Also, how does Google want people to use their new services if they keep closing them down after their "failure" (a.k.a Google completely forgeting about them and proceeding to close them down).
Remember when the person who created homebrew couldn't get a job at google. That person created software used by a lot of people. He saw something that "needed fixing" and he fixed it. He fixed it so well a bunch of other people started using his fix. That's a wonderful engineer. Created a project used (and loved?) by many people. That's the kind of person you want helping to create products at your company.
Google puts so much emphasis on (coding) skills that aren't needed for the majority of the work done, and doesn't emphasize selecting for the ability to create things that people want to use. I also find the coding skills selection kind of amusing since they had to create a simplified programming language (Go) because so many of their 'leet coding new graduates couldn't handle C++ correctly. Perhaps being able to 'leet code in your sleep doesn't really make you a "wonderful" engineer either.
Product Managers are the modern day bureaucrats created to reduce the individual impact on product and make PMs hot swappable like engineers (who I also think are better when they they have the aforementioned skills).
Google should be considered in object lesson in the problems of trying to bureaucratize product creation.
Truly great products e.g. the original iPhone, rarely have PMs
They have their place in the org, but I don't see much creativity from them.
In regards to engineering, the quality of engineering is largely overrated and isn't even that well understood in the first place. Most systems are poorly engineered, and many engineering teams are inefficient, not because of the years of experience of the engineers or even so much their talent but because of bad management. Senior and lead engineers can massage a junior writing l33t code into only submitting PRs that are competently written. But if management gives engineering lip service while undermining their ability to write quality code, and the engineers who actually care end up leaving as a result, then all you're going to get is endless duct-taping and half-assed projects. Worse yet, you get almost nothing but makework projects that go nowhere because project manager #8,592 needs to look important to save their job.
The problem is that companies get really good at solving yesterday's problems. In Intel's case, that was making great CPUs for desktop PCs and servers. I have no doubt that the absolute pinnacle of desktop PC CPU engineering, was done at Intel in the last ~10 years.
The problem is, the world changes. Growth shifts from PC to mobile. People in datacenters start worrying more about cost and energy efficiency and build their own ARM parts. The landscape shifts, and the company is still fighting yesterday's battle. But it doesn't matter anymore-the basis of competition has shifted.
I think it's very difficult to pivot a company's core "basis of competition", or as you've elegantly put it, "self-image". What are we best at? Why are people getting promoted? Who's in leadership roles? The answers to these things need to shift over time, but most companies can't. This is why companies rise and fall.
I think a big problem with Google overall, is that their self-image isn't really customer-oriented. It's more inward-looking, "we're great engineers", "we're not evil", "we build the best distributed systems". The meta lesson is perhaps, orientation around serving your customers is the only thing you can fix, long-term. Amazon gets this. The problem is, it's way more nebulous and hard to pin down, than some of the more specific things Google has anchored on for the past years.
For Amazon (at least in the classic retail sense), the customer is clear and obvious: the person buying a thing from your website, who wants good-selection, cheap and fast/delivered to their door. It's relatively easy to orient your entire company around the question of: "but is this actually good for The Customer?" That is, until you feel you've established your business model well enough, that you no longer need to focus on creating customer value, and instead turn towards growing your business value (i.e. the shift of 3p sellers going from "gee this is a cool way to expand selection for customers beyond what Amazon 1p offers by itself", into "wow this is just a cesspool for fakes and fraud, but who cares since they all pay fees to Amazon").
For Google, with the nature of the search business and the fact that it is their primary cash cow, the incentives are "mixed" to put it mildly. The true customer of Google is not the users, but the advertisers. The users are simply an ingredient to be fed into the advertising engine -- any decisions you make to benefit the user, are only from the perspective of, not pissing them off so much that they leave your platform (and even that, is a sliding scale depending on the viability of alternatives -- Bing along wasn't very viable, but Bing + ChatGPT might be...).
In a twisted way, maybe comparing Google to Amazon is more like this:
- G's search users = A's warehouse workers
- G's advertisers = A's shoppers
How well does Amazon treat its warehouse workers? Only as well as needed to achieve 2 goals: not break employment laws too egregiously, and not churn through the entire employable labor pool too quickly.
Wtf is Google doing? They don’t make good products and they don’t invent that much useful stuff. They’re like the rich kid with a bunch of money trying random different things without focusing on one thing to get good at it.
