Nobody will remember it, but in eBay’s early days of success, Amazon spent a nontrivial amount of engineering effort into building an auction style marketplace. They actually built something that was better than eBay’s model by many accounts. Nobody cared and it was shut down, because Amazon is not where people go to sell things at auction. Just like google search is not where people go to do their shopping.

From the outside, it seems like Amazon doesn’t spend much time worrying about what Google and Facebook are doing. Not sure if that’s changed recently (Alexa, certain AWS products, Amazon original series).

In general, as companies balloon in size, it’s very hard to draw ROI out of the core product, and these companies tend to bloom into conglomerates (like amazon is, arguably). The biggest mistake you can make, IMO, is when you sacrifice the UX of your core product to benefit these “subsidiaries”, like google has done with shopping infecting search, as others have alluded to.

In Steve Yegge's post on why he left google: "You can look at Google’s entire portfolio of launches over the past decade, and trace nearly all of them to copying a competitor: Google+ (Facebook), Google Cloud (AWS), Google Home (Amazon Echo), Allo (WhatsApp), Android Instant Apps (Facebook, WeChat), Google Assistant (Apple/Siri), and on and on and on. They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. They simply don’t have innovation in their DNA any more. And it’s because their eyes are fixed on their competitors, not their customers."

https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/why-i-left-google-to-join-gr...

>Nobody will remember it, but in eBay’s early days of success, Amazon spent a nontrivial amount of engineering effort into building an auction style marketplace. They actually built something that was better than eBay’s model by many accounts. Nobody cared and it was shut down, because Amazon is not where people go to sell things at auction. Just like google search is not where people go to do their shopping.

For more info on "Mr Tooth" and Amazon's quest to compete with eBay, see another Steve Yegge post here: https://medium.com/s/story/jeff-bezos-jack-ma-and-the-quest-...

"So, Life Lesson #2 (and this one is pretty goddamn important) is: Don’t try to beat a network by making a clone with improvements. It ain’t gonna work. There is too much gravitational inertia in the original network; nobody is incentivized to leave it."

Most of my cloud experience has been with GCP, but I tried Azure this weekend. I'm not sure how good specific cloud services / products are, but Azure has a much better story on a cloud-first development.

In Azure, I used Visual Studio Online (VScode in the browser). This ran in a VM with command line access. It's integrated with Github, and I imagine other Azure web services will come next, such as a one click deploy button. Microsoft's acquisitions and open-sourcing (Monaco editor, TypeScript) has been so strategic and well-integrated. Amazon acquired Cloud9 but not sure where that went. GCP had a lead with a more feature filled web console which has all the right pieces (SSH emulator/shell), but it seems they squandered the opportunity to make it fully integrated development solution with a Web IDE.

Oops!

This seems to be kind of a problem with google. I'm usually pretty good at noticing things in software I use, especially changes or added things, except when it comes to google products. I'm still regularly surprised when I learn about or find some feature in a google product i've been using for years or some product that came and went without me ever noticing it was there. Every new thing from them feels like some side project that just gets tacked on to their existing platform without much thought or reasoning until they get bored of having it there.

I bet your case is the former.

TIL Google still has a shopping service.

I used it once. I ordered something very basic from a local department store. Since it was a very common item, I expected it to be shipped from the department store down the street and I'd have it in a few days.

Instead, it was shipped from a city over a thousand miles away and took almost two weeks to arrive.

I went back to Amazon and never looked back.

In my opinion, its more likely that professionals who heavily use those tools are going to favor MS offerings over Google's compared to people who only need to occasionally created simple word documents or spreadsheets with a handful of columns.

I miss Excel the most.

G Suite has none of those features. Docs has more in common with WordPad than Word. It's unsurprising offices that switch to it end up switching back as Microsoft has finally stepped up it's collaborative editing game.

And that's before we even get into things like Excel and Access which are basically automation for people who can't write JavaScript.

I agree that was true at one time, but I don't think it's strongly the case anymore.

Users, leaders, and IT departments seem much more open to non-Mircosoft products than they have been in many decades. But for office work, few are able to match what Microsoft offers.

I'm hardly a Microsoft fanboy, and wouldn't use it if my company didn't insist on it. But I can see the merit in going with Office365 for the masses. There isn't really a strong competitor.

I really wanted to like GDocs, it's just a really poor experience in general.

GDocs has found a nice spot in one of our departments as a scheduling tool, though.

They have made improvements though - Google sheets can now work on Excel format files without changing the format. However they have managed to break copy and paste, with trademark Google lack of service. (https://support.google.com/docs/thread/33960847?hl=en - and I see other problems with borders randomly appearing in pasted cells)

It leaves a lot to be desired, I’m not sure Office could be much worse.

While I like JS, I think the shift towards JS/TS for macros in online versions is seeing some resistance to.

All of this said, still leaps and bounds better than gdocs.

The ads revenue subsides other products. And that's always Google's argument of upholding that business model. Google claims ads-supported internet is key to retain the free offering.

Froogle (est 2002) has continued to exist in one incarnate or the other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Froogle

Besides, Google has partnered with e-commerce firms in the US (Walmart) and in India to presumably counter Amazon. Walmart and Google are the two largest mobile payment processors in India through PhonePe and Google Pay, respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Online_Shopping_Festival

https://economictimes.com/small-biz/startups/newsbuzz/walmar...

Google has invested and continues to invest in startups, and I'm guessing a few of those must have been strategic investments targeted specifically to counteract that duopoly.

Indeed, this article is about Froogle (now Google Shopping search) moving back from the change Google made in 2012 to become a paid advertising platform rather than a open-index search engine.

Before they made that change and simultaneously rebranded from Google Product Search to Google Shopping you could make a search there and be fairly sure of finding lots of websites selling what you wanted, and you could compare prices between them easily. But Google didn't get a cut, so now if you repeated the same search, if you get relevant results at all you'll only get the bottom of the barrel shops with inflated prices.

Google certainly has tried to attack Amazon, but the only way they're trying to reduce that duopoly is to insert themselves as a monopoly player! By heavily promoting their advertising platform and pushing deep integrations between merchants and their platform they're forcing out smaller independent shops and marketplaces.

Trying to recreate Amazon, just better, is doomed to failure. The alternative of iterating on their at-the-time working product and extending the usability and visibility of alternative options would have been far better. Amazon's ridiculous 20% fees would get found out soon enough if consumers could actually see a viable alternative.

All that considiered, a better replacement for Paypal integrated with Google and other services is something missing from the world and it's a shame their lack of commitment meant Google Pay hasn't taken off in most places.

If you are Google why would you try and compete with them?

You already have sentiment analysis down as people search your site daily and use android to upload your life photos to their servers for analysis. Then you have Transaction data in their email you can analyze.

I think google is smart to let these other companies slug it out and to play tech partner to struggling brands.

On the contrary, I'd love to hear more about this.

Particularly Geizhals is an indispensable product research tool since it does a great job of collecting, normalizing and filtering product attributes - it replaces the tedious process of comparing several incomplete spec sheets with different terms, values and units.

https://pricesearcher.com seems to be a fairly featureful replacement for Pre-2012 Google Shopping/Product Search/Froogle, but it's UK only and I'm not sure about its long-term survival prospects (and it doesn't include eBay listings).