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My view is that Google is insanely good at products that demand performance at scale. Google search, YouTube, Google Docs, Google Maps, Gmail, and anything that supplements their usage Android, Chrome. Their failures like Google+, Google Glass indicate a product-market misfit than a result of being engineer led. An engineer (software related) is no less fit to lead a tech firm than a doctor is fit to lead a Medical service facility than a musician leading a record company than a sportsman managing a sport team than a chef leading a restaurant.

Sure it could be the next Xerox PARC, but the next Apple (following the bad metaphor) will very likely be a division of Google itself.

And finally, if anything, Google's ability to kill products that it does not think valuable, is what keeps it innovating, exploring and yet not be a dinosaur search company. (I do miss Google Reader though. Did they really have to kill it so bad ? )

Isn't Google amorphous by design? I thought Google was supposed to exist everywhere hidden in plain sight, and its many products are just the interfaces it uses to connect to us. At least that's the impression I got from listening to Schmidt all these years talk about how Google can go anywhere and be anything it wants to be.

The counterexample is Orkut, Google's homegrown, initially successful social network, years before the rise of Facebook. It died mostly from scaling issues, i.e. became slow when many users were on it.

If Google is an example of "failure", I'm pretty sure a lot of other companies would love to fail.

> Android, YouTube

First off, Android didn't even exist as a product yet when Google acquired it, and YouTube was popular but nowhere near the behemoth it is now. Taking those things and turning them into world beating juggernauts is a very non-trivial task; as you've probably noticed, most corporate acquisitions of startups have a very different outcome.

Google had search and used that to prop the rest. Simple.

And Google is making money by removing more and more "free" listings and replacing them ads and their content. Morality aside, eventually they'll lose their effectiveness.

> Google had search and used that to prop the rest. Simple.

If it's so simple why aren't there other companies doing the same?

> Morality aside, eventually they'll lose their effectiveness.

People have said this for the last ten years. Sure, if you cry wolf long enough you will probably be correct at some point, but does this offer any insight?

He didn't say what they did was simple. He said it's a simple explanation for what they did. Google created a great search engine at the right place and time. Since then Google's products have been a hit but mostly a miss by a company with endless money.

Having many misses is just a result of trying many times. Hell, we're in the forum of the epitome of the idea that having many misses and a few hits can be a tremendously successful strategy.

The line should always be moving. Either up or down, hopefully mostly up, but moving nonetheless. It is perfectly fine for the line to go down, failing is learning. But if the line continues to go down, you're not learning, you're just failing. Fix that. Same as when the line continues to go up. If it goes up with no dips down, you're not learning either. Fix that.

The line should never be level. This is the worst position to be in. It means you're not doing anything at all.

I can't imagine anyone who's used the YouTube Android app would think it is skill rather than a massive existing userbase & network effect that's led to YouTube's success.

Google is absolutely horrible at UI and application design, I can't think of any product that doesn't mostly suck from a UI perspective. Scale & speed is obviously a different story.

What do you think about the UI of their flagship search website, goggle.com?

It's rubbish!

When I load Google.com, I should see the Google logo and at the bottom of a page a "click to continue reading" button that I should, well, click. Then as I continue to scroll down the search entry field should scroll up the page as the Google logo slowly fades out behind it. Searching should feel like an event.

But seriously, I love that Google keeps their search website so minimal. I think that takes courage.

It's fast, but it has many shortcomings.

>> Google had search and used that to prop the rest. Simple. > If it's so simple why aren't there other companies doing the same?

Because the "simple" strategy is predicated on a market-dominant search product. It was simple for them, but extremely hard for anyone else—because Step 1 is "supplant Google with 75% market share".

As it turns out the engineers are good at business.

Using your established brand to propel a new product is business 101 and building a whole web of closely related products is business 302.

The synergy between their many major products is quite astonishing (though it is not public knowledge).

Nevermind...

> Google had search and used that to prop the rest. Simple.

Simple? Tell that to anyone else doing search.

Talking about Google products one has to mention the two products which make around 90 percent of their revenue: adwords and adsense. These programs are the real products of Google, and at least one of them was acquired. It must be really difficult to do other products in an organisation that makes more than 50B on those two products alone. No matter what product or service you launch it's bound to make peanuts compared to these products for 5-10 years to come. Worldwide there is barely a handful of products that come close to adwords and adsense in revenue. How do you get the attention and ressources from management when you are up against that?

One of the most successful companies in history is an example of failure in leadership to you? Thanks for the lawls

> I think it's led to Google having institutional ADD and has left them with countless failed products and others that have been neglected for years

You're missing the point. I think this is part of what defines their existence and probably their success; experiment with many different products/services (and do it quickly too), doesn't matter if you have 1 killer product for every 10,000 experiments.

> Google is an example of the failure of being engineer led in my opinion.

For me, Google is a failure under the very same rule that makes MBA-driven businesses a failure for society. I.e. I'd actually prefer more business to be Google-like "failures".

For example, talk what you like about how Android is crap, but who'd you trust more with mobile OS - Google, or Samsung? Siemens? Oracle?

How are failed and neglected projects a result of being engineering led? If anything, I would think that killing and deprioritizing products, as well as making revenue fueled decisions (i.e. google shopping express for google home) are examples of management making potentially harmful decisions.

I will agree that Google seems lackluster at network effect related things and I find that they are generally very poor at marketing.

> has left them with countless failed products and others that have been neglected for years

Building things that you consider failed is going to be a natural consequence of finding things that work because you gotta try things to know. As for Google finance if it isn't broke why change it? Don't confuse change with improvement.