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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Google search was 1998. Google Maps was 2005. Gmail was 2004. Android was 2008. Youtube was 2005. Chrome was 2008. Docs was 2006. Translate was 2006.

Yet in the last decade, they really haven't had many successes (perhaps with the exception of Google Photos - 2015)

One would imagine that with nearly 200,000 employees at least one of them would have a good enough idea for a new product people like. But management and culture, with 'more wood behind fewer arrows', is no longer conducive to the good ideas getting launched.

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This is a common meme, but it depends how you define "product". There are companies with millions in VC backing that would just be a feature on a Google (or other big tech company) product as most people define them.

I would argue that taking a product from 100m to 1bn users is a whole new level of success, and that has been done multiple times in the last decade.

Why should scaling matter? I thought google tried to solve problems regardless of scale? Or maybe youre commending google for its ability to more effectively commodify datacenter labour in the past decade?

I don't think we can expect businesses to solve problems without any business upside. I don't hold that against any company. That means needing some amount of scale in order to justify the work and opportunity cost.

'free' ad supported products usually have engineering costs greater than compute costs, even up to billions of users.

Compute scales with the userbase. Engineering scales with the product featureset. That means a small userbase in general cannot support much engineering and therefore cannot have much complexity/features if it wants to be profitable.

That in turn puts big companies at a massive advantage. And in fact we see that - the vast majority of my time using the web is spent on big products (google, youtube, reddit, twitter), and only a small fraction on small sites (perhaps HN being the one exception here). Those big products won the battle for my attention.

You have the wrong impression of Google Translate. Translate was started in 2006 and it sucked. 60% accuracy at best. Janky incoherent sentences. Translate revolutionized the entire field of language translation in 2016. Seriously. Went to 94% accuracy when Jeff Dean joined the project and spurred them to train against all languages at once. It revolutionized the whole research field of language translation. Translate is now better than most high school students after several years of study. I consider Translate to be one of the top-5 accomplishments that Google ever had:

https://translatepress.com/is-google-translate-correct/

Another breakthrough is picture recognition. Did you know you can type in "motorcycles" and do an image search and there is ZERO text associated with many of those pictures of motorcycles? They really are mapreducing those pictures and running image recognition against a 17M open-source image library to assess "motorcycle-ness" of all those pictures! They started talking about picture recognition in the early 2000's but it really began happening in the late 2010's after they hired fei fei li, the mother of image recognition ...

https://profiles.stanford.edu/fei-fei-li

Translate did not suck in 2006, it was a big leap over the competitors at the time. It was really the first time a company had launched productized statistical machine translation at all. Before that there was the Altavista Babelfish which was rules based.

Going neural definitely made a big difference but Translate was called "statml" by the infrastructure internally for years, maybe still is, because just using statistics and having training at all was a big deal back then.

If you compare the Android from 2008 and the Android from 2023 then you'd soon agree that within these 15 years, the whole thing was re-invented multiple times.

And I'm not talking the UX, which has already changed substantially, but I mean the underpinnings.

Sure. But as far as the user is concerned, it is much the same. Touchscreen apps, app store, camera, wifi and phone abilities, app switcher and back button. The user doesn't care that the wheel has been reinvented 3 times along the way... There hasn't been any revolutionary new features in android since shortly after launch really.

There have been revolutions in apps. For example, pre 2017 I couldn't just tap a button and get an Uber. Or tap a button and have food delivered. Or do a video call with all my friends.

But the OS can't really claim credit for most of that innovation.

> There hasn't been any revolutionary new features in android since shortly after launch really.

Not visibly. But the tech stack has changed substantially.

I'd find it quite an achievement if the UX has largely stayed the same while things under the hood got modernized over and over again and went with the times, subtly bringing innovations to the UX as well without people realizing. It's a feature that things don't look substantially different every two years.

Android Auto was 2015.

Hasn't really seen widespread acceptance. I bet a sample of 100 cars on the freeway, perhaps only 25% would have carplay or android auto connected in the USA, and outside the USA adoption is far lower.

Are you sure?

https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/05/23/carplay-android-a...

> A report from Straits Research found that 98% of newly produced vehicles were compatible with either CarPlay or Android Auto. Meanwhile, 80% of prospective car buyers strongly preferred having these smartphone-based infotainment systems in their new vehicles.

The same research also shows Asia-Pacific to be the biggest market for these products, though North America is the fastest-growing.

"connected" vs "compatible with"

Tbf. 25% connected is huge. If you just jump into your car to quickly do groceries or pick up your kids, you may not be interested in connecting your phone to your car, even if you really like that feature. So there could be a natural ceiling for the "connected" number and 25% feels getting close to that ceiling actually.

My older car requires a hardwire connection for Android Auto, but my newer car will automatically connect over wifi so I no longer need to take my phone out of my pocket unless I want to charge.

If 80% of buyers express a strong preference for having Carplay/Android Auto I don't think it's reasonable to say that they haven't seen "widespread acceptance."

I read that as "strong preference for having Carplay/Android Auto over the car manufacturers own UI".

And everyone is just frustrated with laggy UI's in cars. But in reality they'll probably still just use Waze with a 10 buck phoneholder suction-cupped onto the windscreen.

Why on earth would you do that instead of using Waze on the larger, built-in screen? Especially if you are a buyer who "strongly prefers" having that in the first place? Nobody is using that kind of holder on a car with Android Auto or Carplay.

Security-concious people like to keep the complexity low of things that are involved in their day-to-day activities. Having your car mingle with your phone is kinda the opposite of this.

I don't think this describes any significant portion of users.

Maybe, maybe not. But it describes an answer to your "why on earth" question.

People may have different preferences from yours.

The proposition in question is whether Android Auto/CarPlay is “widely accepted,” so implicitly what I’m being asked to believe is that there is a large portion of car buyers who strongly prefer a car that supports these features but then don’t actually want to use them because of security concerns. I think the idea is absurd on its face.

Not sure where you're being asked to believe that beyond a single thread contribution. I've argued your point earlier in this thread and agree that they are "widely accepted", so you may be barking up the wrong tree.

Nevertheless, some people prefer not to accept them while not being entirely anti-tech either. You may not be agreeing with choices other people make, but it goes a little far to call them "absurd on its face", don't you think?

This sounds like a result of how often cars are replaced. What if you stopped a sample of 100 cars released in the last five years? That proportion would be far higher. Pretty much every car review I watch mentions support for either or both.

Uber was founded in 2009, and pretty broadly available by 2014 Grubhub was founded in 2004, I was ordering from there all through college 2007-2011 Google actually put out hangouts in 2013, and Skype could do group calls in 2010

Not trying to downplay what happened after this: it was incremental change that made the products scale and be more usable to more people. I would say the things you describe as revolutions were actually evolutions of earlier products.

> Google search was 1998. Google Maps was 2005. Gmail was 2004. Android was 2008. Youtube was 2005. Chrome was 2008. Docs was 2006. > Yet in the last decade, they really haven't had many successes

I don't think this kind of analysis is really giving a good answer. I mean, by these standards, look what a disaster of a dinosaur legacy vendor Apple Computer is! Haven't had a successful product launch since the iPad 13 years ago! (Perhaps with the exception of Apple Watch - 2015).

> perhaps with the exception of Google Photos

Which is somewhat offset by Google dropping Picasa.

Also Maps, Android and YouTube were started by other companies which were acquired.

K8s,

TPU

Colab

Tensorflow

hmmm.

Oh yes - google still has great technology - but they aren't consumer products.

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