

Has Google been humbled?  - Eddk
http://colabopad.blogspot.com/2010/12/has-google-been-humbled.html

======
Pewpewarrows
I can't tell if this is a joke or not. I know the Hacker News hivemind is hate
Google / love Apple, but this is ridiculous.

You want to know what Google has released to great success in the past five
years? Here you go:

Google Chat

Google Docs

Google Calendar

Google Checkout

YouTube

Android

Google Chrome

Google Voice

Google TV

Granted a few of these are acquisitions, but I'm leaving out a ton of tiny
projects and the tremendous contributions to Open Source projects and the
developer community over the years.

Yeah, they clearly haven't done anything useful in five years. They should be
dying as a company any day now.

~~~
rimantas
Only three things on the list I'd call great success, and two of them are
acquisitions: Youtube and Android, third was build on the great work of
others—Chrome.

~~~
Kylekramer
The iPod was largely built on contracted work and Safari/Webkit was built off
KHTML. I don't get this whole "if not built 100% in-house, it doesn't count"
meme. You might have a point about YouTube being an acquisition, but giving
credit to anyone but Google for Android and Chrome's (or Apple for the iPod
and Safari's) success seems like intentionally looking for loopholes instead
of acknowledging their work.

~~~
graze
+1 As far as understanding the value of technology to people, this list
clearly demonstrates that Google is trying to tackle hard problems and
products to do just that. Compare this list of side endeavors (besides their
obvious core competencies) to those of Facebook. Recent products are talked up
as world changing innovations, (Groups, Messages, Places) however they haven't
changed the game or significantly added value to their product. Yes these
products are young, but in the last few years Facebook has done little to
provide this "value of technology" besides the initial innovations of News
Feed and the Like Button, both of which drew heavily from FriendFeed
acquisition as well. Everything in tech is built off something, saying
acquisitions don't count is ridiculous.

------
yequalsx
I recently switched to Windows Live. Google sites is a joke. I can make a call
with my computer using Google Voice but only through gMail. I can't use the
Chrome Google Voice extension to do this. Things like this have made me give
up on the Google.

~~~
endtime
Are you saying you switched to the MSFT competitor to Sites (if such a thing
exists)? If so, what does it do better than Sites?

Disclaimer: I have a friend on the Sites team...if you could make your comment
constructive I'd be willing to pass it along.

~~~
yequalsx
Microsoft doesn't have a sites competitor. I've had my own domain name for a
while went to Sites. It's too hard to get things to work the way I want them
too. Very unintuitive interface. My complaints:

1\. I get 8 gigs of storage at my docs site. The problem, I can't let anyone
with a link to a file view it unless I have a paid account. SkyDrive (Windows
Live product) let's a user link to documents without others having to have a
Windows Live account. It's a true online file storage system. SkyDrive has
much more space. SkyDrive doesn't charge for the linking capability.

2\. Sites doesn't give me the option of creating a file system and letting
that be the root of my site. I'm not a programmer so I apologize if the
technical terms are wrong. There is no index.html that I can edit as I want
and then link to files in subfolders using relative links.

3\. Google Voice. I like making calls from my laptop. They recently added this
feature but it can only be done from Gmail. I can't do this with the Google
Voice Chrome extension. I know that Live doesn't have a Voice option.

4\. I don't like the interface of Google Docs. It's too unintuitive and too
ugly. It's not a clean interface. Looks matter to users like me. If it isn't
simple, clean, and visually pleasing then I'm not using it. I use Google as my
search engine because it's not cluttered and easy to use. Bing looks like
garbage to me.

5\. Can't have multiple email address with my sites account. I address per
user. To pay for sites costs $50 per user per year.

So I'm going to migrate to a paid hosting account and use Windows Live for my
free email address. I don't have Office on my personal laptop and Windows Live
Office is much better than Google Docs. There isn't a reason for me to use
Sites anymore. Since I decided to quit Sites looked at other solutions.

This is one thing that a lot of companies don't understand. Once I'm used to a
service I don't want to change. It's a pain. But if I get into a situation
where I need to change things then I start looking at alternatives. Don't give
users a reason to look for an alternative.

------
kunjaan
I have tremendous respect for what Google has done to the Computer Science
community and the Programming community. From MapReduce to BigTable to Gooogle
Files Systems to tools like Google Collections and GWT, they have contributed
a lot to the community and made many of our lives simpler.

I use GMail exclusively for private communications. It just works. Period.

I love the Android system. It has bolstered my interest in smartphone
development. And I think it is a good case study for VM developers and kernel
developers.

Then there is Chrome, which is probably my favorite Google product right now.

tl;dr Thank you Google.

------
ryetoasthumor
yes they have definitely become irrelevant and lack even a minor understanding
about the value of technology what with the second most popular smartphone os,
a video site with a paltry billion page views per day and the second most
popular website. man I wanna be considered irrelevant too

