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Comment by abledon | Hacker News Reader

Amazon has PrimeVideo, BlueOrigin, Trucking Fleets etc... so diverse. What is google doing with all the cash its sitting on? Is Waymo their only bet? They definitely aren't innovating with youtube, 3rd rate copycat features like 'shorts' etc... poor livestreaming/chat design. Maybe they'll just end up buying rocketlab for their space project ...

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc#Structure

Went over the list of new (consumer facing) products from Google from the last decade that actually got somewhere and concluded that Google Cast and Chromebooks are close to the only one (I may have missed some, but there can't be many). Nothing that compares to Gmail, search, etc.

Additionally, their existing services are getting worse and worse. YouTube is a mess, requiring at least an ad-blocker, and preferably also an extension like Unhook[1] . Google search requires a site blocker to prevent ads and spam domains from dominating the results.

Instead of furthering the development of good products it appears that the culture is focusing on creating new products to get a promotion just to let it die before it gains momentum (see https://killedbygoogle.com/).

If Google is still part of the FAANG (or is it MAANG now) accronym at the end of the decade I'll eat my top hat (I don't have one but I'll buy one just for this).

[1]: https://unhook.app/

To be fair, it looks like Meta and Netflix are in a lot of trouble too.

Netflix has always been in trouble and has never been cashflow positive once they started making content. Problem is now we're in a recession and the free money has run out. Swimming naked when the tide goes out and all that...

Google has lacked product leadership since Sergey Brin and Larry Page left. Since the early-2010's Google has suffered enormous management bloat and exclusively taken a quarterly profit focus.

Always wondered why Larry and Sergey ran for the exits, I assume they had their kids threatened by a TLA and quietly cashed out. I assume it has something to do with the Snowden revelations that their inter-datacenter links were unencrypted on purpose.

Blue Origin is not part of Amazon.

Ok technically yes, but their IP is probably shared.

For instance, Elon Musk has mentioned the Materials Science team he has works for all 3 companies Tesla,SpaceX,BoringCompany etc...

There are close Google <=> SpaceX links too... The Starlink backbone network uses Google Cloud features that appear custom built/aren't available even to big customers. Nearly all Tesla tech seems built on top of Google tech - for example they use various private maps API's for the in-car map display. And everything is built on top of protocol buffers, google's in-house RPC/serialization format.

Protocol buffers have been public for 10+ years (since 2008 according to Wikipedia). Given the mobility between tech companies, it's hardly surprising that the same ideas / solutions are reused across companies.

https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/4/19/15357290/juicero-400...

They're spending it on feeding their engineers with free food and massages.

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