It’s much like how bell labs invented so much great technology, but could never make the transition to new producers themselves.
10 year support goes a long way, and if you paid enough money you could email in your bugs and get custom hot fixes made for issues that annoyed you.
Even their /bad/ technologies had long term support. If you built on top of shiny new thing and Microsoft dropped it in the next release, it was still going to get patches, bug fixes, and the documentation for it wasn't going to vanish from the world as if it never existed.
Of course this was all before cloud services existed. Back then you'd pay for a product and you got software on a disk/CD and there was an expectation that it'd keep working.
One thing that gets overlooked so frequently, by all companies, is that ongoing costs are ongoing. Whenever I see a new fitness tracker kickstarter advertising amazing cloud services for free, my first thought is that the costs from cloud services will eventually exceed the tiny profit that comes from selling physical consumer hardware.
And a few years later another "It's been a great journey" message goes out as the company runs out of money.
Obviously Google won't run out of $, but costs do add up.
Doing the math on how to distribute funding to bundled cloud services is actually rather hard. You have to figure out for a given product / subscription, how much of that purchase price needs to be distributed to the various teams. That sort of attribution is not easy, and not properly allocating those funds to development resources can kill a product. e.g. someone buys a Chromebook, of course the OS team gets money, but the team making Google docs can argue they deserve a split, after all without them the Chromebooks would be somewhat useless. Analytics helps, but only to an extent.
Google doesn't run out of money; what Google runs out of is the things money can't buy in the short run, and at their scale that's employee hours and (surprisingly) compute and storage bandwidth (because they're building infrastructure at such volume that they end up saturating supplies and literally can't get more hardware at a reasonable price-point to run all the services they want to run).
Too much breadth of services cuts into how much load they can bear on services that are business-core or revenue-positive.
Apple doesn’t care as much about backwards compatibility because it doesn’t really care if you upgrade your operating system - especially on the Mac - or stick with your old one until you buy a new computer. It doesn’t make money on operating system upgrades.
Microsoft put an insane amount of effort into documentation[1] and sample code. They ran developer training programs around the world and published an actual magazine.
They funded the writing and publishing of countless[2] books for developers. They still run Channel 9, where they produce/publish long and short form technical content.
If you wanted to develop for a platform in the 90s/early 2000s, Microsoft had the best documented platforms with an incredible amount of samples to learn from.
[1] Each product team targeted at developers had a dedicated, non-trivial in size, full time documentation team. On top of that Microsoft would hire 3rd party software companies to start using early versions of new APIs and write large scale sample apps using those APIs. I worked on one of these samples apps, it was a complete end to end ordering system for a furniture store that included everything from a tablet pc app for the sales staff to use inputting customer orders, syncing to a database in the warehouse to get the order loaded on a truck, and the delivery driver had an application running to get a signature on delivery of the order. Since this was pre-cellphones everywhere, the truck driver's laptop stored data offline and when brought back to the warehouse it synchronized itself with SQL server using some features new to SQL server at the time.
That was one of thousands of sample apps Microsoft made to show off its APIs. Compare this to the modern world where the cloud database provider billing you by the hour is going to throw out a couple basic hello world examples and that is about it.
[2] Technically countable but a very large #
There were no other platforms seriously in contention in the mid 90s and early 2000s. There was Apple circling the drain and Unix vendors were all over the place.
In today’s world, if you are a major corporation that needs help you have all sorts of “partners” that will help you with your chosen platform, information on any API usage is all online.
In the classic MacOS days in the 80s and early 90s, Apple had the multivolume “Inside Macintosh” series.
Companies depend heavily on AdWords, gSuite, and Cloud and all three continue to grow.
The reputation for canceling projects which aren't working may matter to consumers, but I haven't seen anyone in business mention it in their purchasing decisions.
Heck, add features like secure job release, integration with enterprise directory services, and services for brochure printing and online photo printing/albums. Document management and printing services is a huge industry.
Companies and universities hate doing printer driver and device management, and hence all the outsourcing of printers. But the outsourcing companies have to bolt an extra box on many printers to enable printing, or write special printer GUI firmware, makes it expensive. Could all be on your phone instead. Cf https://www.oki.com/ge/printing/services-and-solutions/smart...
https://www.office.xerox.com/software-solutions/xerox-workpl...
Once again, Google has screwed itself and it's users.
If the company has an equally good alternative available, chances are Google wouldn't have launched theirs in the first place.
Doubtful. The successful products to come out of Google are Search, GMail, and GCP. They bought Adwords, Doubleclick, Android, Youtube, and Nest and Fitbit, I suppose. GCP is their only recent win, but it's a me-too late entrant in a market Google should have invented.
Also, many of the acquisitions you mention were tiny when bought, and Google has a much better track record of growing and improving them than, say, Yahoo.
