite? Google docs/drive/sheets/etc? Google Analytics?

[bbulkow]

Cloud happens to be a multibillion dollar business.

[carlineng]

GCP

[asciident]

Keep in mind android they bought, then the leader of that project "resigned" for sexual harassment. So it's continuing but I doubt it'll be more than incremental improvements, as we've seen in the past 5 versions.

But I think Gmail and Maps were fairly innovative products when they came up. Both in terms of "wow I didn't think this would be possible before" and being viable businesses.

[gkoberger]

I use iOS, and have no love for Android but... that's an insane statement.

There's almost 3 billion android phones out there, and one guy leaving isn't going to cause Google to throw up their hands and shrug. Phones are just really, really good now, and there's not much you can really innovate on.

[7thaccount]

I'd prefer phones un-innovate a lot of stuff out of them