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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

Google is far from one trick pony. Android is the most dominant operating system in the world. YouTube the most dominating Video sharing website in the world. Gmail the most widely used web-based email service. Google maps...

If my experience being part of the Amazon Echo team has taught me anything, it's that the most simple looking things (like Search, or Voice UI) require the most complex skill set.

Even if Google got just one thing right in your eyes (aka Search/AdWords), rest assured, underneath they employed a considerable number of disparate 'tricks' to get that right-- you just chose to umbrella dismiss those many tricks as 'One Trick' (TM).

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per the other commenter, most of those are acquisitions and, outside of Youtube, what's the P&L for those other products sans search advertising?

I'm sure Echo is very complex, but it's usually not the complexity of the problem that is important from a business standpoint, but choosing which problem to solve.

Most of what you listed were acquisitions, then paired with Adwords.

Android was an acquisition?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#His...

In July 2005, Google acquired Android Inc. for at least $50 million, whose key employees, including Rubin, Miner and White, stayed at the company after the acquisition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

Google merely acquired the embryo of modern Android. They can take credit for growing it.

Seriously? Someone needed to down vote that comment? Take it easy, not everyone knows everything. Yikes.

A question that can be answered by pasting it into a search engine is very unlikely to provoke an insightful discussion, and is not good use of HN real estate.

Except it turns out the answer you get is wrong!

Please ignore the folks who were snarky and downvoted you. Folks like to think this was really an acquisition, but they are mostly wrong :)

In particular, Google basically acquired some people. Anyone who thinks they had a real OS at that point, and anything that approached even the first version of android, is smoking something.

Source: I did diligence on the acquisition, and I watched them develop android at Google.

At the risk of getting down voted by folks not in the know, Adwords was also such an infringement (just done much much better) of an Overture patent [1] that if it hadn't been for Yahoo buying up Overture and later settling the lawsuit, our views on Google's success might be very different today.

[1] https://www.google.com/patents/US6269361

Amazon is the most impressive company, IMHO. I love my Echo, and I read on a "paperwhite" Kindle even though I have an iPad.

I think Amazon could take over the phone market. Just make a phone that is an "Amazon remote control" with shopping, music, and video streaming built in, combined with Alexa that "just works". (Or a color e-ink phone with no video support, but a long battery life.)

Since when is Amazon building their own Phone OS? FireOS is built on Android, and as such is perpetually in Google's orbit.

Where does Amazon succeed here where Facebook failed (and Amazon currently fails)?

And I haven't heard many good things about FireOS. Their phones haven't done too well.

Amazon did make a phone and it didn't take off.

>I think Amazon could take over the phone market.

No way.

>ust make a phone that is an "Amazon remote control" with shopping, music, and video streaming built in

The problem is the world is much bigger than Amazon. I buy from Amazon often, but I don't want it to be at the center of everything I do. I think most people would agree. That's why all their phones failed, and why the facebook phone failed too.

And Google did not create either Android or Youtube. They bought both of these platforms.

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