Has Google been humbled? | Hacker News Reader

Has Google been humbled?

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18 pointsEddk23 comments

I can't tell if this is a joke or not. I know the Hacker News hivemind is hate Google / love Apple, but this is ridiculous.

You want to know what Google has released to great success in the past five years? Here you go:

Google Chat

Google Docs

Google Calendar

Google Checkout

YouTube

Android

Google Chrome

Google Voice

Google TV

Granted a few of these are acquisitions, but I'm leaving out a ton of tiny projects and the tremendous contributions to Open Source projects and the developer community over the years.

Yeah, they clearly haven't done anything useful in five years. They should be dying as a company any day now.

Only three things on the list I'd call great success, and two of them are acquisitions: Youtube and Android, third was build on the great work of others—Chrome.

The iPod was largely built on contracted work and Safari/Webkit was built off KHTML. I don't get this whole "if not built 100% in-house, it doesn't count" meme. You might have a point about YouTube being an acquisition, but giving credit to anyone but Google for Android and Chrome's (or Apple for the iPod and Safari's) success seems like intentionally looking for loopholes instead of acknowledging their work.

+1 As far as understanding the value of technology to people, this list clearly demonstrates that Google is trying to tackle hard problems and products to do just that. Compare this list of side endeavors (besides their obvious core competencies) to those of Facebook. Recent products are talked up as world changing innovations, (Groups, Messages, Places) however they haven't changed the game or significantly added value to their product. Yes these products are young, but in the last few years Facebook has done little to provide this "value of technology" besides the initial innovations of News Feed and the Like Button, both of which drew heavily from FriendFeed acquisition as well. Everything in tech is built off something, saying acquisitions don't count is ridiculous.

I'm confused how you'd classify anything a great success, considering that every product on that list except for their most recent (Google TV) has millions of active users.

You act like acquisitions and building on others' work means that Google didn't play a significant role in development and success of those products. That's like saying OSX wasn't made by Apple because it was built on Unix, or that the iPod isn't considered an Apple product because they released just another MP3 player, or that Facebook was just another social networking site so they don't deserve any credit by not coming up with the original idea.

YouTube and Android were nice proof-of-concepts back before they became under the Google umbrella. Have you taken a look at what Android was like way back when? It barely resembles the modern product, because that's how much work and dedication Google put into the software.

Once Chrome was released the commits to the WebKit source quadrupled. WebKit was based off of KHTML. Google took something good and made it great.

You trying to downplay their accomplishments because they didn't write the very first line of each of their products in-house is childish.

you are missing the point. the article was only criticizing hiring process at google.

when google makes an acquisition, they'll also gain people who built that technology/product too. these people usually went through completely different hiring process and it's entirely possible that early employees who made let's say youtube, would probably never make it through those tricky interview questions at google...

heck, most startup founders here wouldn't make it into google through their standard interview process. then google ends up buying their companies for millions. go figure.

Who says that it's wrong to have a two-tiered hiring system: the standard "interview then hire" system (though done more rigorously---thus all the "how many golf balls in a schoolbus" questions); and the "let the market see how they do, then hire them at market value" startup acquisition approach. You can't have everyone at an organization as big as google go through the second process, so the first one fills out the engineering ranks.

Chat: uhhh, really?

Docs: fear of Microsoft

Calendar: uhhh, really?

Checkout: sucks

Youtube: Acq.

Android: Acq. but still sucks

Chrome: Awesome product.

Voice: haven't heard of it, and that's saying something.

TV: Also haven't heard of it (enough).

But, you left out one major thing, and what I think will be their saving grace (besides the obvious other 2):

Google App Engine: Getting Much Better!

I recently switched to Windows Live. Google sites is a joke. I can make a call with my computer using Google Voice but only through gMail. I can't use the Chrome Google Voice extension to do this. Things like this have made me give up on the Google.

Are you saying you switched to the MSFT competitor to Sites (if such a thing exists)? If so, what does it do better than Sites?

Disclaimer: I have a friend on the Sites team...if you could make your comment constructive I'd be willing to pass it along.

Microsoft doesn't have a sites competitor. I've had my own domain name for a while went to Sites. It's too hard to get things to work the way I want them too. Very unintuitive interface. My complaints:

1. I get 8 gigs of storage at my docs site. The problem, I can't let anyone with a link to a file view it unless I have a paid account. SkyDrive (Windows Live product) let's a user link to documents without others having to have a Windows Live account. It's a true online file storage system. SkyDrive has much more space. SkyDrive doesn't charge for the linking capability.

2. Sites doesn't give me the option of creating a file system and letting that be the root of my site. I'm not a programmer so I apologize if the technical terms are wrong. There is no index.html that I can edit as I want and then link to files in subfolders using relative links.

3. Google Voice. I like making calls from my laptop. They recently added this feature but it can only be done from Gmail. I can't do this with the Google Voice Chrome extension. I know that Live doesn't have a Voice option.