I’m sure at this point Google is just a system to finally pay engineers a lot of money so they can retire earlier. Everyone that I’ve ever known that wants to work for Google is doing it to cash out, myself included.
Had Intel maintained its competency in designing and manufacturing CPUs, their situation would have been much better.
They surrendered the process technology lead to TSMC, and let Apple make far superior laptop CPUs without a good response for years.
They failed in what was supposed to be their core competency.
And, of course, in anything outside CPUs and Chipset, Intel is comically bad.
There is a lot of stuff that you see come out of google and you have to wonder. Why is this successful in this environment? They have a lot of people that I would say it's fair to claim they're high IQ, but low on experience and the ability to build something wonderful. (Which is why it's frustrating to see their arch [and AWS for the matter] build weird components and force their practices in the industry)
What would be great to see.. foster an engineering culture based on experience there. Encourage their engineers to contribute to the world. (Rather than waiting and spinning out large projects like K8s)
Homebrew may be a wonderful product, but that doesn't make the creator a wonderful engineer. Useful things can be poorly created. And this is not to shit on either Homebrew or Max Howell. I personally do not know if Howell is a wonderful engineer or not. He's obviously competent enough to ship working software. That's not nothing.
And everyone has an idea on how to improve everything. Sometimes we're right, sometimes we're wrong. And even when we're right, it doesn't make us right all the time. You can't really select for "the ability to create things that people want to use". No one's track record is flawless. It's very nearly a crapshoot.
Basically, you're putting Howell on a pedestal, in much the same manner you're accusing others of doing so with Google employees.
I think traveler01 does have a valid question. Essentially, with all of their engineers, why is Google so limited? And I don't think it's a matter of not being able to ship stuff that people use. Google Drive, GMail, etc. They just don't seem to be able to monetize beyond ads. Maybe their fault isn't in pure engineering.
And to be fair to the hiring process at Google at the time he interviewed, Google was an "all yes" kind of place. If anyone had any sort of hesitation, that could cause a candidate to be rejected. Their philosophy was that it was better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad one. So all he had to do was have one off hour, and that could have killed his entire interview. I personally don't think being rejected by Google's hiring committee is a mark against anyone. To get even that far requires a certain level of skill and/or talent.
Google's non-ads businesses are about $60 billion / year revenue. That seems like quite a lot!
To put it in context, that non-ads business would be in the top 20 for all tech companies by revenue. More than e.g. Oracle or Cisco. Roughly the same as IBM or HP. A bit smaller than Intel. Those are not small or unsuccessful companies (e.g. Oracle has 140k employees).
It actually seems pretty amazing that what HN thinks is Google's failed side hustle is comparable to the entire business of what would have been considered tech giants a few years ago.
But it is true that the vast bulk of their revenue does come from ads. So it gets complicated.
If you were to take away their non-ad revenue, Google would be fine-ish. If you were to take away their ad revenue, Google would be in serious trouble.
Compare with Microsoft. Their biggest revenue source is Cloud services. And that's only about a third of their total revenue. And it also includes "server products".
Why is Google unable to diversify to the level of Microsoft? The products are ostensibly there, they just can't make money from them. Or the only money they can make from them are by virtue of selling ads on them.
Microsoft already had diverse businesses 40 years ago, and have "just" needed to maintain that. They're now diverse by default as long as not too many of those existing lines of business fail. No matter how successful a new business of theirs is, it's really hard for it to grow fast enough to threaten that diversity.
Because it all pales in comparison to what actually powers Google: ads. To the point that there are persistent and growing rumours that GCP may be if not on the chopping block, but greatly de-prioritised (it's part of the 26-billion Google Cloud).
It's also weird to me that people always look at revenue only. As if net income doesn't matter.
For example [1], non-ad business may have brought in 60 billion in revenue, but what it is I see: "The increase in other cost of revenues from 2021 to 2022 was primarily due to increases in data center costs and other operations costs as well as hardware costs." And that cost is 77 billion.
Guess what Google's the non-ad businesses are: "Google other revenues increased ... from 2021 to 2022 primarily driven by growth in YouTube non- advertising and hardware revenues", "Google Cloud's infrastructure and platform services were the largest drivers of growth in Google Cloud Platform."
