Moonshots maybe should come once you've mastered all your core products?
Then they'll never come.
Similarly, Google Maps has added features that make it a better map, and it's a great place to find what time a store closes and what their phone number is. But it's been essentially the same service, with iterative improvements, for years. There's a world of possible uses for that data beyond what we imagine when we think of a map.
Well, 98 percent of the market is not asking hard questions, so by dropping support, they are actually making their search product more tailored towards their market.
But it's still a tool to find relevant pages, not a tool to find answers. It's made some progress with the semantic web and knowledge graph, but that still provides basic facts about people, places, and things. At its core, it's still a portal. It's still just a much better version of Excite. Search today feels like it did in 1997: a "solved problem" ripe for disruption. Google has the talent, technology, and data to produce something an order of magnitude better.
Who downvoted this and why?
They seem to rely too much on site popularity, and not enough about quality of result, and god help you if you try to google a higher-level math problem.
Regarding the math problems: do you have an example of a query for which there's a good result on the internet, but Google doesn't return it?
Alphabet is trying to learn from the mistakes of their predecessor tech giants, who continued to focus almost exclusively on their current money spinners, only to wind up completely missing the boat on the Next Big Thing (tm).
That being said, it does indeed need a lot of improvement.
The support lib development pace seemed to have really picked up some steam this year.
Of course they could do more, for example :
- a really open support lib repo where you can really easily push contributions on something like github, gitlab, etc..
- start working on a replacement for Java .. Java 10 is better than what we have right now but still way behind kotlin or swift..
- do even more in the support lib. They are dozen of points of the material specs not covered by the platform right now.
- do something about android updates. It looks like a political issue though, so not sure there is a solution.
I don't feel like they are not investing in Android though, all the contrary.
A true moonshot! :) and :( at the same time...
To compete with what, Xcode?
Strategically they're almost better off inspiring others to make better third-party Android dev tools to open up the space