You don't need to be a Google employee to know its products lack innovation from day 1.
It's a one trick pony company, having just created search, rest is only buy/copy/steal.
It's a company rotten to the core.
It bought a few companies back then and helped scale it with capital (Android, YouTube...), also copied others, like there's a whole Netflix documentary about Google Maps.
Don't come saying that Gmail was genius. There were so many free web mail offerings at the time. The only thing they did differently was giving 5GB storage because they never needed to make money with it, as search was a money printer.
Now that there is no ad space left to be added on their products, it's a sinking ship.
Also with their dieing cash cow search business, with Perplexity and OpenAI eating their lunch.
It you still look at Google and don't see IBM, you need new glasses
Be fair, Gmail was groundbreaking. It's UX was miles ahead of anything else. Especially webmail UIs.
Google was a good product company for a while. But the it wasn't anymore.
Not my experience. UX was more or less in line with everyone else, UI just looked cleaner and prettier because it didn't yet have obtrusive ads compared to the competition.
Gmail was groundbreaking because it offered 1GB of storage at launch compared to measly 100MB or so from Yahoo or Microsoft.
Google brand name + invite only scarcity at launch + huge storage space + no ads at launch = the formula the drove initial popularity.
Gmail was the first single page application I remembered using. It was eye opening to many people what the web could be as an application platform. You could compose a message and have it follow you as you read other emails, for example. It was not just about storage space: Gmail was better in every way. Even the spam filter was smarter and better than everyone else’s for a very long time.
Exactly. It was also one of the first mainstream web apps to make widespread use of XMLHttpRequest. The term AJAX hadn't even been coined at the time of Gmail's release, and it was probably a major factor in the popularization of the technique.
Part of the trend of needing to dumb down everything by removing "power" user features because we can't trust non-computer savvy users to not self immolate their data.
Nah, it was only groundbreaking if you were using Yahoomail.
Sure, they were innovative to use XHR along lots of Javascript to improve the experience, but what got people into were the 1GB + no ads.
Nowadays, they probably offer one of the worst email experience, with ads and terrible privacy. How many times have we heard about the US government reading emails from other governments countries, like US spying on ex-presidents from Brazil regarding oil companies?
Google had also the coolness factor of the "don't be evil" and being overall a lean and trustful company. Nowadays nobody thinks of Google like this.
I think people have forgotten or weren't around back then.
gmail did away with the idea of folders and instead had tags. They were very clearly an innovation on top of how most organization happened with email.
granted, those tags were shunted into folders for the IMAP protocol, but if you were using the web UI it was a whole other world.
The rest of the world caught up, but at the time they were absolutely groundbreaking. yahoo and hotmail existed at the time but neither had anything on gmail.
It started the trend of ...drum roll... taking you to the inbox after logging in. Others would take you to a news frontpage or some other crap. When I open a page for AWS and GCP service and I see a marketing page instead of a list of cloud resources, I die a little.
Most of those on your list were either bought/copied/stolen, as mentioned in my comment.
For the office suite tools they offer (calendar, docs, gmail and drive), they were the first to move to the cloud, but nowadays there are so many companies with similar offerings that are either cheaper or better.
Even Microsoft nowadays has Excel on the cloud, which let's all be frank. It's much superior.
Before I do look like a google hater, I use a Pixel, pay for Google drive etc, but I know how nowadays I have so much more interesting choices(better privacy, better phones etc) and don't move out mostly out of laziness.
"Ads" was bought (DoubleClick) and in fact I've seen it referred to as the best acquisition in the internet era, as measured by what they paid for it vs the revenue directly attributed to it.
YouTube was bought as well.
Android was bought as well.
Ads, YouTube and Android are valuable tech. Analytics, Gmail, Docs, Calendar are all shitty apps. Not in the sense that they're bad, just in the sense that there's nothing innovative about them.
Of everything that you mentioned in your list, the only ones that are genuine Google innovations are Search and Maps.
Go check the wikipedia page for those products and scroll to the “History” section. You might be surprised how the common thread is “another company was doing X, and then”.
I worked at roughly 10 companies in my life. Most either used Outlook/Office or Gmail/Calendar/Drive. Personally I hate the Microsoft office productivity stack, and on the other hand, I love using the Google stack, including Calendar.
Different strokes for different folks. I don’t like google calendar and prefer outlook’s. It’s probably the only part of office except Excel that I actually think works well.
Not perfectly, I’d still like a good calendar based around sharing and collab, but the best out there.
I think we need a good decentralized calendar that treats all calendars as peers. Outlook and google treat a single server as being the authority and everything has to go to those servers for actions. I’d rather see something like a calendar blob for individuals that gets sent around and rehosted lots of places like git. Or at least the availability. It’s still funny to me how hard it is to tell someone off server what your availability is.
This is most successful companies though. Companies are lucky to have a single good idea. So I don’t think it’s a valid criticism to say “all McDonald’s had was franchising systematic food production” as that’s a big deal and it’s carried then all these decades. Or “all Toyota had was their production assembly method” etc etc.
I think companies are typically a really good idea and then many years of optimizing that idea and process innovation.
> The only thing they did differently was giving 5GB storage because they never needed to make money with it, as search was a money printer.
Uh, no, they gave 1GB at the time, when the most you would get was usually either 100MB or 250MB (i think that was what Hotmail was offering at the time?).
GMail was a game-changer at the time, though.
The search features were incredibly fast and super accurate, the UI would refresh immediately (AJAX before it was cool, essentially, nobody was doing that at the time) and their anti-spam was top-notch. Literally, spam was not an issue anymore.