So a large chunk of that revenue is eaten by the costs of generating that revenue. Google cloud lost 3 billion, other bets lost 6 billion etc.
Meanwhile all other costs of revenue are a 49 billion, compared to over 200 billion in revenue from ads.
So how do those businesses inderectly depend on ads? Ads business subsidises them. Despite the size of those other businesses very few, if any, are successful (as in: actually earn money).
[1] All quotes and numbers from Google's own 10-K: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20230203_alphabet_10K.pd...
It's just that they aren't building things that people want to use, but that's a failure of management and incentives.
I even recall watching some comments of sad people who would need another gaming streaming service because they used Stadia for their gaming needs. It was a ridiculous decision that nobody understood why. They also screwed up game devs who were porting their games to Stadia, which will for sure have repercusions in future services.
That tree reverse meme?
he made it up
Go is a great first-class language on its own merits.
I have a slightly different answer than most of the other replies, which is that Google just got too big. I worked there for 10 years (left a year ago for a smaller company) and the amount of inefficiency and waste due to having too many layers of middle management with no real visibility into what was going on was just astounding. Over that decade they paid me millions of dollars in total, while canceling whatever I was working on almost exactly every 18 months like clockwork. Typically due to management issues or corporate politics rather than for any real technical or business reason.
Or if they did internally, why the Board decided to ignore the most loyal and proven.
Googler #1 to #1000 were clearly not fools, and by the 2010s they very likely had enough credibility to be taken seriously if several dozen of them said this.
this is beyond the plane of rationality and the social forces take on a life of their own. it's not a math problem.
Yes I have actually, several times.
It's not easy, and of course it gets exponentially harder as the group grow, but these folks also have access to exponentially greater resources and exponentially greater motivation to do so. (Assuming their desire is to remain loyal shareholders of the company for the long term)
Hmm this sounds like the concern was badly communicated because this phrasing is both unnecessary and not quite correct either. (since it is possible to keep recruiting to a very high standard even during exponential growth via spending exponentially more resources)
The straightforward logic of:
linear increase in organization size = exponential increase in organization complexity = exponential frictional losses
would have been much clearer.
Since when? You're assuming the pool of employees available to recruit is infinite which is clearly not true.
It will breakdown if the company wants to run multiple Manhattan Projects simultaneously, but anything short of that is technically possible.
I claimed it's technically possible with 'exponentially more resources', not that any private organization could feasibly possess the resources or cachet to, in practice, hire a million top notch people.
Maintaining the literal same average quality with Googler #1001 to #10000 would probably have required spending 10x more per hire, compared to hiring #1 to #1000.
Google is supposed to be a technical firebrand and their cloud isn't dominant, and their AI product and market position got punk'd by Microsoft... and he's out there saying things like AI will be a bigger discovery than fire. Which calls into question: so why isn't Google a leader in AI, or seem to be?
It's a bad PR thread for Google, and he lacked any Q factor in those interview clips.
That's putting it mildly
> He shouldn’t be doing interviews
He should not be running Google at all, period.
those times are gone though and Google definitely needs someone more proactive and focused
They used to be, but they haven't been that for a long, long time.
I wouldn't want somebody to give presentations as a head of Google. On the contrary, I hate when people produce vapor.
Microsoft bought their AI solution. We will see if they can successfully integrate it. I am not yet sure about that. I hardly call that innovation though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Why they still rely on search/advertising is well known - Replacing a 150 Billion $$$ source of revenue is not a simple thing.
Its like trying to replace everything ppl do in a midsized rich country with something else.
And compared to Facebook which is still 99% dependent on Ads, Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north of 250 billion). They have cloud, youtube, docs, google play, all the alphabet experiments etc. And most importantly half the worlds online advertising (exchanges/ auctions etc) uses Google ad tech. So Google is not going anywhere.
They just look at the world through a very different lens due to their size. I am guessing they dont see the point of keeping businesses that produce a few hundred million in revenue running, cause they really need businesses that produce a few hundred billion to keep all their free stuff (search, email, chat, chrome, android, video, r&d for other stuff etc) afloat.
Google could be in deep trouble in five years.
