Which is sad and short sighted, because the best way to increase the absolute value of your assets is to encourage large scale societal innovation. Grow the pie, not your relative share of the pie.
Sadly, I think there are too many people who would rather be king of the wastelands than relatively equal to all others in a post scarcity world.
We need to become collectively better about extracting these dark personalities from power if we want a good future.
but from a company & shareholder perspective, this sort of societal innovation and improvement is not privately capturable. Back in the 70-80's, Bell labs did this sort of innovation, but they were funded directly via a gov't subsidy (because they are given a monopoly on telecommunications), and so management didn't have to care that the expenditure on R&D returned profit, as long as it is innovative.
I wish we could return to those days, but i dont believe it is possible today.
You might only use Maps, Gmail, and Search, but you've probably also:
- Used a ton of services hosted in Google Cloud (which Google built outright),
- interacted with data that was filtered through BigQuery or Cloud Spanner (which Google built)
- Edited something in Sheets, Docs, Slides, or Forms (all acquisitions, I think)
- Viewed a photo on Google Photos,
- Used Chrome,
- etc.
And that's before all of the stuff Google has produced that's open-source (Golang, Kubernetes, Flutter/Dart, V8, etc), or their AI stuff (DeepMind, AlphaGo, Brain), or their autonomous driving stuff (Waymo, which is probably a patent factory on its own accord)
Also, let's not discount that Maps has gotten a LOT of innovations over time. Is there another mapping service that can give you historical street view of almost any road in the US within seconds?
I worked there in 2015 and also disliked my experience, but Google definitely definitely moves the needle on stuff.
Google's "innovations" are minor evolutions now. They have some moonshots, sure, if Waymo is succesful, but nothing impacted the world like search did. Historical street view? Really?
The Dart language and Flutter framework have been a rather innovative attempt at making cross platform apps.
But yeah, the amount of innovation at Google has certainly decreased over time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs
That's not to say Google didn't do a ton to advance the concept, but it wasn't their idea originally, and they acquired a lot of the technology.
Its even worse than that for me in that not only am I not using any new products Google is producing, but they killed off a number of the ones I did use (some which they produced, some which they acquired and killed).
So not only are they not producing products I care about to begin with, even if they managed to change this I'd be super hesitant to adopt the product because of the reasonable expectation they will kill it off after I start to depend on it.
These companies no longer need to innovate to stay relevant. They focus instead on stifling competition, lobbying politicians, marketing, advertising, dark patterns, etc. The good people eventually get shut out and shut down and leave or stop trying to influence change. The bureaucracy wins and eventually the music stops.
> I'm increasingly convinced that a large portion of our problems as a society is our absolute refusal to hold anyone in power accountable for anything.
The problem is power is too concentrated. Companies no longer need to innovate. This isn't just in tech. Everyone wants their assets to grow at others expense society be damned.