Agreed -- I saw Sundar give the keynote at Google I/O last year, and while it was obvious that he was really into the tech, it was equally obvious he had no overarching vision for any of the things he talked about, outside of a general sense of "wow, isn't this cool?"

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.

If you look at Google's stock price over Sundar's tenure as CEO you will see why it's very unlikely they "ditch him." Same thing happened with Ballmer.

That’s not the right comparison. He should be compared to the S&P 500. Maybe even compared to large growth firms.

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...

You really think Sundar is having as negative an impact on Google as Ballmer did for Microsoft? I agree Google has lost its way, but I wouldn't go that far.

Google is basically a startup builder. And a really good one.

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.

How are they a really good startup builder? What have they built in house that has been a success since Gmail?

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.

Google is a startup builder but also a bureaucracy that serves as a startup killer. I have a feeling that a lot of the projects Google creates would thrive if Google had budded them off, and only end up dying because they keep them living within the company. (For example, Google Reader, if budded off, would have just been Feedly a decade earlier, which is a fine standalone company.)

I think Google's scale is a problem here. They're always talking about the "next billion users". With that mindset, nothing short of hundreds of millions of users is a success.

Android, Chromebook, the Home series, Maps, Drive, Google Cloud, Docs/Sheets and many more. A lot has happened since Gmail.

Maps is a clear in-house success.

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.

Isn’t it telling that a former bookseller was able to execute better in the cloud market than Google?

Not really, no.

Maps is also an acquisition, although we could argue that what google maps successful was developed after the acquisition.

I think it's been notable in the current hubbub about Stadia some have been pointing towards Gmail, Maps etc as proof Google doesn't kill everything.

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.

Maps counts, I think. But that's going back awhile.

Google Maps was not an in-house project. Google assembled it by acquiring mapping companies Where 2 Technologies and Keyhole.

Which is the reason why import and export files for Gmaps/Google Earth are called .kml [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyhole_Markup_Language

I should have checked Wikipedia at least, who link to a 2005 CNET story on the Where 2 acquisition. - https://www.cnet.com/news/google-mapper-take-browsers-to-the...

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.

Good news! :) Bill Kilday, a founder at Keyhole, wrote a book about Keyhole, Where 2, and Google Earth and Maps: "Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality". It's not very technical, but it has a lot of interesting history about the products' development and internal Google politics.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062673041

Chrome? Chromecast? Chromebook?

Chrome was basically a reskinned WebKit browser earlier on and then they forked it. I doubt Chromecast (the device) is more than a break even if that. It costs the same as a Roku stick and the CEO of Roku said their hardware doesn’t make a profit. They make money from advertising.

The Chromebook sells are minuscule.

> 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 almost think they let their engineers launch products just so they can’t quit and go to another company.

You just described the official purpose of https://area120.google.com/

Is that Google officially accepting that 20% time is actually 120% time?

I’m proud of them for baring the truth even if it is a bit oblique.

I have had the exact same thought about Google for about 2 years now (and about the other big SV companies in general). I guess these golden cages are cheaper compared to doing acquihires further down the road.

I read recently here that FAANGs hire people not because they need them, but to keep them away from rivals.

It's unclear who would buy. Lots of companies and private organizations were benefitting from Cloud Print, but would any of them be interested in taking on the cost of operating it?

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).

>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.

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?

It seems pretty bold and visionary to me. They've lucked out with gmail, chrome, golang, android, maps, etc. and they still have the best search in the world.

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.

Chrome was split off from WebKit, Android was acquired. They didn’t build either from scratch.

Compare their success to failure ratio to Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.

And Apple bought NeXT which is what macOS and iOS are based off of. A purity contest of "from scratch" isn't really relevant. Google clearly put, and continues to put, a lot of serious technical work into Chrome and Android which is reflected in their success.

Chrome isn’t a “success” because of any technical work. It’s a success because Google hocked it on their home page.

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.

> How is Chrome anymore of technical success than other browsers?

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.

Orders of magnitude faster than JavaScriptCore in 2008?

Yes, it depends on what benchmarks you ran though. Example:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-chrome-is-insanely-fast...

I specifically asked about JavaScriptCore - the (open source) JS engine part of Safari.

> and they still have the best search in the world.

Which is disappointing, since Google of ten years ago had a distinctly better search.

Yes! As soon as wikipedia stopped being the first result for nearly everything it started going downhill. The decline in usability for me has been most notable in the last 5 years.

Better for users, but not for investors.

They bought Maps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#History

Though it completely goes against the grain and it's fairly tongue in cheek - sometimes I wonder if the belligerent drive to innovation is really helping anyone but the stockholders.

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?

What's wrong with tapping the wisdom of the rank and file? Why bottleneck 10K+ smart creative people by a few power-hoarding learders?

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.

What’s wrong with putting ideas in public and then discontinuing them means that no one will invest time or money in your products. If you were a printer manufacturer would you support whatever Google comes up with to allow Android devices to support printing without needing to write specific drivers?

Apple released AirPrint in 2010. AirPrint compatible printer still works with an iPad 1.

Having a vision doesn’t prevent the rank and file from contributing quite the opposite. Look at Microsoft. Nadella has a strong vision for the company and great things are constantly created from every level that aligns with that vision. The new surface neo, xbox adaptive controller, gamebar,razor components, the whole .net team. All of it is about empowerment, that is what vision can do.

Couldn't articulate it better.

Except when it keeps paying off, it's not so much "hoping" as just "being big enough to throw so many things at a wall that has such a high payout, anything sticking means winning the lottery. Again. And again. And again"...

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)