... not if it threatens their cash cow they won't. It's not a technical challenge, its a business model challenge
You just described The Innovators Dilemma. You'd hope Google, considering how everyone reveres how well run it is would find ways to avoid it, but they didn't not. You know who used to avoid the Innovators Dilemma amazingly well? Apple. You know who does it really well now? Microsoft. They literally killed their OS revenue to grow the company. That's the equivalent of Google killing their search revenue for something new. It's hard to do, but you have to do it in tech.
>>And compared to Facebook which is still 99% dependent on Ads, Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north of 250 billion). They have cloud, youtube, docs, google play, all the alphabet experiments etc.
In 2022, Google was 80%+ directly dependent on Ads for revenue, and 10.3% indirectly dependent on it. Sure, Google does a lot of things but 90.3% of the actual money that keeps the lights on is advertising. Their revenue mix is extremely similar to Meta.
People kind of dont realize a large chunk of their Ad Tech is not Search related. Its the tooling for the Publishers to sell ad real estate on their sites. Its the tooling for Advertisers to target that real estate based on data collected. Its the ad auctions. Its the ad exchanges. There is ton of shit of going on that no one on the planet is anywhere close to replicating.
I assume the 10.3% is "Google Other". That's things like YouTube Premium, Play Store and hardware. How is any of that even indirectly dependent on ads?
They've had a while now, and all they've come up with is Bard.
Over 80% of that revenue is still just ads though, not really very diversified. And even with GCP they are in a distant 3rd to AWS / Azure.
Do read their 10-K: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q4_alphabet_earnings...
The only thing that realistically brings in money is ads. All other things are just subsidised by them.
For example Google Cloud (which includes both GCP and workspace offerings aka docs)? Well, it lost 6 billion dollars.
> cause they really need businesses that produce a few hundred billion to keep all their free stuff
The only such business they have is ads.
It’s like the curse of oil. Google found a revenue stream early on that was so massive it covered up all their other sins. They dealt with their problems belatedly at best.
Now that revenue stream is under attack and they are scrambling. To put it politely.
I get the essence of the comment and agree somewhat, but also feel;
There are plenty of other areas driving big revenue like adsense, youtube, play store, cloud and pixel.
I dont feel its fair to compare revenue to these in the same level of search. Search was a true unicorn business and took over the world, there only so many businesses that will ever reach those heights. If any of these businesses were stand alone they would be impressive. Its like looking at that photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger standing next to Andre the Giant, Arnie is a big guy, but there he doesn't look too significant.
I think, the bigger worry is their chrun and burn is going to limit take-up of future products. They need to do something like run new products in a lab type environment, not put the full weight of the weight of the brand behind them til they earn reasonable thresholds, then make them so they can be split out if teams want to take them independent should they decide to close.
Amazon isn't doing all that well recently, though (check $AMZN). And I'd argue that the product design on their biggest product, the e-commerce bit, is terrible. I know so many people, me included, who no longer buy entire categories of goods on Amazon because you simply can't trust the quality/authenticity of the goods anymore.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this AI wave pushes azure into the forefront.
I don't follow that closely so I might have missed something.
YouTube is still estimated to be barely above break even, GCP is losing money and if you look at the estimated Pixel sells annually of around 5 million a year is about how many iPhones Apple sells in three weeks.
Good products come through refinement.
But every time you use most Google stuff, it feels like it’s still version 1. When compared to competitors’ products that they’ve been improving time after time, it just falls flat.
Because they lack product management at the executive level downwards. With no goals set for current and future products, the engineers downstairs are allowed to play....a little too much which means the company as a whole flounders.
I can generate huge revenues selling $100 bills for $95.
Microsoft is just an investor that got access to a product that OpenAI has been working on for the last 7 years. OpenAI has a single purpose and doesn't have to worry about displaying ads.
For example, the Nexus 5 (2013!) had a bug - if you took 7 photos in quick succession, it wouldn't save photo 3 and 4. For example, you're photographing someone doing a dance, and you want a photo on each beat, so you tap the shutter to the beat of the music.
On a 2022 Pixel 7, 10 years on...... The exact same bug.
Well yea, Google copied old-Microsoft's incentive structure of working on new features for promotions.
I get that people who rarely leave major cities are Google's favorite and most profitable user demographic, but there are still many millions of people outside of that group. Google can get away with sneering at them while they have a profitable monopoly, but once they breaks up they are in deep trouble. Their culture of half-baked and frequently shuttered projects is so ingrained at this point it's going to be enormously difficult to change.
