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.
It’s much like how bell labs invented so much great technology, but could never make the transition to new producers themselves.