4. I don't like the interface of Google Docs. It's too unintuitive and too ugly. It's not a clean interface. Looks matter to users like me. If it isn't simple, clean, and visually pleasing then I'm not using it. I use Google as my search engine because it's not cluttered and easy to use. Bing looks like garbage to me.

5. Can't have multiple email address with my sites account. I address per user. To pay for sites costs $50 per user per year.

So I'm going to migrate to a paid hosting account and use Windows Live for my free email address. I don't have Office on my personal laptop and Windows Live Office is much better than Google Docs. There isn't a reason for me to use Sites anymore. Since I decided to quit Sites looked at other solutions.

This is one thing that a lot of companies don't understand. Once I'm used to a service I don't want to change. It's a pain. But if I get into a situation where I need to change things then I start looking at alternatives. Don't give users a reason to look for an alternative.

I have tremendous respect for what Google has done to the Computer Science community and the Programming community. From MapReduce to BigTable to Gooogle Files Systems to tools like Google Collections and GWT, they have contributed a lot to the community and made many of our lives simpler.

I use GMail exclusively for private communications. It just works. Period.

I love the Android system. It has bolstered my interest in smartphone development. And I think it is a good case study for VM developers and kernel developers.

Then there is Chrome, which is probably my favorite Google product right now.

tl;dr Thank you Google.

yes they have definitely become irrelevant and lack even a minor understanding about the value of technology what with the second most popular smartphone os, a video site with a paltry billion page views per day and the second most popular website. man I wanna be considered irrelevant too

Don't forget their dull and drab email with its pointless tags and terrible filtering options.

"they are going to find themselves being increasingly irrelevant in the tech space"

Go check out stuff on code.google.com, then tell me again if they're going to find themselves being increasingly irrelevant in the tech space in the next couple of years.

You see, everybody is talking about products like YouTube, Gmail and so on, and we may argue about how successful some of them are, but in the end, these are all end-user consumer products. Some of the finest things that Google has done, and for which I'm very grateful is stuff for developers, stuff like Guava (formerly Google Collections), WindowBuilder Pro (Ok, I know, they bought this one, then open sourced it), CodePro Analytix and so on... The point is, they have this great central point where you can find a whole lot of open source software, libraries etc. This is, as far as I'm concerned, they're greatest contribution, and a proof that they will definitely not become irrelevant any time soon.

Google has definitely been humbled by Twitter, Groupon, Facebook, etc. That said, they're still awesomely successful and useful. The point of the post, though, is about how Google is becoming less relevant/useful and I couldn't disagree more.

Pewpewarrows listed technologies. These are the ones I gladly depend and use at least once per week on:

Gmail (6+ accounts)

Docs

Cal

Contacts

Tasks

Picasa

Custom Search

Reader

Android

Chrome

Ad Manager (DFP)

Adwords

Analytics

Website Optimizer

Python (a bit of a stretch, but I use it because Google does...)

My life is just a lot better because of these bits of technology. Seriously. Lots better. So bummer about Groupon, but Google's rockin and super relevant.

Could it be Google was as surprised as everyone else about Groupon's revenues? During the rumors about Google's offer of $2 billion and then later $5 or $6 billion everyone was reporting Groupon at $500 million per year. After the deal was rejected people are reporting $2 _billion_ per year instead.

As far as innovation from their acquisitions, Google still has Dodgeball. Even without Dennis Crowley they must own something right? Couldn't Google put a few people to work reviving that project and have a social location app, probably tied into their existing Latitude/Maps infrastructure, to get into the check-in game? It seems like it could be possible to get value out of "failed" acquisitions, some of which were just a few years ahead of their time.

top line revenue vs. bottom line income (i.e. minus expenses, which include payouts to the merchants...)

I'd rather generally own a business making $5b/yr in profit on $10b/yr in revenue, vs. $0b/yr in profit on $30b/yr in revenue.

What is Google doing at the moment? Chrome and Android are under development, but I can't really see anything else on the horizon. Search results now have a somewhat annoying hover preview, but I am wondering what else is going on over there.

Yeah, but Chrome (browser + eventual OS) and Android consist of "the base for all non-server computing".

Besides active development on their dozens of profitable projects, the only big-name product on the horizon right now is Chrome OS and their social solution the press have nicknamed Google Me.

This isn't unusual around the turn of the year though. They typically announce their upcoming products during all the springtime conferences, especially I/O.

GoogleTV was just released. If it succeeds at doing for television what Android did for phone, it's kind of a big deal.

I got Logitech Revue (GoogleTV) a week ago through the Google developer program and I've been playing with it, trying to imagine how this is all going to fit together. It's a bit bleeding-edge now but it could easily take off if they can just push out enough updates and introduce the App Store to it.

Google is a software monopoly at this point anyway. they wont go away even if you want them to.. they run your phone now!

Google is the executor of current internet innovation. although i use all their products because they are free and work. So i guess I'm the hypocrite

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