On: Gemini 4 Carbon

The only good products Google has ever built in-house are search and GMail. Everything else is acquisition or crappy product.

So we should ask “why would it be different this time.”

IMO google maps and google earth were revolutionary when they came out. And maps stayed well ahead of competition for many many years.

I'm one of those few that liked Google Wave!

There are ones of you!

Maps was originally an acquisition.

Both were acquisitions.

It started at where2 and Google acquired them.

Youtube, hate it or not, is really good. The amount of data they have to handle everyday is on different level.

For sure. It was an acquisition, though.

Apart from search, what did Google make in house?

Gmail? I don’t recall that being an acqui.

Google finance was an incredible portfolio tracking and research tool. Until they released v2 which took away all the functionality and replaced it with a news feed.

And think that somebody designed it, and somebody else approved it.

Chrome was pretty great as well, it was desperately needed.

Google Chrome didn't start from scratch. Blink came from WebKit which came from KDE's KHTML. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML

Entirely irrelevant - Chrome really stepped up both security and speed over WebKit at that time.

The comment you replied to was: "The only good products Google has ever built in-house are [...]"

I don't have enough information to judge how much of Chrome was original work and how much was pre-existing work. Though I guess by now, after nearly 20 years, Chrome's codebase looks absolutely nothing like KHTML.

It was the rare confluence of people needing the same thing the megacorp showing them ads needed. We all benefited, no hard feelings, but always remember to look at where the puck is going.

I blame how things turned out more on Mozilla being distracted and forgetting about their own user base, to be honest.

The fact that it made the browser itself impossible to monetize to fund development was a part of it. They were an antitrust insurance to Google and tried lots of stuff to improve its position. Granted they failed, sometimes quite spectacularly, but I still drive Firefox for personal use.

The money earned with Firefox should have gone to Firefox but went to vanity projects instead. Firefox OS, Mozilla Social, Firefox Send / Persona, acquiring Pocket, etc etc. And all of it failed.

Nevermind the controversies of silly ad campaigns and CEO salaries and whatnot.

Mozilla should have just reinvested all the money into Firefox. Heck, they couldn’t even finish their rust-based rendering engine.

App Engine was good for its time, and I don't think that was an acquisition. Similarly, Cloud Storage and Google Cloud in general are pretty good products.

I started using AWS when EC2 and S3 first came out, but was forced to switch to Gcloud by the most recent company I joined. I was pleasantly surprised. In many ways it's more techie-focused than AWS, which is more enterprise-focused. And their managed Kubernetes is second to none.

Isn't Waymo the state of the art?

They’re still the same price as an uber and there’s no way to actually order one, it’s all random. I don’t understand why… like I actively would prefer them. If they were available so instead I find myself reaching for the cybercabs instead at half the price.

Uh, use the Waymo app?

HN is hilarious man lol half the world runs on the office suite and drive, at all levels

Workspace was acquisition.

Google acquired it from Upstartle (the company behind the online word processor Writely).

Writely was created in 2005 by Claudia Carpenter, Steve Newman, and Sam Schillace. Google bought Upstartle in 2006 and Writely became the foundation of Google Docs. Google then combined it with other acquisitions, such as 2Web Technologies for spreadsheets, and launched Google Docs & Spreadsheets in October 2006.

Calendar is my fav.