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Comment by hi5eyes | Hacker News Reader

“ The Best Minds of My Generation Are Thinking About How To Make People Click Ads”

It genuinely bothers me that the biggest name in tech is a massive advertising company that hasn't made a significant new product in a decade.

Just to let me know, you made me go through the Wikipedia article "List of Google products" to see if I could disprove you. I only see two things that I would count as "significant new products", Chrome OS (and hence, Chromebooks) and Google Assistant.

The other stuff they made in the 2010s is just carbon-copying other successful services (Drive), already discontinued (Inbox) or both (Google+).

Isn't Google Assistant just Google's Siri/Alexa? Though they might have improved the concept.

I was very tempted to count it as another carbon copy, but didn't want to discount the serious engineering effort that goes into developing an ML-based voice assistant.

Chromebooks are just Chrome running on Debian. They're not sufficiently more innovative than netbooks.

I thought it was Gentoo.

By a similar argument, the original iPhone was not particularly innovative. And Dropbox too is just a nice UI on top of FTP, right? :)

It's enough to make you want to howl!

ps. the good news, if there is any, is that those people are probably not the best minds of your generation.

What metrics decides the best minds and who designed those metrics? They may not be the best minds. In fact if they were maybe they would not be doing it in the first place.

Even if true, I'm sure the 'best minds' historically were often occupied by, say, justifying the existence of a God over exclusively dedicating their immense talents to fundamental scientific theory. We can excuse it, in some cases, I suppose.

It can of course be superficial, but perhaps "the best minds" as it applies in this context could be measured by salary, education level/cost of education (i.e. how many Ivy Leaguers work at said companies)

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