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Comment by jsankey | Hacker News Reader

While I think the grandparent is understating Google's success, it's worth noting that in your list AdWords comes under search (to me, at least), and the only other item that wasn't born out of acquisition is Chrome. Of course this is a perfectly rational strategy for Google and in the case of, e.g. Android, what they've managed to do with it since acquisition is remarkable. It's just worth remembering a lot of the successes come from spotting a startup on the rise and snapping it up.

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This is a bit of a tangent, but at some point I find the "it was really an acquisition" thing becomes rather silly, as there is very little difference between hiring people specifically because of their experience and ideas in a product area and a startup of some people with experience and ideas but no actual product yet. Maps and Android definitely fall under that second group, as Where 2 essentially thought that web mapping was a good idea, but hadn't actually done it yet, and Android didn't release anything until two years after acquisition, let alone ship an actual phone (which came a year after that).

There can be insight there (one great property of startups en masse is that they serve as a great experimental method for proving zanier ideas will work or market segments can exist if a product is made for them), but there does come a point where it's like saying Google's success in AI research is because they spotted AI researchers and snapped them up. Well...yeah, employees usually are hired for the job they were hired for.

Regardless, the original poster's criteria was "Google continues to validate its service not by competing on quality or feature distinction, but by throwing gobs of cash at it", which I think the GP's examples clearly contradict, as all of them have continued to gain quality (for some people's definition of quality) and feature distinctiveness.

It's definitely not black and white, and I called out Android for specifically that reason. I wasn't actually aware that maps was not a web product at all when acquired so you're quite right that it fits into the same category.

To take the tangent further off topic it's interesting to me that Google's greatest successes post-search/ads appear to be these strategic products. Not things that bring direct profits, but those that allow them to influence the major platforms (mobile, web). Committing key resources in this way speaks of long-term thinking that other companies could learn from.

From the perspective of the company's overall performance there is no question that just because some product was an acquisition is a minor detail, it's of course their prerogative to make use of resources on-hand as they choose. However from the perspective of measuring talent and ingenuity it's hard to ignore a company relying so heavily on Plan C to ensure success of their products, and when it comes in the form of a price war in an already cut throat sector I find the absence of finesse in their strategy remarkable, something like a rabid bull in a china shop after feasting on the brains of 20,000 Phds.

Least of all after witnessing the random price changes with App Engine, there's no reason to believe this low pricing is for the long term, so it's not like this is even good for consumers.

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