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by amazingamazing 28 days ago
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.
2 comments
shimman 28 days ago
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.

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amazingamazing 28 days ago
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.
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shimman 28 days ago
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.
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majormajor 28 days ago
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?

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amazingamazing 28 days ago
YouTube has nearly the same MAU as Facebook. YouTube is definitely social, albeit different. The rest, well I respectively disagree.
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majormajor 28 days ago
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.

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