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Comment by badestrand | Hacker News Reader

This is objectively false as they have developed many of the most successful products on this planet. There are hundred of web mail products but gmail is the best. Google Maps is the best in class, other great products are Google Earth, Analytics, YouTube, Cloud, Android and many more.

Yes, you can find flaws in any of those but it's also hard to find better products in the same category. Google is not in any way "terrible at building products", they are one of the best companies in the whole world in building products.

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Android wasn't built by Google. It was the result of an acquisition. Same with YouTube. Same with Google Earth. Heck, even Google Docs was the result of them acquiring Writely.

Maybe it's more accurate to say that Google are one of the best companies in the world at buying products.

Yeah, except one counterfactual scenario: Andy Rubin actually tried to sell Android to Samsung. Let's assume the deal was made; do you really think Android would grow into this dominant position at Samsung's hands? I know Samsung very well and I am 99.9% sure that it will be a miserable failure.

All those acquired products were nearly non-existent compared to post-Google era. The founders may deserve some credits, but it's mostly Google's job that bring them into the real products. Let us not be that idea guy; what really matters to success is execution.

EDIT: typo

off topic question: what’s the idea behind “EDIT: typo”? HN doesn't indicate in any way that your post has been edited and certainly you’re not changing the meaning in a tangible way warranting the etiquette. Nobody is going to fault you for fixing a typo.

IIRC if you edit after a certain period of time, HN marks your post with an asterisk to indicate that it's been edited.

You're assuming that those products weren't capable of reaching scale without Google's intervention. By that logic, Bill Gates should have sold Microsoft to IBM, because that is the only way Windows would have ever reached scale.

Google was willing to pay the most. This means it was more confident than anyone else of being able to scale the products.

I'd argue that indeed, many of these acquired companies could not reach scale w/o Google. Consider Youtube which was burning millions on hosting and always on the verge of bankruptcy if they couldnt raise more funding.

Add in a company that can fund operations, provide user flow, provide a pool of advertisers, real compensation to engineers, and you have a real success.

I give Google a lot of kudos on this.

Do we really want another SUN Microsystems happenning?

> By that logic, Bill Gates should have sold Microsoft to IBM

False analogy, because:

- Software provides the most utility, not the hardware, which is why IBM needed Microsoft more than vice versa, and why Android wouldn't have been nearly as much of a success if they'd been absorbed into a single phone hardware company.

- Google in 2005-2010 was a very different company to IBM in 1980; i.e., much more innovative, fast-moving and highly motivated to grow fast to rival the iPhone.

> do you really think Android would grow into this dominant position at Samsung's hands? I know Samsung very well and I am 99.9% sure that it will be a miserable failure.

And maybe that would have been for the best. If we look, within a year of the HTC Dream (G1, First commercial Android phone) Nokia released the N900, an amazing device running real Linux.

We could have had Maemo instead of Android.

Buying a company and making it successful is a huge tasks that is often bungled by many companies. Look at the graveyard of M&A by Yahoo. Now contrast that to Google's spectacular M&A record -- YouTube, Google Sheets, Google Analytics, etc.

Gmail is by far not the best mail system - in enterprise settings it's possible the worst actually. Its cluttered, threads are unreadable, tiny window by default to write a message... maybe it was hip 16 years ago, but that's past. Because of all these things I'm not even using it in private setting either.

YouTube is full with ads and fake comments including spam.

I agree with the parent post that Google products benefited most from being first or being acquisitions - it's like Microsoft early 2000s or so.

They have a handful of truly wonderful products, but for everything good you just listed, there's at least 2-3 things that have been shuttered because they were poorly executed, or are currently struggling (Google Cloud). Android is hardly a product either, the Pixel 4 is a product, but Android is an avenue to sell apps on their app store and integrate their data gathering services for targeted advertising, and they didn't even build it. Google didn't build YouTube, it was already the largest video sharing platform in the world when they bought it. Analytics is probably good, I haven't used it.

> gmail is the best

That's a very subjective statement. I don't think gmail is the best webmail out there, but it's certainly one of them. It's also one of the oldest. It also adds the contents of all your emails to their profiling service.

I stand by my statement that Google is terrible at building products, they've only built half of the things you listed and bought the rest. One of them could barely be counted as a success (Cloud), and another isn't a product (Android)

Youtube and Android were acquired by Google, and there are definitely other products that are also the result of an acquisition.

youtube android and earth are acquisitions, Cloud is nothing compared to its competition, GMail is almost 2 decades old.

In the last decade, I can't remember a single innovative google original product, or some copy-cat product that is better than the competition

> Cloud is nothing compared to its competition

I've been working with GCP a lot during the last two years, and I think the experience is actually quite a bit better than people generally assume or adoption numbers suggest. It's probably not a great fit for large companies with really big engineering departments building really complex systems, but getting started on GCP as a small to medium org is a breeze, products at different levels of abstraction complement each other well (so it's easy to grow) and everything seems to be built to be minimum hassle and require a lot less fiddling by an engineer to get going than the corresponding AWS product. Much better web console than AWS, great K8S offering, BigQuery can do machine learning nowadays, which is actually usable for simple tasks. Everything has lots of sane defaults, it's usually only a couple of clicks to spin up pretty much any resource; in AWS this tends to be a huge pain.

Although, if you're in the EU and bound to a strict interpretation of GDPR, then your experience is going to be absolutely miserable, because there's no way to actually restrict data to stay within the EU for the vast majority of products. A lot of the serverless products has something like "data may be processed in US West or global" hidden in their docs (which legal tells me is a big no-no), and while you can set allowed regions, even BigQuery violates that silently, so that's useless and dangerous as well.

So if they were to get better at selling what they have (which they really, really suck at; we're using them not because, but in spite of, their sales efforts) and maybe discover Europe one day, then it'll be a very strong contender for AWS/Azure.

Borg/Kubernetes?

They haven't developed one for quite a while now.

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