

Google, Facebook don’t innovate - morbidkk
http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2010/11/google-facebook-dont-innovate-a-vc/

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donall
I think Google still innovate in that, as other commenters have noted, they're
creating some interesting file system and database solutions. However, these
(among others) are infrastructural contributions to the backend. I think the
article is talking about innovation from the average consumer's perspective.

I remember speaking to a friend of mine when Google released Wave. He said
Wave was the first real home-grown "product" since GMail and it was his
opinion that it was developed in Australia because the office there was a kind
of skunkworks plant with little bureaucratic oversight compared to the other
Google offices around the world (whether this is true, I don't know). He said
Google were at the stage where they are big enough for middle management to
stifle real innovation because the individual managers don't need to take the
kind of risk required with greenlighting a project like Wave (and look how
that turned out!).

To Google, buying an early-stage startup is a cost-effective way of
outsourcing the risk-taking and that kind of acquisition is the closest they
can now get to serious innovation and staying competitive.

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nlawalker
From the average consumer's perspective, innovation doesn't mean squat.
Consumers don't care who invented what, they care about the products and
services that are available to them.

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fauigerzigerk
The Go language, Chrome OS, the recently announced redesign of the backend
storage architecture that's supposed to replace MapReduce for some tasks.
These are the things that I remember off the top of my head without going
through the stuff they keep announcing all the time.

[Edit:] Things like native client and V8 might also be worth mentioning.

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thevivekpandey
Apart from these, Google has come up with the WebP image format which may make
internet significantly faster than what it is today.

Furthermore Google hosts jquery files on its servers, which for many people is
a godsend. While it is a simple thing to implement, it ranks highly on how it
benefits websites (and thus the end users of those websites)

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Goladus
So John Doerr, a venture capitalist, "lost" an impromtu argument at a Web 2.0
Summit and this is supposed to mean that Google and Facebook don't innovate?

This is a really weak submission.

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dansingerman
Yeah, the whole self-driving car thing was rubbish wasn't it?

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db42
And also, all the technologies created for distributed computing by google
i.e. Mapreduce, GFS, BigTable. Currently most of the web is using Hadoop,
HBase, Cassandra and other tools which are all inspired by google work.

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JoeAltmaier
Really? Those aren't acquisitions?

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db42
Yeah, they were all developed by Google. I don't think you have any idea about
these technologies. Do care to 'google' them.

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sabalaba
How about that Chrome, with multi-process tabs + Google Apps, is really a
stealth web operating system?

Its surprising that wasn't mentioned...

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JoeAltmaier
I would prefer to call it an operating environment. Not that different from
many others - .Net, the DOM environment of JavaScript, any scripting language
in any larger tool.

Lets use "operating system" to mean what its generally understood to mean:
something that you boot on hardware, that manages system resources/hosts
drivers for devices, manages time and memory.

Just a separation-of-process model is not enough to justify the name Operating
System.

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takrupp
Wasn't Google planning (or had in beta?) a voice service before buying
Grandcentral? It just seems that when you get to the size of Google, if you
see a market that you want to get into and that has an easy to acquire,
quality product currently being created, why not buy it? You get the double
bonus of a working product and some talent.

Bad day for Doerr. Yikes.

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fairlyodd
Facebook Platform, Graph API, Like Button, Social Applications - a few truly
transformative things that have come out of facebook in the past few years.
Saying facebook doesn't innovate is rubbish. Though they do tend to borrow an
idea here and there, they have sometimes left it better than they found it
(exceptions of Quora and 4sq)

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chopsueyar
What about the mobile OS developed by Facebook on all these smartphones?

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metageek
Android was an acquisition.

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chopsueyar
Touché.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29#Acquisition_by_Google)

