[Jzush]

By that logic though wouldn’t Google have wildly successful products instead of a long line of failures? Googles product strategy is akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.

Sure some stuff sticks but most falls off the wall and is axed barely half way into the product life cycle.

[xboxnolifes]

You're on HN, you should be aware of the idea of not needing every product to succeed. They only need 1 in 10, or 1 in 20, or however many moonshots to succeed. You can not like that strategy, but it's basically the entire tech industry.

[AntiUSAbah]

No one around me cared about Google Reader / their RSS Reader.

Pepole around me don't even know what google is doing besides search and probably maps.

I'm the person with an adblocker, the others are not.

Who is Googles target audiance? Its not me. I might only be a target for when i run some IT Platform in my work as an architect.

[duzer65657]

>> Who is Googles target audiance?

I think this is an easy question to answer: 1. what's your monthly ad spend? 2. how many ads did you view lasy week? You're probably not their target.

[MiSeRyDeee]

Pretty much all companies have a long line of failed products, only the ones we heard have successful ones. Google is definitely one of the most successful companies ever existed

[WalterBright]

> Sure some stuff sticks but most falls off the wall and is axed barely half way into the product life cycle.

If you're not failing often, you're not an innovative company.

[vntok]

But they do have wildly successful products.

They also have failures, then again most companies have failures as well at all points in the product cycle.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Those failures are funded by a wildly successful product.

[impulser_]

People need to understand Google. They have a long line of failures, because they are an innovative company. Their whole goal is to scale products to billions of users. So if they release a product, and they see no path to billions of users they cut it and move on.

This has always been the way Google has worked. This is why they are literally the most successful company in the history of the world.

[rchaud]

That's the economic model of Saudi Arabia. Just because the world wants to pay for oil and apparently ad inventory today doesn't mean that it'll do so forever.

[TacticalCoder]

> By that logic though wouldn’t Google have wildly successful products instead of a long line of failures?

Failures like YouTube, GMail and Android?

[wiseowise]

Two out of those were bought by Google.

[SquareWheel]

Sure, and Microsoft acquired DOS, and Adobe acquired Photoshop. At a certain point though, after 20+ years of development, you need to give some credit to the new owners for making it into what it is today.

[kernal]

No. Android was just a JavaScript demo. The OS was developed at Google.

[luckydata]

so you're saying Google DOESN'T have wildly successful products? That's definitely a hot take.