I can see Docs with GSuite especially in education and maybe Drive.
In case anyone is wondering, the math has been done. I have been told that Google even has an internal page devoted to informing engineers how much something has to be worth before it is worth their time, and it's a big number.
There are several tech PE firms that specialize in that niche. KKR bought Corel (of WordPerfect fame) recently.
I'm also confident someone at Google already had this obvious idea. Any ex-googlers know why they chose not to / cannot do this?
I can’t imagine you can decouple Googke’s products from their infrastructure.
It had a huge installed base, but of course Google would not sell user engagement in bulk, only in tiny pieces as ads. Advertising the things people take photos of is pretty straightforward too, another reason why Google killed Picasa instead of letting it free.
But that was also an acquisition, so I guess it lifted out of Google's infrastructure more easily.
https://openprinting.github.io/driverless/
Google is pro-adapting to change. And it is painful but it is usually the right thing.
But, as with many things, "I'll believe it when I see it."
"Driver" is merely the word we use for "protocol", when the protocol is ad-hoc, non-standard, or badly documented.
Seems like a pretty normal patent to me. Technology doesn't have to be likable, a good design, or even functional to be patented.
Not sure if anyone has cloned that in a Windows utility, but a lot of printers support it.
The problem would be mostly solved if Windows added native support and added a giant warning when anyone tries to install a printer driver saying that it’s a terrible idea.
Google Plus is the superior way of keeping up with blogs and news sites, and I am really enjoying texting with my friends over Allo ever since they discontinued Hangouts.
and, I think, a bunch of proprietary HP/Epson protocols.
The best part is the toner cartridge that comes with it lasts long enough to totally recoup the cost difference between it and a "consumer" inkjet printer
Printer companies want to differentiate and upsell. The best way of doing that is via software which means first party "drivers" (which is really this huge bundle of bloat and ads at this point). If anyone has recently installed a consumer inkjet for a family member will know what I am talking about. It is basically adware.
Those of us sticking to our nice boring laser printers aren't the main market for consumer printers, it is the Epson/HP/etc sold by big box retailers.
> There exist a variety of methods for a client to submit a job to a printing system and print driverlessly-:
Use a cloud service such as Google Cloud Print (GCP).
Bottom line: Google is not ready for the enterprise.
I know a mid-sized travel company ($500m+ revenue) that will have its workflow seriously disrupted by this.
Creating new products is probably over incentivized, while the boring work of operating and maintaining existing useful products is under incentivized.
However, those who stay on a product and continue to grow/advance the product don't get nearly as much recognition, and don't get the incentives that a launch does.
This translates to people jumping on board an pre-launch project, riding it through launch, then moving on to the next thing, leaving the project in a post-launch slump with few people lingering to maintain and grow the project.
So they encourage these random projects hoping one of their employees will have a vision for them.
So the organization just flails around hoping to win the lottery. Each new project is a new lottery ticket.. saving the leadership from making any hard decisions.
Google really needs to ditch him and find a new CEO capable of providing some actual vision and direction, not just randomly lead them to chase various cool technologies.
When compared to both, he’s done about average or less, depending on which benchmark you use. [0]
[0] - https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&t...
How many companies manage to stay so innovative after having found their rainmaker product?
However, they should probably sell their successful startups instead of killing them.
But I guess they don’t need the money.
After flailing around for a decade, almost all of their profit is still based on ads. They are less diversified than any of the big tech companies besides Facebook.
Android and Docs/Drive/Sheets were two acquisitions.
Google is certainly a contender in cloud computing services, but they have a market share of 4% in 2018 for a product category they were one of the first to enter on a big scale, and I don't think niche success is what they are after.
I'm not sure what I think about Chromebooks. I'd like to hope that it has an exciting, Fuchsia-coloured future.
But the thing is all the examples seem to be more than five years old, because god help me but they don't seem to have done anything in quite a while to be honest.
Google desperately needs to rethink how it moves into new areas and launches new products. "You'll get it when it arrives" seems like such a terrible attitude to take with the general public.
It looks like a talent acquisition: the Where 2 codebase was a C++ app, nothing to do with the Ajax implementation they rolled out.
I'd be interested in learning more about this story.
The Chromebook sells are minuscule.
Chromebook sales were 21% of notebook sales in the US in Q4 2018 and the percentage is growing:
https://chromeunboxed.com/chromebooks-make-big-strides-in-sa...
I’m proud of them for baring the truth even if it is a bit oblique.
Also, would enough Googlers be willing to spin out from "the mothership" to go work for a spinoff that likely couldn't afford the same benefits package?
(And this is to say nothing of the fact that most of Google's software is written atop Google's internal software infrastructure, which generally cannot be ported out of the company. It just won't work outside the ecosystem of services it assumes exist).
