Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

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Lotus 123, Borland and Wordperfect were at the top of the software world. They failed to make the transition to GUIs/Windows.

Microsoft missed the arrival of the web. Microsoft also missed the mobile revolution and ended up with zero mobile operating system market share.

Internet Explorer, having vanquished Netscape, declared "job done" and stopped developing the web browser further, only to be cast to irrelevance for its failure to advance and innovate. Much like Google search.

Kodak, Yahoo, Commodore, MySpace etc etc etc all missed the critical technology change that left their business behind.

Despite seeing the oncoming train, Google may be too arrogant, too internally political, too controlled by it's vast river of web advertising gold, to be willing or able to make the changes needed.

And it may be that Google simply cannot transition it's search over to becoming top dog in AI information seeking - it's possible that AI interfaces aren't a "winner take all" market like search is. If that turns out to be true then Google won't be finished but it will be diminished.

ChatGPT brings a laser focus that Google simply cannot.

It's possible Google's time has passed.

I remember distinctly when Google arrived how instantly old and out of date Altavista suddenly looked - that's how Google search looks now.

I was able to see LaMDA in action about 1.5 years ago. It was just as awe-inducing as ChatGPT. Google is not behind in this race. They're simply slower to roll out new functionality. And maybe rightly so? Some of the things I saw ChatGPT say would have been multi-day international bad headlines for Google, if a Google AI had said them instead of an upstart startup.

They should have had the courage to weather through that noise. Or do something like Microsoft and acquire after release. These are just excuses tbh

Acquire what after release?

The point GP is making is that Google's technology has been (at least to a non-expert) on-par with the external things. Why would they acquire something they already have?

My point was that this public relations issue could have been easily solved. A tech first company can easily get PR to solve it. That they didn't implies they they are past their prime. This is Xerox-Apple thing again

I still don't follow. "We should publish a harmful product when instead we could continue refining and instead publish a good product at the same time as everyone else" is a good strategy.

This is ultimately only an issue if you think Google's models are significantly worse (and that's related to the lack of public testing). That assumption doesn't seem justified.

Microsoft feels like an outlier on this list. They are thriving right now.

Also, there are still many categories of things that ChatGPT-like bots can't help with yet, such as shopping. I think we're still very early in this cycle. That doesn't mean Google will succeed, but it feels premature to be writing their obituary.

Very true. Although, as an aside since you brought it up: I will say shopping on Google has gotten far worse these days days with all the SEO optimized "top 10 best X" pages that are basically just affiliate link spam with extremely limited value / product testing / insight.

That's a fair point about shopping. I was more thinking that I end up googling things that then lead me to ecommerce sites and its unlikely that ChatGPT will replace that any time soon.

Windows, Office, and more recently Azure are big enough to make these failures survivable and give Microsoft more chances, but IE and Windows Mobile are textbook examples of complacency.

IE stood no chance against Google Chrome because just like Microsoft shoved down IE down the users' throats the same thing happened with Chrome and Google.

This is probably true, but I honestly wonder why. Windows is a commodity as far as I understand, which you can get for free with not-so-hidden tricks, which are also apparently approved by Microsoft themselves.

O365 etc. survive due to corporate inertia (Excel), but I wonder if growth stems from new customers vs. big, large customers growing and requiring more licenses while actively looking for replacements.

Azure is good, sure, but AWS is better (yeah, the console) and google will probably do anything to not go into irrelevance in this area, so they're stuck between a rock and a hard place.

I still have MS stock (with a large payoff atm), but I honestly wonder when it's time to sell.

Google was already next when they missed the social media boat.

That said, Microsoft is still the second most valuable company in the world a decade after missing out on mobile, so it doesn't really seem like a big deal.

I certainly didn't kill Microsoft, but it's tens of billions of dollars they didn't get. It's significant, even at Microsoft's scale.

There is also opportunity cost though. Maybe if they succeeded in mobile then they would have missed Teams. Its hard to say that the side effects from missing that wave were exclusively negative.

Quite the opposite. If they have owned mobile + desktop, they could have a much stronger integration, and we wouldn't be Google first with our apps.

Yeah that's a good point with regards to integration. I still think the Microsoft that wins in mobile looks very different from the Microsoft we know today.

Arguably Microsoft is actually well-placed to continually miss major advancements in areas they should be king in (or adjacent to them) and yet continue.

Using Teams as a not negative example is very odd.

They have crushed Slack with Teams and it is the backbone of their enterprise offering. Am I missing something?

I am referring to the near universal opinion that Teams is shit software that is only worth forcing employees to use because it is free.

And this is Google's core business. Nothing came along yet that replaced corporate use of microsoft office, and that is were they make most of their money.

How did they miss the boat when they have YouTube? I assume by 'social media' you mean "user-generated content that we can slap ads on".

Facebook doesn't make any money when people talk to each other, they make it when people click ads. Same goes for Google. "Social Media" is just another ad vector.