Oh, and it was super fast and very lightweight: I had a P3 with 128MB ram at the time of launch, but it would still run incredibly well.
I managed to get an invitation from a friend, and I loved it.
>How would you want it to evolve? It shows and sends emails good.
Yahoo mail is better for me because it implements the use of tabs, making e-mail multitasking a breeze. Also Yahoo's UI is more compact and less wasteful of screen real estate and just feels snappier while Gmail feels sluggish even on modern machines.
So yes, there's definitely room for Gmail to evolve beyond just barebones sending and receiving emails, as there's dozens of other companies who can do that just the same or better, because otherwise why use Gmail beyond the Google brand name, network effect, and integration to the wider Google-Chrome-Android ecosystem which is it's biggest strength and selling point, but as a stand alone email service it's pretty lackluster and unimpressive.
Reaction: Um, kids? You're working for a number-8-in-the-Fortune-500 company, with a "keep turning our monopoly-business crank to make yet more money" financial model. Where are you getting the idea that the management of such a business should be non-boring, let alone visionary?
Such things are matters of degrees, and humans use all sorts of intonations, gestures, tags, emoticons, and such, to provide similar disclaimers. Being neither young nor on-line enough to feel myself fluent in the current local dialect of those, I fall back to something that feels workable, if rather clumsy.
Sundar Pichai is a MBA-bot. He's going to chase fads in a me-too fashion while running the tired MBA playbook until they give him the boot or he runs the company into an unrecoverable senescence.
Of course they are boring. Non-boring means taking huge risk and chances. Something Google hasn't had to do for at least a decade. If you want interesting, join a startup. But you might end up without a job when they lose funding/run out of money.
My real issue with google, and google products, would be the uncertainty.
They release a decent product that sees some growth, but unfortunately it doesn't scale to their standards, and it gets sunset.
It makes me extremely hesitant to commit to new products - no mater how good and seamless the integration is to their other existing (and still surviving) products. I love using sheets, colab, drive, gmail, photos.
Is there any other type of management at big companies? I am yet to see a violation of the Peter Principle when it comes to middle to higher management.
I'd say they're slow, not boring. But this is good for a multitude of startups, including OpenAI. This is why startups can succeed, because they move faster than the bigger companies. So is anything really wrong?
I have thought about this as an employee. I think which point of view you have matters. The problem is that the best interest for the company and for the individual employee do not align in most cases.
If someone wants to move fast and innovate, an employee or a large company like Google, it needs to invest time to do things differently.
Given a finite amount of resources, you can spend them part on "speed" of execution, to keep up with in AI race, or "acceleration", to innovate and move faster in the future.
If you are a company CEO or senior leader and you think we are in a paradigm shift that threatens the very core products of your company, you cut what you think won't bring future revenue or better revenue growth; then, to maintain speed, you focus fewer resources on mature products that have less space to growth or fewer risks to be challenged in the short term; then, and use all resources that you freed up to accelerate. (Whenever a leader is visionary and good or not impacts the quality of these decisions; this is not an endorsement or rebuttal of Google's leaders)
The problem as an employee is that you are only in one of those buckets. Depending on where you are in these buckets and in your personal point in life, the consequences can be very different. It colors how you view the choices of those leaders in these surveys.
- cut + early career = can be challenging and demoralizing, but in my past experience these moments were those that pushed me into a higher trajectory.
- speed + early career = can be very comfortable to be here, but you're learning less variety than if you see more companies/roles. In the long run, it could make you less successful.
- innovate + early career = be blessed, you're very well paid and you learn state of the art that will hopefully be very marketable. If the bets of the industry do not play out and sentiment/hype on AI cools down, be prepared for a drop in earning down the line and save;
- cut + mid career = depending on your early career choices and marketable skills and personal inclination for risks, this can be quite challenging or push you out of your comfort zone, into another (hopefully upward) trajectory.
- speed + mid career = very comfortable position, but the most risky on long term trajectory. (1)
If the AI paradigm shift materializes, your skills could likely become outdated/largely reduced value and you are at risk of being automated away. (2)
- innovate + mid career = nice place to be, very highly paid and very hard to replace.
I can't comment on late career, I am not there yet. I'd expect it really depends on your priority and inclinations. My judgement is also likely influenced by the fact that I started as a generalist and contractor/small-business-owner; if you move from education right into FAANG, you'll likely have a more organized but less innovative personal drive/risk tolerance.
(1) I think I am here, and that's why I decided in late last year to move to (60%) part time and invest a significant portion of time, beyond what I can do at work (learn to do things differently, and learn about other industries, how they solve similar/adjacent problems and what is unique about them), on my own improvement/innovation at a significant personal cost (40% less income).
(2) IMHO the risk as an employee in "speed+mid career" in one of the companies in the AI race can be much higher than in other companies, automating SWE/eng roles requires a lot more mature tech infrastructure (e.g. good testing of very large systems is tricky to get right, but it enables closed-loop automated AI improvements) than many non-tech companies have.
It's a one trick pony company, having just created search, rest is only buy/copy/steal.
It's a company rotten to the core.
It bought a few companies back then and helped scale it with capital (Android, YouTube...), also copied others, like there's a whole Netflix documentary about Google Maps.
Don't come saying that Gmail was genius. There were so many free web mail offerings at the time. The only thing they did differently was giving 5GB storage because they never needed to make money with it, as search was a money printer.
Now that there is no ad space left to be added on their products, it's a sinking ship.
Also with their dieing cash cow search business, with Perplexity and OpenAI eating their lunch.
It you still look at Google and don't see IBM, you need new glasses