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Re:Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars by mortenjorck on Thursday June 23, 2011 @08:29PM (#2690484)
Google is good at entering a market just as it's catching on with a meaningfully-differentiated product, and the product markets itself. See Search, Gmail, and Maps.

When Google doesn't do this, they have to rely on marketing. See Wave or Buzz.

Re:Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars by varjag on Friday June 24, 2011 @06:56AM (#2691726)
Every big company has its string of failed products. I'm not convinced that Google is really worse in this regard than Apple, Microsoft or Yahoo.
Re:Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars by esrauch on Friday June 24, 2011 @12:41PM (#2692868)
Has Apple had any failed products in the last 10 years?
Re:Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars by Travis on Sunday June 26, 2011 @03:40PM (#2698880)
The XServe line was shut down (although you can still buy the OS X server edition).

The Cube was a failure, although I'm not exactly positive it's exactly within 10 years.

.Mac (or MobileMe) hasn't been as successful as I think apple believed it would be.

Re:Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars by mortenjorck on Friday June 24, 2011 @01:17PM (#2692979)
iPod Hi-Fi, buttonless iPod Shuffle. But that's a pretty good track record.
Re:Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars by varjag on Friday June 24, 2011 @03:04PM (#2693446)
None of them has any failed products if you set convenient enough window.
Re:Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars by esrauch on Friday June 24, 2011 @06:50PM (#2694253)
Google has only existed for 12 years, so it doesn't seem like it would be fair to talk about Apple failures from 1988 in this context.
Re:Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars by varjag on Saturday June 25, 2011 @09:01AM (#2695563)
There were enough failures with Apple (constant string of failures in fact) until late 1990s. Also, if we take Yahoo!, a successful business by any measure, it is hard to assign any two years where they didn't fail at something. Mind you, Yahoo! is a prefect example of marketing-driven company, much more so than Apple (who actually prides itself more at solid design and technology).
Re:Nevada passes law authorizing driverless cars by esrauch on Saturday June 25, 2011 @02:14PM (#2696181)
I would honestly have a lot of difficulty naming a Yahoo! product that launched in the last 10 years, period.

I understand that Apple had more than enough failures in the 80s and 90s, but honestly they are basically a different company since 1998 when Steve Jobs came back and completely changed the trajectory of the company.

They have managed to have basically no significant failed products at all in the entire term that Google has existed at all as a company. Google and Microsoft have had several extremely high profile failures, and dozens of failures as minor as the most significant failed product that Apple had.

The stock price of the company went from 3.5 in 1997 to 350 in 2011. I just don't think that the Newton is at all relevant when talking about how careful the respective major companies are to avoid large public failures.