The worst decision Google ever made?

[profsummergig]

My candidate: shutting down Google Hangouts a few months before Covid hit. They lost the generic brand name to Zoom. Before that it used to be called "a hangout".

I'm told it has resurfaced as something called Google Meet.

Microsoft's equivalent (of losing to Zoom, not their worst decision) would be buying Skype for $8.5 billion when it wasn't worth that much, changing features that made the beloved brand unusable for years, then rebranding it as Teams and forcing me to see that never-used logo in the bottom right corner of Windows. Never used it, never will, want it gone, but I can't. On the upside, I've heard that Teams is usable, and a worthy competitor to Zoom.

What's your candidate?

[nicbou]

From their perspective? Losing control of search result quality. Google sucks now.

From mine? Killing Google Reader. This is when something changed about Google in the minds of many.

[bediger4000]

Letting advertising in. Advertisers always seek to get favorable placement, treatment, more of everything. The old newspaper thing about editorial independence was always aspirational, if not an abject lie.

Google let ads corrupt search.

[smoldesu → bediger4000]

Google is loving it. AdSense revenue is high enough to make iPhone sales blush: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...

Strictly from a business standpoint, letting advertising in was Google's best decision. I don't see how platforms like Gmail or YouTube would exist today without it.

[galenmarchetti → bediger4000]

Agreed...the user quality has fallen so much due to the advertisers preference. But it's also hard to imagine how they could have built such a long-lasting business without monetizing via ads...what would be another route to sustainable business and service?

[yongjik → bediger4000]

Uh, ads were Google's initial business plan. Saying it was their worst decision is like saying founding Google was a mistake.

[dotcoma → yongjik]

Do you have a deck from the very early days, like 1998 or 1999, in which Google say that they will monetise the service via ads?

I am not so sure ads were the initial business plan. I think the initial plan was to take care of search for portals like Yahoo! and eventually sell the company to them. Larry and Sergey at one point asked Yahoo! for $ 1 B, were told “no”… and the rest is history.

[sacrosanct]

I used to use Jitsi Meet, but lately they're mandating we sign in with Google/Facebook[0] I think to stop anonymous usage of the service.

[0] https://jitsi.org/blog/authentication-on-meet-jit-si/

[MilnerRoute]

Google should've made an alliance with the newspaper industry. Yes, it would've been a little more expensive to pay for that content. But they could've single-handedly ensured the health of the newspaper industry -- and maybe even created a symbiotic, mutually-beneficial relationship.

[ankurdhama]

ChromeOS flex not having support for Android apps (even on capable hardware).

[galenmarchetti]

not sure it can be reduced to a single decision, but losing Ilya Sutskever to OpenAI/not cultivating his talent to its fullest extent is a pretty big "one that got away" moment