[solardev]

Early Google (like twenty years ago) bought a bunch of small mapping companies and created Google Maps and Earth out of them, and to this day they remain the best navigation systems ever seen in the history of our species.

It's amazing that in a decade or two we went from paper atlas books and yellow pages to bring able to look up the top restaurants an hour from where you are, and a gas station along the way, in a country you've never been to before, with real time traffic and directions spoken to you in your language. The amount of integration work it took to get there was incredible and you could see it slowly improve with each new acquisition (Keyhole for satellite images, Waze for crowdsourced reports, etc.) It must've been such an exciting time to work on that Maps.

The journey from Writely into the integrated GSuite (or whatever it's called these days) is pretty amazing too, creating an awesome alternative to MS Office.

That was all decades ago though. Who knows what Google is up to these days...