Hacker News Reader

Comment by pinaceae | Hacker News Reader

the big question is though, can Google also be awesome in Services going forward?

i am loyal user of chrome, gmail, search, youtube, maps, picasa - in this order. none of which is younger than what, 5 years?

innovation in those items? gmail got a new UI, but else?

where are the BETA products? used to be the awesomeness of Google. ever since Page took over, they've been killing the small, useful things. ok, they want to be apple. google glass, cars, chromebooks - big ambitious things, big bang approach. nothing below 1500 usd.

of course there is android, but that one is slipping away - samsung, amazon, chinese manufacturers - all are eating it up and taking ownership.

how come amazon is the premier cloud provider, not google? how come dropbox is the premier storage provider, not google? they are moving from a (ad-supported) knowledge company to a product company. more money there i guess. still makes me sad.

View on HN

Google was always a search and ad company, and this refocusing lets the company go back to its roots while other companies build on Google's progress. Microsoft thrashed about and did a lot of damage when it was where Google is now. I prefer this approach.

>gmail got a new UI, but else?

Priority inbox? It's pretty useful.

true, don't use it for priority myself though, only to group unread items out of the rest of the inbox. which is indeed awesome.

And that is real advantage with Google. Priority Inbox(and every other feature) is a quite powerful tool and lets you use it the way you want it.

Try that with iCloud mail or any other Apple service. They look good, work well but may feel restrictive after some time!

Google Chrome initial release is September 2, 2008. So it's less than 5 years old. Also Android, Google+/Hangouts, Google Voice are pretty nice and yes, ChromeOS is getting better all the time.

Sure, the innovation in those items are pretty much non-existent (except for search which improves often with very interesting new features), and i think thats perfectly fine. I'd much rather have them focus on "futuristic" things such as Glass and Cars than have them trying to become the leaders in cloud providing, storage etc.

Gmail will be 10 years old on April 1st, 2014.

Google doesn't need to innovate, they can do a so-so clone, post it on top of search and 1 billion people will see it a month. And boy do they see it, over and over and over again. Now even Chrome has ads, in addition to the suite of Google services.

Don't forget that they acquired YouTube, Maps, Picasa, Android and Chrome is a wrapper around WebKit.

Chrome is not just a wrapper. WebKit requires you to implement networking, graphics rendering, font rendering etc. There are huge differences between the different WebKit based browsers

Sure but you can just defer to the OS for the bulk of those services e.g. CoreGraphics, DirectWrite etc.

Things unique to Chrome that don't come from the OS: V8 Javascript engine, process isolation model, networking including new protocols like SPDY and possibly QUIC [1], auto-update (for browser and all apps and extensions) Chrome sync (for bookmarks, open tabs, apps, extensions). Don't forget that the Chrome team is now a major contributor to WebKit.

[1] https://plus.google.com/u/0/100132233764003563318/posts/b36w...

And WebKit is forked from KDE KHTML, Apple acquired FingerWorks for multitouch, C3 Technologies for 3D mapping and Siri (http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/04/28/apple-moves-d...)

So what's your point? Acquiring is bad?

But they did good job with them. YouTube, Maps and Android are on top in terms of market share and Chrome is on its way.

However, I feel that there is a big problem with Google: Customer Care.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com