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Comment by rorykoehler | Hacker News Reader

Neither Gmail or Chrome were exceptionally innovative ideas. More iterative technical executions which Google are exceptionally good at imo.

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You're moving the goalposts. The blog post just spoke about "most successful products". And "innovative" is subjective. Moreover there was nothing like Gmail at the time it debuted (AJAX, huge storage, powerful search). Chrome was technically very innovative and also popularized UI things that have become standard - tabs at the top, omnibar.

Maybe I’m just misremembering, but I’m pretty sure Gmail had much better spam detection than anything else when it launched. Back when it was in beta, that was one of the main features I remember talking about when I ditched Hotmail.

Regardless of how innovative Gmail and Chrome were (and I agree they were), more of Google's "innovative" products are a result of acquisition. This supports the article's hypothesis that Google's internal product innovation is not as great.

Some examples of failed innovation at Google are Wave, Allo, Chat, Plus, etc. Having worked at Google, I can count way more product failures than successes that originated internally.

But in the real world too, way more companies fail than succeed. It would be weird if internally developed products didn't also fail a lot.

Some of the successful acquisitions (YouTube, Waze) were made at a time when they were already popular and had traction. YouTube wasn't the only video sharing site around at the time (there was even Google Video[1]) but it was obviously the most well-liked.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Video

You're moving the goalposts too in your first comment: The original article never say there wasn't any very successful and innovative internally developed products.

Arguably, YouTube, Android, Maps and Double Clicks have much more impressive market shares and revenue impact than Chrome and Gmail.

When it was released, Gmail was on a class of its own. It was free, fast, and had ~1+ GB of storage (and it was increasing every second!).

I know that you might think offering more storage for the same product is not innovative, but here's the thing: Yahoo (pretty much the largest competitor at that time) offered an email service with 4 MB of storage.

4 MB.

Gmail was clearly better than any other offering and in most ways still is but it wasn’t paradigm shifting like YouTube.

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