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Comment by kingcobraninja | Hacker News Reader

When I (the consumer) think of successful Google products, I think of search, email, maps, productivity (docs, sheets, drive), Android, and Chromecast. Which of those launched under the current CEO?

I'm sure I'm missing another success story, but really, when was the last time Google hit a home run?

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It's probably not helping that most of their newer products get relaunched/branded and splintered so frequently leading to consumer confusion; for example, Android Pay -> Google Wallet -> Google Pay -> Google Pay and Wallet.

I'm looking forward to Pixel Purse and its successor G-Billfold.

Seriously, this example perfectly illustrates Google at its worst.

Or the evergreen GoogleTV -> AndroidTV -> GoogleTV.

Or Hangouts (the massively online public video space) -> Hangouts (the chat app inside GMail) -> Hangouts (the private videoconfering app) -> Google Meet.

> Android Pay -> Google Wallet -> Google Pay -> Google Pay and Wallet

These all sound like the same thing. If they are different, then I guess it would be confusing.

That's the point.. Google either rebuilds or rebrands a lot of their stuff way to frequently.

I mean this as a genuine question-- what new successful projects have Amazon or Apple produced since 2015?

I'm not a defender of Google, but my sense has always been that tech generally slowed around that time. Would like to know if I'm missing something

Your second point is probably right, but in Apple's defense, they launched:

Apple M1 Apple Watch Airpods Their streaming service

With Apple, definitely Apple Watch, they also leaned into Apple specific services with lots of success. Apple TV+ started a little shaky but its growing at a good clip. The new Apple TV's have been pretty successful.

Apple also shipped the M series chips, revitalized the Mac line as a result, and been giving proper attention to the iPad, finally.

Amazon has been innovating in logistics and Alexa is (was?) a genuine innovation when it came out. I think, ironically, AWS lacks a lot of innovation to pivot to more user friendliness and understand-ability, but its its still growing strong.

Google has been more flatfooted by comparison, with more product closures than successful projects, period, let alone hits.

And Apple AirPods, launched in 2016 and now a $20B business.

Amazon ads - from 0 to a multi tens of billion $ business at probably a 80% margin. The reason your Amazon results are probably awful today is precisely this.

Amazon also has a more decent content strategy (eg why they bid on the NFL rights) than both Apple and Google.

M1/M2 chips

Moving to a completely different architecture is a big deal, launching their own architecture is an even bigger one. I am astonished at how readily it was accepted, how well it seems to have delivered (I don't own any of their newer products yet), and how smooth the transition seems to have been for OS users and software vendors.

It's a huge deal, far more interesting than individual products like the watch or earbuds (successful though those are, they're not paradigm shifts).

AWS has added hundreds of products - they even arguably have a better hosted Kubernetes than Google Cloud does. I suspect AWS Aurora alone makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year as well.

Chromecast came from Pichai's era - Maybe before he became CEO, but he had had broad authority even then. Not claiming he's a hit maker, just dropping a trivia.

Android, acquisition Productivity apps, acquisition Maps, acquisition YouTube, acquisition

Where’s google latest acquisition and what happened to their M&A arm?

Calling Android an "acquisition" is really overblown. What Google bought was a handful of employees and a 3000 line JavaScript demo. There was no "Android" OS when Google bought them.

source: Androids: The Team that Built the Android Operating System

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