Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not familiar with all of those but if the ones I am none are revolutionary. They are mostly just a large company using their vast resources to capture market share. Gmail, Android and Chrome aren't revolutionary in the least bit. They are just Google taking over existing segments to sell ads more effectively. Same for maps, perhaps street view was at the least innovative.
That sounds like some pretty high standards then. What within the area of tech would you classify as revolutionary then? I'm guessing DARPA: The Internet, IBM/Microsoft: the PC, Apple: the iPhone. Anything else? I'm talking about the next category of innovation down, whatever you want to call it if you feel "revolutionary" needs to be reserved for generation-defining technologies. Because with your current definition…
1. There’s ML research that clearly shows that you can convert video streams into neural nets that only need to transmit a very small amount of bandwidth for a high quality construction on the remote. Why didn’t this research come out of Google which has gobs of people working on the space? Why hasn’t the Meet team figured out how to get this into customers hands? Certainly the hardware for it exists and it would drastically change what a video call experience looks like.
2. They abandoned Google glass (correctly - that was a terrible product) and their VR in favor of sitting back and watching what others accomplish to then copy cat what a successful product would look like. Why didn’t they wait for in-lens displays while continuing to invest in the R&D of the product itself?
3. Android is a know memory hog. Android phones require 2x the amount of RAM as an iPhone for the same performance. Why hasn’t Google figured out how to bridge this gap? This is also a big reason why they’re watches struggle.
4. I was advocating to an SVP that Google should release a wearable digital watch/fitness band that’s a very basic experience focused on actual value add instead of a smartwatch: an SE so that Google Pay works without needing internet connectivity, mDL integrated, BT phone calls for the cellular enabled version, basic fitness sensors. It was shot down because he didn’t think it could make his P&Ls only for the SVP to later publicly call out the Android SVP for “why did Apple get to mDL first” ignoring that I was the first Bay Area engineer on the ISO committee.
5. Google took a long time to materialize their in-house CPU and it’s largely been underwhelming I think compared to what Apple’s been doing. Of course they started not too long ago (very late) and are copying Apple’s playbook so not sure how innovative. But for a company that’s been making their own HW since forever…it took them a long time just to make the decision to copy. There’s a lot of cool buzzwords but hard to compare value. Disruptive play: compete with Qualcomm here.
6. Fiber: gave up instead of figuring out how to outcompete telco business practices only to resurrect it again.
7. Stadia: instead of going with a disruptive Netflix-like business model and eating the upfront costs to publishers, they tried and failed. There’s a theme here that Rick is not cut up for anything more innovative than managing mature P&L products.
Then there’s all the dead end projects that they refuse to can because they are unlikely to deliver on the vision. Most of their efforts around “health” are vanity efforts that don’t require the amount of man hours being invested (certainly not rolled up under the commercial health app product line). Or at least this was the case many years ago - not sure about now. They talked a huge game about all the things they were going to enable and have a proven track record of not being able to deliver on any of them. X is neat pie in the sky ideas that never materialize. Moonshot ideas actually require you to get to the moon once. Don’t think any of that has ever come out of X.
Deep mind is probably the best innovative jewel in Google’s arsenal. Most of their magic comes from keeping Google disease at arm’s length. It might be interesting to see a Google with Demis Hassabis at the helm and a mandate to bring back some innovation to Google.