Google makes so much good stuff but they seem to never commit enough to make it truly great...
Chromecast - better than all the alternatives but they could have gone that extra distance to make a whole Google TV apparatus and didn't.
Pixel phones - when they had all the critical mass they fumbled and released an entire line of very mediocre hardware
Pixel laptop - one of the best laptops made, ever, but they didn't commit and it was a one-off...
Hangouts - could have been the messaging app for everything... Instead they split it into two and now FB Messenger is the messaging app everyone uses (outside the US anyway).
GCP - again, they had a chance to become what Azure is or bigger but just seemed rather uncommitted to it...
Stadia - if they had committed it could have been huge because it absolutely does work very well. The concept of it working with Chromecast was good so again, they could have again, just made the TV box, bundle a controller and it's a console for everything... But nope, cancelled right as gaming Chromebooks are coming onto the market...
It sucks because many Google products are absolutely best in class but there's this eerie feeling that even those could disappear. Google probably has the best engineering in the world but also probably the worst product managers and business people in the world it seems...
And it's precisely their lack of commitment that's put Google in this position. Everyone knows that unless a product is a smash hit at Google, they will almost always kill it in a year or two. But the reason Google isn't making smash hit products anymore is no one wants to try it knowing Google will probably kill it, it's a death spiral for any new products they release.
They made a bold move with refunding literally every sale stadia related. Maybe the next launch can just have a contract with "use this product regularly and if we kill it we'll give you 500$". I certainly would have tried stadia if they made the refund promise in advance. Or at least bought some of the controllers for steam
I think it would be the opposite, it shows at least some commitment from Google. Anyone building a product on Google will know now how they are. Hell, there was a Twitter thread on here of a dev releasing their game on the day that Google shuttered stadia, irresponsible to partner with Google without knowing at this point
It requires a culture shift; how they hire, the types people they look for, how they staff teams, how they promote, how they budget, how they measure success, etc.
Product requires commitment and continuity which Google has proven to be really, really poor at historically. Likely because it has the wrong culture for it, is likely organized with the wrong incentive structures in place, and has thus far been wildly successful in spite of it.
But Oracles costs are much lower because they mostly sell software, not datacenter space. Revenue is impressive but profits moreso and GCP seems to lose a lot of money.
> Chromecast - better than all the alternatives but they could have gone that extra distance to make a whole Google TV apparatus and didn't.
It was a super cool tech demo and then they just stopped working on it. I guess it depends on what you consider "Alternatives" but it doesn't hold a candle to the Apple TV, Fire TV, or even a Roku stick IMHO. A remote is key to any TV-based device and no, a phone is not a valid remote (at least as the "only" remote). Watching my friends rave about the Chromecast and watching them have to pull out their phones to pause/play/etc is just mind boggling to me.
So maybe I'm missing something entirely obvious here, but isn't "Chromecast with google TV"[0] exactly the product everyone here seems to be lamenting not existing? I've got two at home and they are great. It's a solid tv experience based on android, with probably the best remote I've ever used -- though I wish the remote wouldn't be so dang slippery.
> A remote is key to any TV-based device and no, a phone is not a valid remote (at least as the "only" remote). Watching my friends rave about the Chromecast and watching them have to pull out their phones to pause/play/etc is just mind boggling to me.
Agree about the remote. But the thing that's much better about Chromecast is that discovery on your phone is much quicker than with a remote and the fact you can simply cast any video on the internet that uses the protocol without any apps.
If they made it a box more like Apple TV then they'd capture both people.
I think Chromecast is excellent. Usually it's easier to find my phone than a remote that gets buried in the cushions somewhere. It's a lot easier to search and type using a phone than an awkward TV keyboard (usually in an infuriating ABC layout). Also, multiple people can connect to it at one time and queue up videos while another video is playing
> GCP - again, they had a chance to become what Azure is or bigger but just seemed rather uncommitted to it...
