[amazingamazing]

I remember these types of posts saying Google is done because they shut down Google Reader. Google's stock was about $60 at the time. I look forward to reading this post and chuckling a few years from now. Doomers really do get more engagement, though. I have some friends in real life who complained about reader, and none of them even use RSS feeds anymore. I mean seriously?

The one point I will make though is: these people complaining about Google shutting things down is really just funny. It's like complaining about people having abandoned side projects. A healthy organization tries things. Not everything works out or is cashflow positive. That's life.

For reference Google has more employees than all Y Combinator companies combined. Keep in mind there are thousands of dead Y Combinator companies.

A better complaint about Google would be the lack of polish on many products. Take Gmail. Google made haste in adding the "AI Inbox", and yet you can't even read threaded emails in reverse chronological order. People have been complaining about this for nearly its entire existence. With the talent, and now AI - there's no reason such a thing couldn't be fixed tomorrow. It's just CSS and there are tons of chrome extensions that implement this. C'mon...

[majormajor]

I was thinking the other day that it's particularly weird that Gmail is so bereft of features after all this time. It's not that they've left it completely as-is "this is great, there is nothing to do"—but just that the things they have tried have been... kinda uninteresting and quite simple? It's weird to me that with the other AI features they've tried (including suggested responses and such in drafting new emails) there isn't anything, say, to make really good proactive suggestions for like "apply this label to all incoming emails like this."

That sort of stagnation, though, and lack of their "trying things" really moving the needle compared to their decades-old ads product, makes me think they really are becoming the new IBM. IBM, in my estimation, has largely been irrelevant to the future of computing since the early 80s when MS ended up owning the PC story, but they have still had some quite solid stock prices runs at times over the decades (10x in five years at the end of the 90s, say). You can make a lot of money with a no-longer-that-interesting business.

[amazingamazing]

I honest to God cannot see how someone informed at all could call Google stagnant. Name almost anything and Google is on the frontier. Quantum computing, self driving, language models, network infrastructure, TPUs, etc.

It's some sort of delusion on this website that Google is falling behind. Or more likely, wishful thinking.

[shimman]

Nah, they're right. Google can only afford to do this because there are literally two players when it comes to online advertising. Remove advertising from Google and suddenly they can't subsidize failing BUs.

Kinda the point of preventing monopolies. They stagnate actual growth in the pursuit of profits. Americans don't benefit when Google is a trillion dollar company, but Americans would benefit if there was an actual competitive market.

[amazingamazing]

Sure, and 20 years ago Walmart dominated retail. And yet, Amazon is winning now. Being #1 is never guaranteed. Plenty of more examples of this happening. Defending your position becomes increasingly difficult. We're literally seeing this right now with AI.

[shimman]

Okay fine, break up both Walmart and Amazon. Doubt you'll hear voters complain about the two companies that always make the most hated lists.

[majormajor]

For self-driving, Waymo isn't technically Google anymore. ;)

I don't know anything about Quantum so I'll defer to you on that one.

In the LLMs/inference/ML space they seem to be great at theory and poor at execution until someone else shows them what the model looks like first. Similar to with cloud. Or with mobile. Or with voice assistants. Or with social (well, they never got there on that one even with the copy attempt.) Which is a classic "decline phase" behavior (see also Xerox, Bell).

If all Google products outside of their research papers and labs had disappeared ten years ago, what product categories would be missing?

[amazingamazing]

YouTube has nearly the same MAU as Facebook. YouTube is definitely social, albeit different. The rest, well I respectively disagree.

[majormajor]

That's fair. In my taxonomy it's media+ads, which was "fewer unique verticals" but it certainly has a heavy social component.

But it's also over 20 years old.

[jeffbee]

What kind of sicko wants to read an email thread in reverse order? I worked on gmail for years and never heard the first whiff of this being a thing that any sane person wants.

I would be willing to allow that there are probably some highly vocal people conditioned by OWA trauma who might have demanded this, but by no means a grassroots army.

[amazingamazing]

is it really that weird to want to read the most recent email first? that's how the emails are already arranged. they just decide to not respect this when reading threaded emails. or is this sarcasm? lol

[SanjayMehta]

If you only use IMAP gmail is just good old email. I learnt about the AI inbox from your comment.

[diob]

Yeah, IBM is nothing like Google, it's a weird comparison.

[kuschku]

> I remember these types of posts saying Google is done because they shut down Google Reader. [...] I have some friends in real life who complained about reader, and none of them even use RSS feeds anymore. I mean seriously?

Can't you even consider the possibility that the reader shutdown and the death of RSS might be causally related?