It was totally low hanging fruit. Try building a search engine today. The barriers to entry are much harder. Finding useful sites and filtering out spam are much more difficult now than when Google started. The signal to noise ratio on the internet has plummeted.
And that is just the difficulty of building an application. Actually gaining marketshare in search is a whole other problem to solve and also very difficult. Even if you manage to build a superior search engine you’ll have an uphill battle convincing people to use it.
This is what it means to have all the low hanging fruit cleaned out. Google built their application at a time when most people weren’t even on the internet and spam was barely getting started as a social problem. Sure, what they had was remarkable and innovative, but only because everything else at the time was so bad. But now? Different story.
You can actually read Page & Brin’s original paper online [1] and implement it yourself. It’s not very difficult. In fact, it was an assignment question in my 3rd year numerical methods class. Unfortunately if you just point the basic algorithm at a crawl (which you can download for free here [2]) you’re going to get useless results. The spammers are optimized to fool this algorithm (Pagerank) so you need to find a way to filter out the spam. And that is a very very deep rabbit hole!
This is what everyone thought in 1999. Search engines were a solved problem in a crowded market where there could be little room for new contender And whatever limitations we had in search were just inherent in how it all worked and we just had to deal with it.
We must have lived in different 1999's
But that's not where others failed. Instead, it's coming up with the idea, realizing that it's a truly good idea, that was the important thing. (Remember, Yahoo and other(s) didn't want to buy Google and the algorithm, when they had the chance.)
Maybe if you replace "totally low hanging fruit", with "It was undiscovered winner-takes-it-all markets" I'd agree.
In hindsight, everything is obvious. But initially, discovering that opportunity — looking at how many people (how few, just 2) did, it wasn't easy.
I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make. I think what's being proposed is that the more undiscovered markets get discovered, the fewer undiscovered markets are left, and the more difficult they are to discover. Pagerank was a good idea that worked.
And back at the time, before Google Search, many many related markets didn't, couldn't, yet exist. And, back then, I'd think PageRank could count as one of the few and difficult thing to discover.
I think "low hanging fruit" makes it sound too easy :- )
Then you missed the point. It doesn't matter whether PageRank was something trivial any grad student could come up with or if it was on the level of Einstein's General Relativity in difficulty. The point is that it was one basic idea.
Today if you want to dethrone Google you need to overcome the enormous amount of engineering that has gone into Google Search and Maps. You can't do that by just "discovering" something as a grad student. It's going to take thousands (or millions) of engineering hours to achieve.
That is what it means for the low-hanging fruit to be gone. It's like the difference between discovering electricity, as we all know took quite a while but was achieved by a small number of scientists and inventors over a period of a couple centuries, and trying to compete against the modern-day electrical distribution network on your own, which is essentially impossible without some kind of Star Trek alien galactic empire level technology.
The big guys at that time were blinded by their own success, Google wanted users to do their search and leave the site which was completely opposite to what the Yahoo's of that day wanted to do, they wanted users to hang out on their portal.
I’ve often heard the saying how “everything easy has already been invented” and that it’s so much harder today to invent new things.
I think it’s a fallacy. Things were just as hard in the past.
I owned an ISP in 1998 and there were plenty of search engines at the time. Google invented something unique and innovative and they were rewarded tremendously for it. There were literally hundreds of other companies trying to do the same thing but Google was better. If it was low hanging fruit then Hotbot or any of the other major players could’ve done it.
In 1998 there were plenty of search engines and their use was distributed more evenly. The internet was still fairly new and most people weren't online yet. It certainly wasn't an integral part of most people's life. Google came along and improved on the existing search engines and in doing so wiped out a lot of that competition, becoming what they are today.
A new search engine now has to compete with global network effects, orders of magnitudes more data, Android, and a complex web of interconnected functionality.
Even only looking at the advantage that Google Maps brings to the table totally blows past any barriers present in 1998. Sure, you could build a much better search engine but who's going to use it when it can't give them directions?
Then consider that if you look like you'll end up making some headway, you're likely to just get bought and killed off/integrated.
Are you a pessimist in life? You’re focusing on only the negative aspects of starting a search engine today.
24 years after Google was formed we have orders of magnitude cheaper processing, orders of magnitude better AI, the ability to start small with cloud computing and work your way up from there. We have 24 years of search engine research to a large extent publicly available.
I really think all this “things would’ve been so much easier back then” are simply excuses as to why someone can’t do something today.
