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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

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Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#22

Someday, Google will be a business school case study on the dangers of a) having all your money come from one cash cow and b) having too many self-directed engineers with no management vision. Google is a car with a 1,000 horsepower engine but which can't drive in a straight line.

Seems like it is easier for a smaller group of capable people to make a big change than a giant org of diverse talented people from different backgrounds

Pretty sure this was a motivating factor in the re-organization from Google to Alphabet.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#23

> It’s amazing how they have four monopolies and only monetize one of them. They appear to me to have begun monetizing google maps. And it is awful.

This is why I've switched to Apple Maps for like 98% of my navigation needs.

I might be biased, because I live in one of the cities with the updated maps data, sure, but I find that it handles most of my use cases just as well as Google Maps.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#24

Google is only good at search. The only reason why I use everything else they create is because of their massive distribution, market penetration and inter-operability. Thankfully there are solid alternatives in certain areas like fore example using iPhone instead of Android. But for everything else I don't see a massive migration happening any time soon. Notion, Hey.com, DuckDuckGo are all niche products. My dad has…

Sounds like they're also good at interoperability, market penetration, and distribution. Do you not think they're good at video streaming, security research, email, or cloud hosting?

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#25
No kidding. Early adopter of gsuite for domains (work and personal email). The google home devices CANNOT get your calendar from your google calendar. My Alexa device can easily.

The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy.

They have some things they keep on improving. I think youtube is there (after the dumped plus thank goodness). Chrome seems to be moving along nicely.

I used to push google chat / video hard, including to external business partners. Then - yoink, google duo was hot, then yoing, hangouts? then yoink, hangouts meet? Then yoink, meet. It's honestly mind blowing. So now we are stuck on zoom.

We were making the move to docs and sheets, but it's basically stuck. Now it looks like office 365 is going to be the cloud editing future for word / excel type needs. For those of us who are older this is totally incredible - Office was so anti-linux / cloud it was incredible, and now word in the cloud kinda works!

And yes - when you get locked out of even a paying account because some state machine gets screwed up (looking at you gsuite admin onboarding flow with some kind of zombie state issues) you CANNOT get an actual person who can help.

Android / Chrome are amazing - why not put the execs like this in charge of shipping everything? Instead i keep hearing that google engineers are going on "strike" (ie, getting company paid days off).

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#28
post #16

>I’m a long shareholder of Google. It’s amazing how they have four monopolies and only monetize one of them. Okay, but we don't want Google as a monopoly... or do we? Breaking up the monopoly means throwing away the ten-year lead.

I think OC's point is that they're breaking up their own monopoly with a complete lack of product vision.

Google Wallet/Pay/Android Pay could have become Stripe, Venmo. Google Hangouts/Meet/Chat could have become Zoom, Slack, Teams, iMessage, etc. Google Finance could have become Robinhood, Mint.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#29

Someday, Google will be a business school case study on the dangers of a) having all your money come from one cash cow and b) having too many self-directed engineers with no management vision. Google is a car with a 1,000 horsepower engine but which can't drive in a straight line.

Seems like it is easier for a smaller group of capable people to make a big change than a giant org of diverse talented people from different backgrounds

A small focused team of diverse talented people from different backgrounds, can make the biggest-impact.

Focus=speed. Focus is what's missing at Google, and why they have such a sprawling staff and politics.

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