[romwell]

Creating a product that operates at a loss (by funding it with ad money from search), effectively evaporating small players in that niche, only to kill the product in several years, leaving a smoldering hole where an ecosystem used to be?

Or, in cases like Picasa buying a product, only to shut it down and force existing users onto a new platform (Photos in that case) with no feature parity.

If that's innovation, it's a rather sad kind. Google could do with less of that.

And as a xoogler: Google is long past trying crazy things. New things — sure, crazy — nope. Crazy won't fly in a project proposal.

FWIW most of the things mentioned in the parent comment (Waymo, Wing, etc) are not Google.

Yes, they're owned by the same holding group. But if you work at Google, you don't have access to projects, employees, and spaces.

[xmprt]

I partly agree. But only partly because Google has tried crazy things recently too. Stadia seemed pretty crazy in my eyes and it's the kind of thing that most people wrote off but I had hoped that Google could prove them wrong. They didn't and have killed it off for the most part (it still exists but I think it's back to the drawing board). A while back Google was working on building a modular smart phone with Project Ara. They killed it before it got to consumers.

It seems like Google still attempts crazy things now and then but the crazy things don't succeed like they used to. Maybe there's just not as much blue ocean for crazy things in tech to succeed like there used to and the crazy things are crazy for a reason and no one's trying it.

[gooses]

Is stadia really that crazy? OnLive existed well before stadia and was basically the same thing.

[smeagull]

It is. The lag for steam play just over wifi is insufferable. Encoding the video takes too long for latency intensive applications like video games.

[romwell]

There's a difference between "very complicated to accomplish" and "crazy" in my book.

For example, balancing a bowling ball on the tip of a pencil is technically very challenging, but accomplishing that isn't exactly what people would call "crazy" - more like "OK, but why would you do that".

The problem that Google faces now is that the fun and crazy things that could be done with the wealth of personal data that it collects are increasingly seen as creepy by the people providing that data, immoral by the journalists, and illegal by legislatures.

Saying this as someone who would have absolute loved to do some of the crazier things while working there. It's for the better that it was not an option, at least at the time.

Google has a lot of power now, and with great power comes great responsibility. And responsible behavior tends to lean away from "crazy".

[Ygg2]

Stadia isn't crazy. It's just dumb.

Is it new? No. Streaming games has been done for a good while now.

Is it exciting? Games on subscription? Already done.

Even exclusive games were done. And done better by Epic store.

Works with existing collection? Nope.

Working on any device? So does GFNow but works with current Steam collection (unless publishers is greedy).

Does it solve any interesting issues? No. But adds non-repairable console. Basic issue can't be fixed easily - Network congestion, speed of light.

On launch it was universally panned by hardware reviewers like Gamers Nexus, and others.

It's not like Google graveyard was a secret at that point.

[romwell]

>But only partly because Google has tried crazy things recently too.

Our definitions of "tried" and "crazy" clearly differ.

>They killed it before it got to consumer

By that definition, I "tried" building a spaceship yesterday. I just killed it before it got to the launch. Crazy, huh?

>Maybe there's just not as much blue ocean for crazy things in tech to succeed like there used to

Or maybe a company abandoned by its founders that ditched its "Don't Be Evil" motto for something incomprehensible ("Respect the opportunity", pardon me? Should I also "Be nice to profits" and "Revere stock value"?) isn't the shining paragon of innovation it used to be.

There is plenty of space for crazy things, more than ever before. And both Alphabet and Meta are doing crazy things. Just not as a part of their main businesses (Google/Facebook, respectively).