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).