They do exist, have you heard of any of them?
My intention wasn't to dismiss the possibility of popular new search engines. Only to highlight that the environment is substantially more complex/challenging than in 1997.
I actually think that their entrepreneur spirit and business attitude made them successful. Other guys thought of their search engines as of technical experiments and hobbies, they weren't serious about it. In another words Google cared more for innovating their search engine, making money and then reinvesting it back in R&D and staying ahead of everybody. The same story was with Microsoft and Digital Research; Bill Gates simply cared more business wise and was more fanatical in making money than Gary Kildall.
I'm not a programmer but I can write down on a piece of paper an algorithm which is more efficient than Google's in filtering out "spam" websites. I'm from southeast Europe and for my local market there are numerous ecommerce phishing websites that are popping up on a first page of search results. Some even ranked first. I reported them to Google but 6 months after nothing changed.
Stadia was a rich technical problem with an application area that’s accessible to Googlers. Even if Googlers don’t video game, real life is a game to them. But Stadia failed because it lacked the artistic passion behind Nintendo and the best gaming studios.
If Google set themselves up like McKinsey—- i.e. turn their engineering workforce into a contracting service—- then Google might be able to contribute to a real product. But Googlers just don’t care about people. They care about puzzles and systematicity.
PageRank actually originates from Economics[0] where Input–output model tells you that you need to care about balancing inputs and outputs in order to have an efficient economy. Speaking of internet search engines and ranking websites inputs would be links(backlinks) and outputs would be ranked web documents.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_model
This may be part of the problem. Google was founded by algorithm nerds, and that's now part of the DNA of the company. Apple (Tesla/Starlink/etc) was founded upon vision - what could the future look like? How do I make that happen today? - and then, somehow, to pare that back to something that's economically viable in a reasonable time frame.
That said, taking existing problems and trying to better apply algorithms to make a better product is still a thing in AI space though - and even here plenty of start ups are taking the lead.
Within high technical complexity space, they differ in significant ways with Apple or Tesla – they don't have organizational mechanisms to do deep vertically integrated problem solutioning. Even when they have academically much superior AI tech, their ability to productize those capabilities is slow and less effective due to how cross-organization collaboration works.
On the business side, they don't have a business team really. There's no MBAs scheming new pricing or bundling models nor are there people wanting to chase/beat market competitors. So, whenever they do SKU based pricing or subscription based pricing, they tend to get it less right than, say, Microsoft.
Edit: One thing to add... Google's history of 'solving highly technical problems' has really been more around scaling infrastructure, with their notable successful products being Google search, Maps, Gmail, and YouTube - with Android being an exception that rule if you'd call that a 'product'. Maps and Google assistance have some technical aspects, but nothing really out of the grasp of a modern startup. Technical ability for SaaS companies isn't really the moat it used to be.
Not any more. These days their DNA is ads.
> The fact that Tesla has failed to output a new car or really innovate much lately
They literally turned into a battery company with their own batteries, their own chemistry and their own end to end manufacturing process. They are making state of the art batteries when only 5 years ago this company had never even made single high volume car.
You can like or dislike FSD but it is innovative.
In terms of manufacturing, things like Gigapress is now getting copied all over the car industry.
Innovation is not just new products.
And in capital intensive business, scale itself requires innovation.
And they are doing this while having 30% growth every year with exploding profits at the same time. After 10 years when people were screaming about how EV wouldn't ever be profitable.
> spacex appears to be stuck in a morass of engine troubles for their latest big rockets
What? SpaceX is currently reaching an incredibly high operational cadence. That requires innovation.
SpaceX is launching Starlink sats with laser communication and deploying it large scale. They are producing incredibly advanced antenna technology as consumer electronics.
The Raptor engine is the most advanced rocket engine in human history and they are on their second major iteration building them as fast as very few rocket engine in history have ever been produced. They are regularly doing full duration test of these engines. Currently its not really the engines that is holding them back.
Claiming that being a little bit late on building the by far the most advanced rocket system in human history is taking his eye of the ball is pretty absurd.
Tesla were early adopters by making use of them, but not innovators.
There are two versions of the Gigapress history going around. In one version the idea came to the Idra CEO in a dream, while in the other version Elon gave multiple die casting manufacturers a call and got a hard no from everyone, expect for Idra who gave him a ‘maybe’.