Chrome and Gmail are homegrown but Maps, Youtube, Docs/Drive, the display ad business (ie DoubleClick) and Android are all acquisitions.
Think of it this way: if your ad business generates $100B/year, how do you justify spending billions on something that will generate a farction of that, particularly to start? How does that effort ever compete for resources internally?
And if you are successful it reaches a point where your two efforts can become competing interests.
The problem is all Google's products use the free-plus-advertising model and this has caused them to drift to serving the advertisers rather than serving the users. And that makes it hard to switch gears to offer more benefits to users.
The main problem is Google shifted from making search better for their users
For context, I worked at Google for ~4 years, and have also been at two other FAANGs, as well as done time at VC-funded startups. I'd like to think I have a good gamut of experiences to compare against both in the realm of smaller companies and massive megacorps.
Google's problems are (from most severe IMO to least severe):
- Poor senior management. Other posts touch on the middle-manager-heavy ranks of Google, but IMO that misses the forest for the trees. A bloated middle management layer is but a symptom of a sclerotic upper management. To add some color to this:
- Google has a fundamental ethos that I haven't seen described in other writings and lacks a good term for it. In my head I call it the hypothesis of the free-range engineer. The foundational belief is that upper management's job is to get out of the way of the top talent they've hired. Product ideas should come from the bottom of the company - and even more importantly, they should succeed through intra-company competition. This is probably the singular most impactful organizational cultural belief at Google, and it informs how the entire company is structured. My position: the entire hypothesis is crap, and is a huge part of what holds the company back.
- The net result of Google's culture is that upper management sets very little product direction, in favor of letting individual teams set their own priorities and ship independently. This means a lot of duplicative products and a lot of products that don't integrate with each other (see: Workspace account sign-in and... literally everything). Upper management has a light touch and is extremely loathe to mandate standards, resulting in a really mind-blowing level of product fragmentation. Much of this seems to be a deathly allergy that the company developed after the total and utter failure of Google+, where upper management did exert direct influence over product. The lesson they took from G+'s failure wasn't "have a better top-down product strategy next time" and was instead "top-down product strategy bad".
- Upper management turnover is excessive. All big companies suffer from re-orgs, but Google practically makes re-orgs a sport. In addition to upper management being extremely loathe to give product direction, upper management (by this I mean Director-and-up) rotates alarmingly often, and each time it's accompanied with a re-org where projects are killed or deprioritized. I don't think in my entire time at Google I ever saw a multi-year roadmap actually executed to completion - each and every time some senior leader is replaced and the entire roadmap and strategy rewritten.
- Google has poor product strategy overall. The company tends to swing for a lot of home-runs but structures these endeavors poorly. There are a lot of ambitious PMs advocating for huge multi-year megaprojects that end up being total failures. Upper management is credulous and doesn't demand proof of viability prior to sinking a ton of resources over multiple years into a thing (this feeds the turnover problem above - where inevitably when a multi-year thing flops heads roll, when the real problem is that upper management did not exert scrutiny over the project sooner). Big, ambitious goals are good - but viability needs to be validated quickly and continuously throughout the development process so that requirements can change (and yes, so that the project can be killed expediently if the fundamentals aren't there). Again, a failure of Google's upper management.
- Continuing on that theme, Google's upper management is naive and credulous when it comes to product forecasts. PMs seeking to have their projects approved (especially big megaprojects) will make up absolutely bonkers projections for fundamental success metrics, and are often not seriously challenged on them. Senior leadership is ready to believe numbers that are facially absurd, and then are surprised when the product fails to live up to the unrealistic expectations. This phenomenon also drives the turnover/re-org problem above - since when the product whiffs the metrics by a mile somebody has to get the boot - but the real problem was believing the bad projections to begin with!
- Promotion-driven development is a problem. But unlike most prognostications about Google I don't think it's their main problem. Leadership is at the core of Google's problems and promo-driven development is just an exacerbating factor IMO. But there is a serious problem with how Google structures incentives for ICs and middle management. The biggest concrete effect of this is that after launching, engineering teams empty out rapidly as people sense that no promos are forthcoming for working on the product, and look for greener pastures. This exacerbates the effects from above, where -- through an array of leadership failures -- the product was already on thin ice. The collapse of the engineering teams on it further buries the product and sends it on a death spiral.
