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by berkes 757 days ago
> Many in the tech community have high expectations for Google engineering quality and product development

Wait? Whom has these expectations? I presumed most in the tech industry scoff at anything Google launches, point at Google Graveyard or at all the failures they've been through.

Seriously: aside from search, ads and android, what product has Google developed ever that is of high quality and meeting the high quality? Maybe maps at some point? Gmail, maybe? Google docs? For each and every google product, I can name two competitors that meet much higher expectations of engineering.

3 comments

Really the only 100% in-house products are Search and Gmail. The rest was bolted on piecemeal into the Borg: maps, android, double click, docs, YouTube, etc. - all acquired.

That’s not a bad thing, Google is really a story about a shrewd - even brilliant - acquisition and integration strategy.

However, they have systemically failed to grow new things in-house - be it space balloon internet, being an ISP, games network, etc etc.

They are likely better off just buying Anthropic at this point.

Photos is my favorite Google product (that isn't gmail and search circa 2004 - 2010ish)
Hopefully it won’t get Picasa’d
Chrome, Chromebooks and Android.

Non-Products: Kubernetes and MGLRU.

Android is anything but high quality. There are so many baffling and poorly thought out ideas it's a dumpster fire.
Such as?
MediaCodec/Camera2 API