Whichever it it is not that important in my view. What is undisputed is that Tesla put their money where their mouth is and took a real money bet on this new unproven technology early on. That is as much innovation as actually coming up with the machine and idea yourself.
Edit: to add to my point about innovation, from what I understand, no car company has ever used die casted parts in structural components due to concerns about internal stresses resulting from the die cast process. Normally this requires expensive post treatments but Tesla developed a custom alloy that makes this post treatment unnecessary. I am a bit light on details; someone with a metallurgy or structural engineering background pls chime in.
Structural die-casting has been a trend in the automotive industry, having started before the Gigapress. One article on this, from 2018, is https://www.spotlightmetal.com/opportunities-for-die-casting... and in that you see an analysis of the economic benefits, even though it's an article for public consumption.
The article itself, back in 2018, mentions cars already using structural die-casting and basically forecasts structural die-casting becoming a more typical manufacturing method.
Also its a part of company from China operating in Italy.
These machines are also continuously improved in prosecution at Tesla and that knowlage is flowing back to the company. The machines deployed in Texas are already an improvement over those in California. There is a lot around the core machine that needs to be improved as well.
My understanding is that they saw the usefulness of these machines quite early and were developing them in this direction and that they had already produced 4000 tonne presses of this general type. Now it's at 6000 and 8000 tonnes.
Customers are needed to make use of good ideas-- you can't take them otherwise, but the innovation is the work the Italians did.
Machines that like still wouldn't exist today had Tesla not done the necessary investment.
There is the machine and then the application of the machine to an actual production process.
It's like Germany and its heavy presses, during WWII. Lack of manpower, or in this case, something else that is wrong, leads to an player going for the most complete realization of that is easier and has major advantages.
All other car companies?
> If the other manufacturers have that down, then their need for very large components of this kind is lower.
This is not how this works. Tesla also 'has it down' with the Model 3 manufacturing line.
Its still lower CAPX and lower OPEX to use gigapress.
This is a large part why even the former CEO of VW said they were behind in some ways.
Yes, but at the time when they went after these presses as the thing for the future, they didn't quite have it down.
>Its still lower CAPX and lower OPEX to use gigapress.
Now, probably, yes.
That’s Panasonic, not Tesla. You are confused by the Tesla marketing here. Tesla makes plenty of interesting things but that’s not part of it.
Yes, Tesla is buying batteries from Panasonic. They are also buying batteries from LQ and CATL. Nobody questions that.
In addition to that Tesla has its totally own production process and chemistries. These are not shared with LG, CATL or Panasonic. Its own fully owned battery factory and research facility in California. They are currently building a battery plan in Austin and in Berlin, these are fully owned and operated Tesla plants.
These plants have their own manufacturing processes developed in-house. They even built the machines them selves. A lot of this is done in Germany in a former well known German supplier that Tesla bought outright like 5 years ago. They also bought a company in Canada that makes the battery filling machines and pumps in Canada.
If you still think we are in 2014 and Tesla is just being supplied by Panasonic, you have not been paying attention.
Google virtually own Android, and yet they haven't innovated or taken the initiative in a way that Apple has. A distinction can be drawn with Apple here, as they've opened new markets by making devices that didn't exist yet (e.g., touch-driven mobile computing). They innovated from the beginning, not so much remaking Altavista with Bigtable.
The first phone with a capacitive touch screen was the LG Prada. Of course, resistive touch screen phones existed for a long, long time before that.
Sony Ericsson Liveview, MOTOACTV, the Pebble watch, even the Samsung Galaxy Gear predates the Apple Watch.
As always, downvotes are welcome but where I am wrong?
But you’re just seeing the screen 1 dimensionally yes capacitive screens existed but when I say the “iPhone screen” is why it was a success I mean the technology (capacitive) + the interaction design (momentum scroll and pinch to zoom) + heavy optimization (jerky scrolling was unacceptable, every interaction had to move exactly with the finger, even browser redrawing was decoupled from the scroll to enable this).
All these parts together in unison and to a high level of polish is what made that product magical and a success.
On the other hand the LG Prada devs and designers just had jerky scrolling and no one on the team said “this isn’t good enough”
If you ask me, Apple's main innovation with the iPhone was making the UI usable with just a finger instead of a stylus.