Not to be hateful, and I couldn't possibly live further from the SV area, but isn't that just a description of startup culture? Are they just being the most successful startup?
Having a HIPPO tell everyone what to do, how to do it and when is not visionary. Letting engineers do what they want and then making money from the ideas is.
Compare their success to failure ratio to Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.
How is Chrome anymore of technical success than other browsers?
As far as Android, it came out in the Oracle trial that it only made about $22 billion in profit during its entire existence and the entire ecosystem is still a mess as far as security and updates compared to Windows - ie where one company controls the operating system and licenses it to other OEMs.
Not to mention that the entire Android market is a profit less race to the bottom for all of the manufacturers.
All that being said, Google still derives almost all of its profit from ads compared to Apple, Microsoft and Amazon who have had far more success in introducing diversified products.
But if Google’s failures can be attributed to a lack of leadership, most of Apple’s current success wasn’t the result of the NeXT acquisition. It was the result of bringing its founder back.
When chrome was new it was extremely innovative with how much space it gave to websites, and also came with orders of magnitude faster javascript. The other browsers then copied Chrome so all of them are now fast and sleek, but back then the difference was huge.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-chrome-is-insanely-fast...
Which is disappointing, since Google of ten years ago had a distinctly better search.
Of course, innovation is positive and generally drives the quality of life in the civilisation, but... if Google stayed as Search + GMail + AdWords/Sense for decades and only worked to update those services to be generally useful and offer decently modern UX, who'd blame them? Sure, that'd turn them into a sort of utility, but again - who in the general population would actually lose from that?
That's usually regarded as the great "bazaar" / "free market" style of getting the best ideas out of the community.
The failure is in not well supporting the good ideas that come up.
Apple released AirPrint in 2010. AirPrint compatible printer still works with an iPad 1.
Google can literally _afford_ to kill off highly profitable ventures because something else will make them _more_ money.
(which in itself should be reason enough to judicially split this company up, but that's apparently no longer a thing we do, so here we are)
This isn't Google-specific. Based on my own first-hand experience working in a Global 500 company, I'm inclined to say that it's actually inevitable in any sufficiently large company with a sufficiently large range of business.
The fundamental problem is that there's just way too much heterogeneity for senior leadership to possibly understand all the company's lines of business. Which means that it's impossible to make thoughtful, intentional decisions about all of it at the corporate level. I'm guessing the best strategy is to focus on the bread-and-butter business, and treat all the rest with a sort of benign neglect. That seems to be what Google is doing. But you can't neglect things indefinitely - you do need to occasionally clean out the hallway closet and get rid of all the stuff you didn't even remember you had.
Enormous Japanese and Korean companies don't seem to have this trouble, and they're far more heterogeneous than any American company. Yamaha for instance makes boat engines and high-end pianos and audio electronics.
https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...
But I don't necessarily think they have the same weight, so to speak. For example, the majority of products Google shut down were free, and the majority of Microsoft's were not. How should that be evaluated? I don't really know! It would be interesting to look at this.
They were also mostly software that you could run practically forever without MS support because MS strives for backwards compatibility. Once Google subsets a service, you can’t use it anymore.
Latest example, now that ConstraintLayout is finally working properly, they come up with JetPack Composer, most likely due to Flutter marketing pressure.
This is the entire industry. I work for a non-sexy "tech" travel company, and it's the same thing. Pay down tech debt? Good luck getting any kind of recognition. Make a react graphQL api? You're making senior.
I can't say Google's launched anything exciting in the past decade. If they're shooting for sexy, they're failing miserably.
I've wondered why, and the only thing I can think of is that they are all jumping to machine learning, and the results are worse than the old-fashioned algorithms.
Sometimes it’s in the best interests of the company to only have one major revenue stream!
They receive press and seem as innovators/bandwagon jumpers simply by entering the ‘flavour of the month’.
If something is deeply broken, it's what allows them to thrive in spite of themselves.
If anything it's a barrier to any organizational adoption. You have the exfiltration of data to Google, and a weird protocol implementation that's a relic of last decade.
It's printing physical paper. It's 2019, does it really confuse anyone as to why they would kill a product that prints paper? Even if it was successful in the short term, which it wasn't, it seems very rational to kill Cloud Print from a business perspective in the long term.
The developed world been moving far, far away from print for a while now. I imagine if you look at the graph of overall paper usage, you'll see it going down and to the right for some time into the future until it's near zero. Definitely the wrong business to be in.
It has no long-term prospects.
The fix seems to be obvious, create a separate path, a maintenance and growth hacker path, where people can take ownership of products and grow them over time. Perhaps people could be judged by their market traction, making them sort-of internal entrepreneurs who over a decade or more, get to share the benefits of shepherding their project.