Genuine question: What is category defining about Google Calender? Or even good? In my experience it lacks a lot of features and is kind of clunky.

I worked at roughly 10 companies in my life. Most either used Outlook/Office or Gmail/Calendar/Drive. Personally I hate the Microsoft office productivity stack, and on the other hand, I love using the Google stack, including Calendar.

Different strokes for different folks. I don’t like google calendar and prefer outlook’s. It’s probably the only part of office except Excel that I actually think works well.

Not perfectly, I’d still like a good calendar based around sharing and collab, but the best out there.

I think we need a good decentralized calendar that treats all calendars as peers. Outlook and google treat a single server as being the authority and everything has to go to those servers for actions. I’d rather see something like a calendar blob for individuals that gets sent around and rehosted lots of places like git. Or at least the availability. It’s still funny to me how hard it is to tell someone off server what your availability is.

There’s nothing wrong with you preferring one service over another, but the question was what makes Google Calendar “category defining”.

The commenter you’re replying to was explicit:

> rest is only buy/copy/steal.

Go check the wikipedia page for those products and scroll to the “History” section. You might be surprised how the common thread is “another company was doing X, and then”.

Most of those on your list were either bought/copied/stolen, as mentioned in my comment.

For the office suite tools they offer (calendar, docs, gmail and drive), they were the first to move to the cloud, but nowadays there are so many companies with similar offerings that are either cheaper or better.

Even Microsoft nowadays has Excel on the cloud, which let's all be frank. It's much superior.

Before I do look like a google hater, I use a Pixel, pay for Google drive etc, but I know how nowadays I have so much more interesting choices(better privacy, better phones etc) and don't move out mostly out of laziness.

Excel still unrivaled. By comparison Google sheets feels like one of those "I could do that in a weekend" projects.

"Ads" was bought (DoubleClick) and in fact I've seen it referred to as the best acquisition in the internet era, as measured by what they paid for it vs the revenue directly attributed to it.

YouTube was bought as well.

Android was bought as well.

Ads, YouTube and Android are valuable tech. Analytics, Gmail, Docs, Calendar are all shitty apps. Not in the sense that they're bad, just in the sense that there's nothing innovative about them.

Of everything that you mentioned in your list, the only ones that are genuine Google innovations are Search and Maps.

Docs was an acquisition iirc.