I think GCP would have bigger, but Azure is a different beast. Azure is based on Fortune500 sales. What GCP could have been is the de factor Serverless and Platform-as-a-Service for hobbyists, as App Engine was a pioneer in the space. App Engine actually preceded GCP. It could have subsumed the likes of Heroku, Twilio and various other APIs-as-a-service, and even logs / monitoring tools such as Datadog, which are billion dollar businesses in their own right.
They're basically an engineering company that could never become a marketing company. I personally think it's a little inverse of Apple's philosophy. It's primarily a fashion/marketing company before an engineering company.
I'm sorry but I couldn't disagree more. This is just cherry-picking and not even accurate.
First of all, let's look at the "truly great" things Google has done -- search, ads, Android, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, Apps/GSuite/Workspace, and so on. 100% commitment, 100% great.
You say Google is "rather uncommitted" to GCP, which is hilarious if you'd look at the billions they've sunk into it. They committed to competing with AWS and by god they're spending the money to do it, and they're almost at profitability after more than 10 years of staying the course. If that's not commitment, then I literally don't know what is.
The rest of what you're listing is just that it's very hard to achieve profitable product-market fit, even if you're Google. Hardware like Pixel is hard to turn into a series of reliable successes, consumers just didn't sign up for Stadia in the numbers needed, Hangouts is a complicated story but Google certainly keeps trying with messaging, and FB Messenger's popularity was not even remotely a result of Hangouts splitting.
And just checking -- you think the 4th largest company in the world has the worst business people in the world...? No amount of genius engineering is going to get you there without an awful lot of genius business and product people too...
It's a bit of hyperbole. You have to admit, their engineering is far, far better than they marketing. IMO they should be the #1 company in the world. Chromebooks could have been the new general purpose computer if only they were a tiny bit less locked down... GCP could be better than AWS with a little love. There's already network effects with Gmail, Docs, Google for business and all that... They should have pushed Stadia just a bit more.
It's just slightly disappointing because Google stuff works better than any other computing items I've ever used. Everything connects to the cloud and just works in a way MS' and Apple's cloud offerings don't. And they should be competing with Apple and MS but instead they're mostly selling ads...
... they killed off all the projects which could have made more profits. Worse than that, nobody in their right mind wants to depend on a Google product because it could go away at any time. What happens when they decide that email is too open of a protocol and gmail goes away?
Exactly. Stadia being killed off and now Colab moving to a credit system is the final nail in the coffin for my trust with Google. Google is just an ad company with cool toy projects.
50% I think Stadia was just a matter of "me-tooism" on the part of Google. So many vendors rushed out cloud gaming products without any consideration if users wanted them.
The other 50% is that it was a huge lost opportunity. Google Cloud has monster servers that can take a large number of GPUs, such a system could stream a complex world to 30+ users simultaneously. If you wanted to make something like the fictional Sword Art Online (just not deadly) that's the way to do it.
Some people would say that games should be driven by story or gameplay, not technology. I don't disagree. But some great game developers have been technology first, such as Id games. Google is not going to win in terms of story, but they can win in technology and they should have given it a try. Even if game didn't work out the IP could have been licensed to somebody who could make the story work. But no, Stadia was ultimately meaningless.
Google is killing GCP with their legendarily bad customer support elsewhere. AWS may also have zero customer support for small customers, but I am not reminded of that fact every time someone loses their gmail or adsense account due to some ML algorithm and takes to twitter to plead for it back.
Seems like you could cut Google X and save a bundle without affecting the company in any material way. Same for Verily. THere, I saved you a billion, Sundar.
While this is correct, I don't think that's how things will play out. Wall Street views Alphabet as a growth company, and X, Waymo etc. are perceived to be where the growth will come from. So I expect X to be largely untouched and the cuts to come from teams that are shipping products. (Which I think will put Alphabet on a path similar to IBM in the 90s and Microsoft in the 2000s, but that's another story.)
It might stick around - I'm merely speculating what low adoption / non long term strategy products they have. I think that one is a long term play for Fuschia.
