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Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

Google is only good at search. The only reason why I use everything else they create is because of their massive distribution, market penetration and inter-operability.

Thankfully there are solid alternatives in certain areas like fore example using iPhone instead of Android.

But for everything else I don't see a massive migration happening any time soon. Notion, Hey.com, DuckDuckGo are all niche products. My dad has Gmail and I can assure that's going to be the case for ever. He is never going to find out what Hey.com is. Even if he does he is not even going to consider it.

Google didn't blew a ten-year lead on anything.

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Disclaimer: used to work there, but not in security/domains.

The other thing I find Google to be good at is account/login security. A gaccount with 2fa is unlikely to be stolen by anything less than a targeted zeroday against the 2fa device; social engineering just doesn't work to the extent that there's a trope of people who have permanently lost access to their accounts because they changed phones, phone numbers, lost recovery codes, etc. Combine that with Domains and I think it's pretty unlikely to lose a domain name registered with them.

Sounds like they're also good at interoperability, market penetration, and distribution. Do you not think they're good at video streaming, security research, email, or cloud hosting?

I think you missed my point. Of course saying that they are only good at search is a catch-all statement. They are probably good at many things but their relevance is tied exclusively to their search product. Products like YouTube are what they are because of Google's search expertise.

Also let's not forget that AdWords either subsidizes or leverages everything that Google builds. So I would add that they are also great at selling ads.

I understood your point, I just think it's incorrect. For instance, I don't think search is even close to the hardest problem YouTube is solving. I would say that magically streaming a crazy volume of video at the best possible resolution is a pretty tough technical problem, and totally unrelated to search. Ditto security research for the most part, modulo some of the work TAG does on finding 0days in the wild.

This is a common trope about Google; they're only a search company, only an ad company. It's simply not the case.

Edit: if you wanted to make a broad sweeping statement, I would say that they're only good at hard technical challenges. That's why they succeeded at e.g. search and YouTube, and failed at chat and social.

I wouldn't say that's entirely true. IMHO BigQuery is their best product. A lot of GCP is really good.

For consumer products I completely agree. I use DuckDuckGo as my default, but I still find myself hitting !g a lot to find what I'm looking for.

Google maps is still pretty amazing. Maps and search are the only two Google products I still struggle to move away from.

(I am a big fan of Play Music too but of course they killed it.)

Yeah, I love google maps. It has saved me a ton of hours routing me around what I assume were multi-lane car crashes. Also, I really like exploring cities with their 3d maps and I've heard google earth VR is amazing which I want to try sometime.

Not to mention their push for the newest content to be the highest rated. It's really hard to find old content these days.

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