But you’re right, they need to take the burn for awhile until escape velocity. I think they did with YouTube in general until the ads money hit.
They’re also more geeky and not that creative of a company, nor do they really get design, so some of their blind spots can hurt them from time to time, although that’s separate from their AI issues which yes they have bungled their lead do to fears of the feds.
Interesting, that's essentially Dutch disease[1] for a corporation.
I'm guessing their OKR's go on the lines of building billion dollar businesses or nothing at all. And 'nothing at all' winning at the end.
At large companies, there are just so many costs associated with attention, management effort, and everything else even if an initiative is sort of run "as a startup."
Its strange because they look at something that makes $200 million an year and think I am better off making something that makes a $1 billion than $200 million. They now shut down the $200 million product, but never succeed building $1 billion product. Net result is after a while you are -$200 million.
Do this with a few products for a few years, you are now just a pie in the sky dream company with no real products and actively shutting down things that bring in money.
They are very aware Windows is nothing without the literal decades of software available for it.
Then when the hype didn't win the market in the first year, they didn't have the stamina to keep going like Microsoft did with the Xbox.
This is key to my current perception of Google. I don't get invested in any new Google product for the same reason I don't get invested in any new Netflix show, it's a coin flip whether they will cancel it while I'm in the middle of it.
Search, Gmail, Android and Maps are the only things I regularly use, all of which I'd be happy to replace with another offering, some of which I'm already starting to replace.
Really? All I remember is huge amounts of skepticism that Google would really commit to it, and as we know in the end they didn't.
MS used to have this trust problem too (remember windows 8?), but they’ve turned it around. I’m happy to use VSCode because I’m sure it will exist many years in the future. If there were a GoogleCode, would anybody use it, or would it be DOA for the same reasons as Stadia?
There was Google Code, a service that was similar to GitHub. Google Code was closed down on January 15, 2016 (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google_Developers...).
Google did at least one attempt of creating an IDE (I can not judge from the outside, though, how serious this attempt was): Google Collide
YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gq12bLbm54 (jump to 1:45 to see it in action).
Well, Google open-sourced it in 2012 (i.e. shot it down): https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google-open-sources/
A fork of Google Collide on GitHub (its last commit was from end of 2018, though): https://github.com/WeTheInternet/collide
Many of my friends and colleagues were so hyped about it that I kept reading about Stadia just to understand what I'm missing.
(well, it turns out I didn't miss anything)
But I was at the Google Next event when I think they announced Stadia and there were some serious gamer stars associated with it.
Nvidia beat them to it with GeForce Now, even offered it for free (in a perfectly functional as far as I could tell 'beta') for ages, and it is still available.
Facebook wasn’t just as dominant back then and Google could have had perfect integration with Android - but they didn’t, in the end it was just another isolated Google project left by the wayside.