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Comment by pg_bot | Hacker News Reader

Google has lost its edge, I don't know any startups that are being built today that are worried about being put out of business by them. While they have been working on a bunch of products that have gotten a lot of PR in the last 3 years nothing they have built has stuck. Google+ and Glass were failures, their foray into hardware and robotics has been a mixed bag, and their core services have been stagnating. If I were to make a bold prediction, I don't think they will ever release another great product internally.

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> and their core services have been stagnating

I don't think some core services like Android & Chrome are stagnating. They may not be much superior to their competitors to blow them out of the water, but they do seem to be moving ahead in those sectors.

I agree with the fact that they didn't come out with new products/brands that stuck, but their progress with existing products seems to be in the right direction.

Interesting prediction. Can we make it more precise and put money and odds behind it?

We should probably give it a timeframe. I say over the next ten years?

Nailing down `great product' will be harder.

By `internally', I assume you mean not from a recent acquisition?

I was gonna say Google Drive, but wow, it's nearly four years old at this point.

Still, don't you think self-driving cars are going to be a huge success?

No. If the only potential customers are huge car companies, they're going to prefer to build their own self-driving car tech to paying a high price for Google's.

Isn't that what they said about phones before 2007?

That's hilarious. Most American car companies can barely build cars, let alone self-driving cars.

They are not going to come so soon, the fully automated ones. I have watched with interest for years the Google Self Driving Car project and they release very little actual information about the stage they are at and the problems they are solving.

If self-driving cars are a huge success as a technology, it won't be from Google. Google is incredibly bad at developing things where humans need to be involved. (See also: Try to get customer service for most Google products.)

Google has basically glossed over the fact that their cars fail every 1,560 miles and focused on their "1.4 million miles driven" figure. They're pushing an agenda of eliminating the human driver from their prototypes, even though their cars would be incredibly dangerous without them.

Meanwhile, other companies are focusing on ways to make the UX of self-driving cars safe and comforting for humans to interact with: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3054330/innovation-by-design/the...

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