~~~
sukuriant
Don't forget their dull and drab email with its pointless tags and terrible
filtering options.

------
Sandman
_"they are going to find themselves being increasingly irrelevant in the tech
space"_

Go check out stuff on code.google.com, then tell me again if they're going to
find themselves being increasingly irrelevant in the tech space in the next
couple of years.

You see, everybody is talking about products like YouTube, Gmail and so on,
and we may argue about how successful some of them are, but in the end, these
are all end-user consumer products. Some of the finest things that Google has
done, and for which I'm very grateful is stuff for developers, stuff like
Guava (formerly Google Collections), WindowBuilder Pro (Ok, I know, they
bought this one, then open sourced it), CodePro Analytix and so on... The
point is, they have this great central point where you can find a whole lot of
open source software, libraries etc. This is, as far as I'm concerned, they're
greatest contribution, and a proof that they will definitely not become
irrelevant any time soon.

------
CoffeeDregs
Google has definitely been humbled by Twitter, Groupon, Facebook, etc. That
said, they're still awesomely successful and useful. The point of the post,
though, is about how Google is becoming less relevant/useful and I couldn't
disagree more.

Pewpewarrows listed technologies. These are the ones I gladly _depend_ and use
at least once per week on:

Search

Gmail (6+ accounts)

Docs

Cal

Contacts

Tasks

Picasa

Custom Search

Reader

Android

Chrome

Ad Manager (DFP)

Adwords

Analytics

Website Optimizer

Python (a bit of a stretch, but I use it because Google does...)

My life is just a lot better because of these bits of technology. Seriously.
Lots better. So bummer about Groupon, but Google's rockin and super relevant.

------
mikecarlucci
Could it be Google was as surprised as everyone else about Groupon's revenues?
During the rumors about Google's offer of $2 billion and then later $5 or $6
billion everyone was reporting Groupon at $500 million per year. After the
deal was rejected people are reporting $2 _billion_ per year instead.

As far as innovation from their acquisitions, Google still has Dodgeball. Even
without Dennis Crowley they must own something right? Couldn't Google put a
few people to work reviving that project and have a social location app,
probably tied into their existing Latitude/Maps infrastructure, to get into
the check-in game? It seems like it could be possible to get value out of
"failed" acquisitions, some of which were just a few years ahead of their
time.

~~~
rdl
top line revenue vs. bottom line income (i.e. minus expenses, which include
payouts to the merchants...)

I'd rather generally own a business making $5b/yr in profit on $10b/yr in
revenue, vs. $0b/yr in profit on $30b/yr in revenue.

------
VMG
What is Google doing at the moment? Chrome and Android are under development,
but I can't really see anything else on the horizon. Search results now have a
somewhat annoying hover preview, but I am wondering what else is going on over
there.

~~~
Pewpewarrows
Besides active development on their dozens of profitable projects, the only
big-name product on the horizon right now is Chrome OS and their social
solution the press have nicknamed Google Me.

This isn't unusual around the turn of the year though. They typically announce
their upcoming products during all the springtime conferences, especially I/O.

------
VSD20C
Google is a software monopoly at this point anyway. they wont go away even if
you want them to.. they run your phone now!

Google is the executor of current internet innovation. although i use all
their products because they are free and work. So i guess I'm the hypocrite

