[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)_/¯