Google falls somewhere in the middle. They have great R&D but just can’t make products. It took OpenAI to show them how to do it, and the managed to catch up fast.
Is this just something you repeat without thinking? It seems to be a popular sentiment here on Hacker News, but really makes no sense if you think about it.
Products: Search, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Maps, Youtube, Workspace (Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, Meet), Photos, Play Store, Chromebook, Pixel ... not to mention Cloud, Waymo, and Gemini ...
So many widely adopted products. How many other companies can say the same?
What am I missing?
It took OpenAI for Google to finally understand make a product out of their years if not decades of AI research.
YouTube and Maps are both acquisitions indeed.
A phrasing I've heard is "Google regularly kills billion-dollar businesses because that doesn't move the needle compared to an extra 1% of revenue on ads."
And, to be super pedantic about it, Android and YouTube were not products that Google built but acquired.
But I reckon part of the sentiment stems from many of the more famous Google products being acquisitions orignally (Android, YouTube, Maps, Docs, Sheets, DeepMind) or originally built by individual contributors internally (Gmail).
Then here were also several times where Google came out with multiple different products with similar names replacing each other. Like when they had I don't know how many variants of chat and meeting apps replacing each other in a short period of time. And now the same thing with all the different confusing Gemini offerings. Which leads to the impression that they don't know what they are doing product wise.
Look at Microsoft - Powerpoint was an acquisition. They bought most of the team that designed and built Windows NT from DEC. Frontpage was an acquisition, Azure came after AWS and was led by a series of people brought in in acquisitions (Ray Ozzie, Mark Russinovich, etc.). It's how things happen when you're that big.
That's not like Google buying Android when they already had a functioning (albeit not at all polished) smartphone OS.
Many of those are acquisitions. In-house developed ones tend to be the most marginal on that list, and many of their most visibly high-effort in-house products have been dramatic failures (e.g. Google+, Glass, Fiber).
Honestly, I still don't really know how Google managed to mess that up.
Even with gemini in lead, its only till they extinguish or make chatgpt unviable for openai as business. OpenAI may loose the talent war and cease to be leader in this domain against google (or Facebook) , but in longer term their incentive to break fresh aligns with average user requirements . With Chinese AI just behind, may be google/microsoft have no choice either