Anyway, this is already running way too long. At this point I think there needs to be a fundamental change to how Google pursues product if they hope to turn this boat around.
I wouldn't say so; I mean they like to experiment a lot but their product strategy is good in the long term e.g. Google Search, Google Mail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Chrome, Android etc. If 5 experiments fail and 1 succeeds and brings billions of dollars in revenue that's win in their book and in my book too.
Basically what Google is doing is building its family of apps to capture more attention and sell more ads. The same thing Facebook does with its family of apps e.g. Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. The goal is to capture as much attention as they can and then sell ads because that's what their business model is all about. Zuck even tried to acquire Twitter back in the day plus Snapchat as well. I doubt he liked the products or the people behind it, he just wanted to get rid of competition which was stealing attention or screen time from his family of apps. The same thing is with Google, that's why they are constantly pushing new apps and services (to gain market share and user attention and then to push ads).
This is a vindication of Google's M&A department and an indictment of Google's actual product orgs. Out of this list of 6 major Earth-shaking products only 3 came from Google itself. YouTube, Android, and Maps were all acquisitions.
And of the homegrown successes the last one of note (Chrome) was released 15 years ago. In other words: Google has been completely unable to produce a mega-hit product for 15 years by itself.
> "If 5 experiments fail and 1 succeeds and brings billions of dollars in revenue that's win in their book and in my book too."
Yes, and this is how all other tech companies operate as well, the problem is that Google experiments incompetently.
Take for example the recent and total failure of Stadia - they sunk truckloads of money into developing the underlying technology, which is legitimately impressive. And then they slapped a substandard (let's be honest, less than substandard) go-to-market strategy around it. And after it predictably floundered they walked away from the thing entirely.
Meanwhile on the other side of the fence Microsoft developed basically the same product, but with a better go-to-market strategy has now carved out a niche for themselves in streaming gaming.
Both companies experimented, one got the product to stick, the other flailed around before declaring the experiment a failure - even though within the competitive landscape it was obviously viable.
Or for something more currently topical - Google literally invented LLMs but failed to productize it. They put in the money and failed to get the result where another company did.
The list goes on and on. The claims of "see what sticks" is a superficial mantra and its practitioners often forget that how you go about experimentation affects your odds of success. Google has IMO one of the worst experimentation processes (or really just what other companies call product strategy) in BigTech.
Google has taken the notion that you can swing at multiple balls that are tossed your way and generalized it to mean that one doesn't have to be any good at hitting the ball, because given a sufficient large N pitches you're gonna get a hit anyway. This is poor business strategy and it's showing.
They tried to compete with YouTube, it didn't work out but hey we have deep pocket, let's buy them. Successful investment because they bought YouTube for $2bn and last year YouTube generated $30bn in revenue. All done and lifted to sky by Google. Android was pre-emptive acquisition against Microsoft and its mobile Windows OS and its search engine Bing. Today Android is the most used OS in the world and it comes with Google apps preinstalled. Also all done by Google because as far as I understood, they built modern Android OS from the ground up with the Linux kernel ofc. I'm not sure about Maps but I bet there was also some long term vision/strategy there as well. You don't have to innovate all the time if you have strong core business and deep pocket for acquisitions, innovation happens elsewhere.
Also turning acquisitions into successful businesses and money making machines is a difficult task. Not every company can do it and some companies even go bankrupt because of acquisitions that gone bad.
>Take for example the recent and total failure of Stadia - they sunk truckloads of money into developing the underlying technology, which is legitimately impressive. And then they slapped a substandard (let's be honest, less than substandard) go-to-market strategy around it. And after it predictably floundered they walked away from the thing entirely.
Stadia was too early in the game, something like Altavista to Google. Cloud gaming market needs to mature and eventually some successful cloud gaming company will pop up. I also don't think they really cared that much about cloud gaming because let's be honest they jumped on the bandwagon of cloud gaming just like they are jumping now on LLMs hype.
>Or for something more currently topical - Google literally invented LLMs but failed to productize it. They put in the money and failed to get the result where another company did.
Too early to judge. We will see in the next couple of years.
Technology is not a product. A product that uses technology to solve a number of clearly defined real problems is a product. When Google was saying AI this AI that, I had yet to see any product.