Google has YouTube.

It's a big deal. It's just that Microsoft has lots of other businesses. They could have had a billion dollar mobile business too, but they don't.

Crazy to say this about a company with a 5y CAGR of 25% at nearly 300b in yearly revenue. That more growth than Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and pretty much any other large tech company.

Google time has passed?

They still have 7-8 products with more than a billion monthly users.

If you go back and look at the company you listed. They die because they were poorly ran companies. Google isn't a poorly ran company.

Not a dog in this fight but an alternative to dying would be to become ibm (to be seen as irrelevant).

> Microsoft also missed the mobile revolution and ended up with zero mobile operating system market share.

OTOH, Google got scooped when in January 2007, Apple changed computing by launching the iPhone.

But, though it had not been announced, Google already had the Android project in progress, which pivoted to a more iPhone-like concept (full-device touchscreen, no keyboard) and ended up doing OK in the market.

Presumably you can see the parallel I'm trying to make with today's situation. Obviously it doesn't prove anything, but if we're looking at past history as a guide, this is something that also happened.

> and ended up doing OK in the market.

Thanks in no small part to Samsung. Google honestly would probably not have gone beyond their initial Blackberry-style design approach without the iPhone. And Samsung's Android flavour pushed hardware capabilities way past what Google provided out of the box.

> "Microsoft missed the arrival of the web."

How did Microsoft miss the arrival of the web and have the dominant web browser for years?

> "Microsoft also missed the mobile revolution and ended up with zero mobile operating system market share."

That's kind of disrespectful to the competitors who duked it out during the pre-iPhone phase of the mobile revolution. Microsoft competed with and defeated Palm Computing, the market leader, and others in the marketplace to become the top dog in PDAs and smartphones around the release of Windows Mobile 5 and 6. They didn't "miss" anything.

Apple, to their credit, managed to hit the right combination of timing and consumer appeal that they swept everyone away, Microsoft, Blackberry (remember them?), and what was left of Palm. The iPhone would probably have killed Palm even if they'd managed to fend of Microsoft.

>> How did Microsoft miss the arrival of the web and have the leading web browser for years?

That's a well known part of computing history. https://www.inc-aus.com/tess-townsend/what-bill-gates-got-wr...

The results of Google today really look like Altavista in 1999. I started using you.com, which looks like Google 10 years ago. You get actual non-SEO-optimized search results on the first page. I‘m sure that will change once more people use it, but at the moment I have a working search engine again.

Google should release whatever that ex-dev was going on about some sentient AI that Google has looked up.

I think Google has enough capital, brand recognition, and customer dependence, that they could get away with missing some of the AI hype train for now.

Same. switched to you.com since day and never looked back. Once in a while I’ll use DuckDuckGo for very specific queries.

Plenty of cases where you just want to type something in a search box and see a bunch of different options - like shopping. Let’s say you’re in the market for a keyboard. Would you ask ChatGPT what’s the best keyboard on the market right now, and just buy that? I wouldn’t. I want to see a few different options and I‘m not even someone who enjoys shopping. Where there’s a list of options to display, google will have plenty of room to throw their ads in. If anything Amazon is more of a threat to google, if all online shopping ends up there.

I can search for, find, and order virtually anything I want in less than a minute. Unless an AI is going to anticipate exactly what I need, order it for me, and have it delivered before I even think about it, I don’t see these two things competing much.

I would definitely ask ChatGPT what the best keyboards are, summarizing their strengths/weaknesses, and then use that as the starting point of my search.

Comparison shopping is a major PITA with current sites, clicking back-and-forth between various product pages and review sites, and trying to distill it down to a few relevant choices -- things that ChatGPT's excellent abilities at summarization could really help with.

I don’t consider it a major PITS, especially compared to physically driving to a store and buying it that way. It’s fun for a lot of people too. If a chat bot is going to recommend a few things, there’s opportunity for google to throw their ads in there. Or maybe they’ll just tax everyone and make advertisers pay a fee to be considered in the training set, then you don’t even know what’s an ad and what’s not.

"Microsoft also missed the mobile revolution"

I remember getting a Windows Mobile phone and loved it. Their UI (tiling etc was cool) was superior to iOS and Android at the time ( at least for me). I was sad to see them disappear.

Agreed on the trust part - at this point i would expect Bard to start incorporating ads into its responses as soon as they had any sort of market dominance (If it is even competitive enough to achieve that).

I feel like all the examples you give are actually counter examples to the thesis that Google will decline?

Like, those are all examples of companies which failed to adapt to some new reality. This announcement is Google seeing AI as the next thing and proactively engaging with it.

You forgot Nokia. They had touch screen prototype before Iphone but they thought world was not ready. When Android came they took too long to admit S60 is dead.

I agree and just want to add to your list, Intel missed the low power mobile processor market and may never even achieve a foothold.

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