> In those 12 years, Google did not launch a single new product that they didn't shut down a year later. 115 thousand people, most of them college graduates, did nothing useful for more than a decade. Their primary accomplishment was to inflate house prices in tech hubs.

This is just like...obviously false. Google photos (initially part of G+, but spun off into its own thing) as a sort of obvious product example. Not to mention any one of hundreds of products in the cloud org, or like an entire hardware business.

It's also kind of silly to imply (as you are) that launching a new product is the only useful thing. I'd expect iterating on and improving existing products to also be valuable? Like so much of the startup focus is on execution over ideas, but I guess not here.

Haha you're so right, I can't think of anything at all.

*closes Chrome tab on my Android phone, opens another website hosted on Google Cloud Platform*

You're already down all three, because Chrome was first released in 2008, and Android was also released in 2008, and GCP was apparently released in 2008 as well. Who knew?

lol so true

*taps terminal with a Pixel phone using Google Pay, uploads selfie to Google Photos, plans a trip in Google Flights and saves the itinerary in Google Drive*

And to be fair with GCP, it's not like they released every single offering in 2008, at least I'd assume. Just like how AWS started with I think just a few things like S3 and EC2.

>chrome

Copy of Safari.

>android

Copy of iOS

>GCP

Copy of AWS.

Cloning an existing product needed, at the absolute most, a staff of a hundred each. If you want to be wildly excessive, add 900 useless middle managers and developer relations people.

Then what were the other 112,000 full time Google employees doing? What one hundred and twelve business critical new products were they engaged in?

"Nothing"? Then why did they need to have college degrees?

> Each one of those needed, at the absolute most, a staff of a hundred.

Ah yes, this is why AWS is noted for employing only 100 engineers, and Apple employs 200 across its browser and OS divisions.

This is rich. If Google refused to grow it would have become another Yahoo. Chrome was launched in 2008 and was barely usable. Do you think it could have remained anywhere near dominant in ads, search and lot more if it stayed at 20k people?

> In those 12 years, Google did not launch a single new product that they didn't shut down a year later.

Okay. I know people like to shit on Google. But this is beyond the pale. Google Cloud by itself is a lot larger than a huge number of entire companies.