>> Getting into too many fields and ending up all over the place is bad management.

I'm glad Google (and Apple and Amazon) got into the phone business, the camera business, the phone service business (Google Voice), the car business (Waymo) and the entertainment business (Youtube, Music, etc.)

The status quo was so awful (remember cable TV contracts with 200 channels you didnt want to watch?) and has finally improved with the tech giants putting pressure in cushy lazy incumbents.

Same for self-driving cars. Where were the efforts before Google and other tech giants go into the game? I seem to recall only incremental innovation for decades.

What I really wish is that they didnt botch some of these things (Google Voice is a great example of an amazing product with massive underinvestment (abandonment?) from Google.)

I think you're still seeing these companies as startups. They're in incremental innovation mode now. I'm biased, because I was hoping Amazon would come in and wipe the floor with Australian retail, but it's been kinda lukewarm.

We also missed out on Google Voice, will miss out on whatever TV play they're making with YouTube.

> We also missed out on Google Voice, will miss out on whatever TV play they're making with YouTube.

To be fair, us Canadians are in the same boat. You can be literally a stone's throw from the U.S. and still not get a lot of features available. Voice was never available, Wallet took several years before it was rolled out here, YouTube Red isn't available here either. Hell, most new Home/Assistant features take months to arrive here too.

> Getting bad commentary on geeky/nerdy HN is, almost by definition, bad communications/PR for a tech company.

Except there's always going to be some critics, especially when you're talking about a corporation of Google's size.

There's going to be people concerned about privacy, corporate overreach, the nature of some of its activities (such as defense contracts).

You will also get various biased opinions, such as people who were hurt in some way by Google: rejected candidates or businesses that folded due to some Google service grabbing their market share.

Hell, even if Google religiously avoided all the above, you will still get some astroturfing campaigns by its competitors!

Negative commentary on a niche website like HN doesn't actually mean much in the grand scheme of PR. Check what the average person thinks about Google. Most likely you will find it quite positive. If you're looking for a company with serious image problems, compare to Facebook.

I think their failed product track record should qualify under the category of bad UX e.g. Google Wave (confusing UI, no apparent use case for average users), Google plus (confusing UI conceptual be model when first launched, subsequently failed to get market share to Facebook partly due to obscure UI), etc.