(1)[http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-...]
Google has one huge problem in general when it comes to hiring. I call them the China of tech companies. They have a lot of engineers and a large infrastructure so they can copy anything that works and use their scale to get market share.
Hearing from friends who have interviewed with Google, it seems to me they are good at hiring great engineers, they've hired bunch of MBAs but they're not able to hire product-driven entrepreneurs or give them space to shine.
Just to give you an example, Inbox precedes MailBox by years. I joined Google in 2009 and they were working its various incarnations even back then.
Also, doing what other people do is not necessarily "copying". When Google entered the Search market, there were plenty of search engines. They didn't "copy" search, they make their own. When they introduced Chrome, there were plenty of browsers, but they put their own spin on it.
It's not just about the ideas, but about their implementation and execution that matter.
Possibly related to why they acquihire so much?
Search is more like a platform, not a product, so let's look at GMail the first product that comes to mind, with the many gigabytes and proper IMAP/POP3 access they went all in. Filtering and search, labels and labs, plus it meant people were always logged in even while searching and looking at ads on 3rd party sites (and even though Blogger is and older Google product, not everyone had a blogger account, and I don't know how well integrated that was back in 2002-2003).
Then Maps, with all the bells and whistles. Analytics, you still can do arbitrary dimensions and metrics with it, drive it from a simple API, etc. Calendar, boldly supports ICAL, XML, RSS and so on.
And compared to these Google+ is still a trainwreck speeding ahead by the sheer force of will of Google. (Even Facebook switched back from the multi-column layout fast, because it's unreadable.)
The overarching theme used to be making something very powerful for average users and cater to the power-users/developers (who will then happily evangelize/integrate-with the product). Lately Google does none of that. At least Google Wave had a nice API on launch day to write robots, G+ was just a HTML5 slideshow for months. (Now, even on 1440p when reading comments, even after clicking to show more than one, I have to scroll the comment section in a 518x430 box. Why?)
They have thousands of very capable engineers, and it's great that now I can see the curvature of Earth in all its glory thanks to WebGL in Maps, but simply measuring distance just recently made a comeback.
RSS with PubSubHubbub, microformats and organic evolution of de facto standards would have been completely adequate for almost anything they wanted in this new sharing economy.
Though, to think of it, it sort of started when they elegantly neglected to make the profile (user data) path customizable in Chrome, and continued with the Real Name policy blunders on G+, and now YouTube subscriptions by default are completely useless too. (Because if you are not a simple user, but a channel of some sorts, your likes are not visible on your profile/channel page - nor anywhere else as far as I can tell - but subscribers by default get notified of new content on the channel, then proceed to visit it, and find none. At least users can then tweak this in the well hidden clickable gear menu!)
It doesn't take top pro exec Vic (or anyone) to fix bugs or provide more configurability. (In 2014, just 8 years after You were the person of the year, how fast You just became a wallet to milk.) Or if it does, then all the more power to the startups.
Now it turns out that a big integrated product really isn't such a great idea - but that's a different problem. (partly because it kills a lot of smaller interesting projects, and it kills the playground where things were tried out; a big platform is more involved with politics (the real name requirement); a big platform is harder to modify - as one has to care about such tricky things as overall consistency, etc, etc).
I want to hear about what he thinks of his decision to focus on business vs product as his company grew. It just seems insane from my perspective, far outside the realm of business leadership.
I guess he presumably felt like it had some kind of effect...