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Comment by sorenjan | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what your thoughts are on Sundar Pichai. Has Google created anything interesting under his leadership? I would put Cook above Pichai if I ranked top tech CEOs.

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Google hasn't had a major new product for a decade.

Prior to 2010: Search, Doubleclick, Maps, Mail, GSuite, AppEngine (which was first serverless platform). All of which were category makers or category killers.

Since 2010:

You are over-generous.

Android - Acquisition

Doubleclick - Acquisition

GSuite - Acquisition

AppEngine?? - Is that still around?

Google is indeed rudderless, but it's been mostly just milking their search cash cow for a long time.

Android was an acquisition but I believe it was completely rebuilt at Google. Pre-iPhone, it was a Blackberryish UI.

Who has?

We're still on Facebook and Twitter and Youtube, using iPhones to play digital music. You say 2020, I say 2009.

Wireless earbuds and smart watches I guess are the only "game changing" (they're not) inventions of note for the past decade?

Web... phone... computer... they're just more refined versions of products we had in 2009.

Well VR is a thing now for $300. And there is tiktok and snapchat as far as social media goes. Companies are slowly marching to deliver AR as a product too. Consumer drones are another thing along with cheap digital large sensor cameras, and once something like waymo and boom delivers, those would be revolutions of their own. Also solar is cheaper than coal now as an energy source, and complete DNA sequencing now costs $1000 vs $100’000. Electric cars are now something that the upper-middle class can own practically.

Am I the only that finds SM platforms like snapchat and tiktok infantile and vacuous? Say what you want about Facebook and Reddit, but in the right forums you can have thoughtful debates and discussions. I don't see TT and SC as anything but fads. TT is the same 10 or 15 takes on the same thing over and over and SC is just a 1 hit music star that somehow still lingers around.

tiktok good though. I like the community "clusters" the algorithm creates. Leads to a whole vareity of interesting content and stuff to watch explore

In fairness, Google Cloud Platform is a huge new product. GAE (which I love) was but a tiny drop compared to the vast ocean that is GCP today. And GCP is really a multitude of products.

Android was launched in 2008, although I think it really deserves to be in the post-2010 category. Today's Android is a whole different beast.

Google Home is a new product. And tied in with Home & Android is voice recognition, which is definitely post-2010. Voice recognition may not be a standalone product but it has radically changed how I interact with technology. It counts.

Google Hangouts launched in 2013. Google's whole messaging platform has become a muddled mess that they're only just now untangling, but hangouts video was a huge hit for a while.

Of course it's hard to top hits like Search, Gmail, GSuite, and Maps... but there's progress.

> Google Cloud Platform is a huge new product.

Does it define the category? Is Google Cloud 'the' cloud provider? "Just spin up a box on GCP" the default thing for people to do in tech?

> Today's Android is a whole different beast.

Is it? Android 4 (which was around that time) is pretty close to android as it is now.

> Google Home is a new product

And? Is it category defining like maps or Mail or GSuite, did it create something entirely new like GAE did for serverless? Is it the default home assistant? Do people outside tech even know the name 'Google Home'?

> hangouts video was a huge hit for a while

And now it's close to dead. Never reached the heights of Skype or Zoom.

None of these products are category defining.

You seem to be moving the goalpost? "major new product" is a far cry from "defining the category".

That said, Google's voice recognition does "define the category". My iPhone-using friends barely use voice recognition.

GCP is nowhere near Azure or AWS, either in terms of functionality, or in terms of support. GCP cannot compete at all with those two for enterprise customers, since a.) lack of functionality and risk of closure and b.) the big customers have already been locked in. Of all the GCP customers I've heard of, the only big one is Spotify, while the landscape is largely dominated by independent devs.

Waymo

Is a project, not a product.

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