The reason Apple’s success at product development is so hard is that it involves orchestrating many, many different technologies together to create a powerful set of capabilities accessed through a consistent seamless user experience. That’s not a simple thing to even describe or discuss, let alone understand. It’s why they take years to develop products, and are almost never first in a new category, such as smart watches as you say.
That said, the LG Prada beat the iPhone to market by a month but the iPhone was in development for longer. What’s really interesting is the LG Prada II included a physical keyboard showing they where backing away from the design rather than doubling down.
Opera Mini was well optimized for cellphones of the time and bandwidth limited cellphone plans, but Apple’s deal with AT&T to allow unlimited bandwidth flipped a lot of those design decisions on their head. IMO what really separated the iPhone’s browser was a larger screen + better UI + better rendering + unlimited bandwidth meant it could just be used to casually browse the web.
Opera Turbo was always disabled on my phone, never needed it. But I never used GPRS, only EDGE and later.
The iPhone was released June 29, 2007 but announced in January. “On 7 November 2007, Opera Mini 4 was released. According to Johan Schön, technical lead of Opera Mini development, the entire code was rewritten.[28] Opera Mini 4 includes the ability to view web pages similarly to a desktop based browser by introducing Overview and Zoom functions, and a landscape view setting. In Overview mode, the user can scroll a zoomed-out version of certain web pages.[29] Using a built-in pointer, the user can zoom into a portion of the page to provide a clearer view”
Hmm, perhaps I had a beta version of that. I definitely had it before the iPhone came out. Or it might have been a different browser? Not sure.
Mobile hardware wasn't capable of delivering such smoothness. Apple's innovation was to prioritize UI rendering over everything else. When you're zooming, rendering stops and browser only deals with zooming. Regardless of current CPU capabilities and load, scrolling and zooming is always smooth. And turns out people care about those way more than parallel rendering.
That's some underappreciated outside of the box thinking.
You call it innovative, I call it draconian anti-consumer walled garden that needs to be eliminated
And that’s because it was a terrible phone.
I’m confused by your comment. Android pioneered a good 80% of the modern smartphone UX. Apple makes nice phones but they are pretty much always late mover.
Their Pixel line hasn't dominated the market by any means, but has also done well enough that they can at least claim to some extent that they don't "need" the other manufacturers. Of course they do, but they can use "whatever, we'll just make $COOL_THING a Pixel exclusive and leave you behind" a threat with teeth. They actually do sometimes make features Pixel exclusive (sometimes just for a limited time), and that seems to be working out ok for them.
Similarly, Apple made a lot of concessions to the wireless carriers back in the beginning, but I'd wager these days they've also clawed back most of that control. If Apple tells their customers, "we wanted to give you this cool new feature, but Verizon wouldn't let us", that will not go well for Verizon.
So I do agree that there's some compromise, and Google (and Apple) don't get to do literally anything they want, they are in a much better position to control their ecosystems and dictate terms than they were back when they started.
What concessions would those have been? The way I recall it, Apple in the early iPhone years would always favor retaining control over the phone experience over carrier reach, so they were available on very few carriers initially (especially compared to Android), but would not make concessions to them. Eventually, iPhones became a must-have item for carriers, so they all signed on under Apple's terms — and nowadays, unlocked phones are mostly the norm anyway.
Making sure the other guy loses isn’t great motivation to do anything. Especially once the “other guy” has lost. Google isn’t especially excited by OS, because their bread and butter is all in the cloud they just don’t have the institutional energy to care about consumer software for the consumer’s sake. It’s always looked at through the lens of how it will help advertisers and since the zeitgeist for the last few years has been about privacy as it relates to personal devices, they can’t really “innovate” much without hurting their core business.
I worked in Google consumer hardware and yes this is how it is. Quite a few motivated and talented people, for sure, but organizationally it just ended up being "copy Apple and/or Amazon's roadmap."
There are whole product areas at Google whose entire existence boils down to "everyone else is doing it, so why can't we?"
And the rest of it: "Ok, we killed Microsoft here, now what?" "Eh... whatever."
I do agree that they’re victims of their early success, but rather that it proves that it’s rather difficult to make multiple successful products.
When you own a whole ecosystem, like Microsoft and Apple do, it makes it much easier to do; you can also see this in case of Google Maps. You can just push your products inside the ecosystem, and be almost guaranteed success.
Stadia drifted away from that ecosystem (as does Google Cloud for that matter), and as such is much more difficult to pull off. Combine that with Google’s reputation for killing things, and the writing was on the wall from the start.