I imagine they won't kill things like Fuschia either, but let's just agree that there's a lot of middling projects or vapourware that they have at the moment. The wall of killed Google projects shall grow again.
What I don't understand is how these big companies always seem to be reactive in decision making instead of proactive. It's not like they just suddenly saw the revenue drop and needed to scramble to optimize.
Yes they make money through ads (but also through Premium btw)
The point is though, that if Search Ads stop making money, why would YT ads also stop making money?
You're speaking as if society is going to stop having Ads altogether.
The same argument applied to e.g. Apple would be like "Apple makes all it's money through HARDWARE, since iPhone and Mac and wearables are all HARDWARE, they only have 1 revenue stream". Which is unsophisticated and kinda dumb
No. For your argument to be correct, I would have to argue that Google makes all its money through SOFTWARE.
One is a BUSINESS MODEL, the other is a product category. You are confusing the two.
It seems unsophisticated because it is unsophisticated. Take away the ads model and you don't have a business. It's that simple.
I am not against the ads model, because it's business at the end of the day. But to think it's anything more than that is kinda dumb too. All products need to make money. That's how employees get paid 200-500k salaries.
You might not like it, but Google functions as a whole, not individual products. No CEO is going to look at YouTube and think of it as a separate business. It may be able to function as one, but he/she is always thinking how it can help the other products under the company.
You seem to have this fascination with Google products. I would argue you are not business-minded at all. Would you consider yourself a Google fan boy?
On a last note, I would appreciate it if you argue on the merits of the argument instead of calling other people kinda dumb. It's doesn't convince me one bit about your logic and shows the limit of your reasoning skills. The cap locks also don't help. It's immature.
>I mean… google maps? Chrome? YouTube (purchased in 2005 and not the same product/scale at all anymore)
None of which have ever (or will ever) generate any meaningful revenue for Google beyond their ability to funnel people into ads. They are an ad company, and nothing more.
I think the OP’s point is that Google has basically only generated 2 profitable revenue streams over their lifetime.
1. Google ads. The vast majority of their products are funnels into ads, but ads are the business. Android, for example, is simply a channel for the ad business. Alternatively, Google could have chosen to sell Android to manufacturers the way MS does Windows. That way it could have become an independently profitable business, but they deliberately chose to not develop it as a business but make it a channel for the ad business.
Everything since then has been the slow crumbling of their "Kool-Aid"/branding about their company. Finally being a public company chasing quarterly earnings will peel the last remnants of idealism off their carefully constructed image.
I'm soooooo nostalgic of pre-2011/2012 or so Google.
One of the most illustrative things for me is Google Talks back in that day, some of the people invited and subjects would be unthinkable for today's Google.
I wished I could have been a Googler in that period, kind of my dream job if I had any.
It's more of a general impression, but for instance the other day YouTube recommended me "Jesse Ventura | 63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read | Talks at Google", it just doesn't seem like the kind of thing Google would host or publish now.
Chromecast - better than all the alternatives but they could have gone that extra distance to make a whole Google TV apparatus and didn't.
Pixel phones - when they had all the critical mass they fumbled and released an entire line of very mediocre hardware
Pixel laptop - one of the best laptops made, ever, but they didn't commit and it was a one-off...
Hangouts - could have been the messaging app for everything... Instead they split it into two and now FB Messenger is the messaging app everyone uses (outside the US anyway).
GCP - again, they had a chance to become what Azure is or bigger but just seemed rather uncommitted to it...
Stadia - if they had committed it could have been huge because it absolutely does work very well. The concept of it working with Chromecast was good so again, they could have again, just made the TV box, bundle a controller and it's a console for everything... But nope, cancelled right as gaming Chromebooks are coming onto the market...
It sucks because many Google products are absolutely best in class but there's this eerie feeling that even those could disappear. Google probably has the best engineering in the world but also probably the worst product managers and business people in the world it seems...