Google hasn’t really demonstrated a good track record of revolutionary launches. Doing so requires risk and long term investment and vision. Bigger companies have more to lose with risk and thus take much “safer” risks because CEO and middle management are incentivized to do that - risky bets might cause you to be on the losing side of a bet and end up regressing from where you are now. Risky bets are also how you can attain 1000x results but management is incentivized and condition for loss avoidance. That’s why in-house incubators always fail to produce billion dollar businesses - the incentive structure is very wrong. For everything else that Ruth has delivered to Google in terms of getting it into a supremely healthy financial position, I think the concerns about her killing “Google” have been largely borne out (whether or not that’s her or just her delivering what was asked doesn’t really matter - it’s probably both).
Facebook is about the only company attempting to do this at the size of the big tech companies with Oculus. I think because it’s viewed as an existential threat that they otherwise don’t have their own platform so temporary headwinds / market punishing them for investing so heavily is less a concern for the board and Mark. Ford had to outsource this with Cruise and it’s a delicate balance even then. Apple is interesting to watch because they make very few moves in public that it’s hard to see what’s going on even from the inside in terms of innovation. Toyota is an example of taking a bad “market risk” investing into hydrogen although I think that’s an example of either saving face until they fix their EV story, truly making a misstep, or the story being misreported (eg hydrogen for fleet vehicles and trucks but EV for individuals).
> Google hasn’t really demonstrated a good track record of revolutionary launches.
I disagree. Search was the original product, and since then, Google has launched the following other products/technologies that I would also describe as revolutionary: Gmail, Maps, Android, Chrome, Ads/AdSense, YouTube (depending on who you give credit to), MapReduce, Kubernetes, TPUs, TensorFlow, and I'm sure I'm missing some.
The trajectory of these revolutionary launches over time does seem to be decelerating though even as the company gets larger. And with these layoffs it'll likely get even worse, not better.
I expect a retort like this because it’s so common.
And to be clear. I’m not talking about technical infrastructure pieces (eg k8s was kept in house for forever as Borg and then an open source version was built when it was clear they could sell it). Google has a lot of good pieces there and whether or not you can scale is mostly (but not fully) question of being right. When it’s a question of being right on a binary question, these soft politics phenomena disappear because reality is immune to that.
However.
Search: yes. Their first product alongside ads. Today it still represents something like 80% of ALL Alphabet revenue (and probably a much larger share of the profit provided). Anyway, bad example because search and ads were developed when the company was a startup. By necessity that’s your high risk bet.
Gmail: yes. Still early enough in the company’s DNA to take a bold bet. They’ve totally failed that space though by failing to invest and take gambles. Back in the day this also captured almost all IM traffic because EVERYONE had gmail. Now you might get a fresh can of paint every once in a while but there’s nothing bold. The reason? You have billions of users: if you make any meaningful change you’ll lose the ones that aren’t early adopters, especially if a change in direction has instability or feature loss (see Inbox). See their total incoherence on what to do about messaging, a problem they wouldn’t even have if they continued to take risks and innovate a decade prior.
Orkut: they could have had a social network. Gave up on it before truly figuring out how to make it work. Then G+ as an emergency Hail Mary that went nowhere for many reasons, not least of which is that bold risks need to still start small and grow and they went immediately for the billion+ market (notice the copy of GMails rollout strategy that was a poor imitation and failed to realize why that worked - cache and buzz driving “must have this” demand instead of a product copy that was meh and invitations that were more just how far away you were from the elite).
Speaking of social. Google Wave. See: Slack eating their lunch here. Heck, even FB workplace is miles ahead of Google Chat which still can’t figure out scrolling, scheduling posts and reminders, and requesting messages to be silent.
Maps: yes, fantastic. They’ve failed to keep innovating and taking bets here though. Notice the acquisition of Waze. In the long run, expect Maps to falter. The only saving grace is that Maps is important to their ad strategy so as long as users and revenue are aligned they won’t let it get too bad.
Android: first, acquisition. 2. Bold bet that had leadership buy-in for same reason as Oculus at FB - you have to own the platform if you’re an advertising company as otherwise the owner of the platform has you by the balls. See Chrome.
Chrome: yup. Fantastic innovative bold product at launch. Since then, mediocre incremental value with no new bold risk-taking ideas (unless you count pissing off loyal users and enthusiasts).
Ads/Adsense: see above. Too early in the company’s life + it’s 80% of their revenue. They don’t take any bold bets with this cash cow.
YouTube: acquisition. See above - failure to capitalize on social graph, failure to take meaningful innovation risks instead of slowly and methodically growing the business.
MapReduce: neat technical idea that actually preexisted Google’s idea. Google has largely abandoned it anyway afaik as other techniques work better / have better modern tools.
Spanner: this one has some staying power and is innovative but it feels like they continue to fail to innovate here.
TPUs: not bold or revolutionary. Take existing embarrassingly parallel problem you’re running on GPUs and build an ASIC. They’ve done excellent innovation and technical work here. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s not been a huge risky bet leading the market (and they don’t even sell TPUs as standalone units you can buy which would be truly a risky bet to eat their own cloud offering).
So in essence, they’ve always been slowing down for a long time and most of the things you listed as big risky bets just aren’t that. Certainly none of the technical stuff - that’s driven by in-house demand / obvious market demand. I’m talking about changing the rules of the market. If you own the market you’re not going to change the rules because you might not end up on top. See Clayton Christensen. I do think we should limit the ability for a market leader to enter new spaces though and how much they can charge. Once you’re big your ability to manipulate the markets creates meaningful market inefficiencies. The common belief is that these get sorted out over time but I’m not so sure / I’m not sure that regulations can’t help shorten how long market inefficiencies promulgate.
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, the vast majority of even large tech companies will never have a product that meets it.
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.
Facebook is about the only company attempting to do this at the size of the big tech companies with Oculus. I think because it’s viewed as an existential threat that they otherwise don’t have their own platform so temporary headwinds / market punishing them for investing so heavily is less a concern for the board and Mark. Ford had to outsource this with Cruise and it’s a delicate balance even then. Apple is interesting to watch because they make very few moves in public that it’s hard to see what’s going on even from the inside in terms of innovation. Toyota is an example of taking a bad “market risk” investing into hydrogen although I think that’s an example of either saving face until they fix their EV story, truly making a misstep, or the story being misreported (eg hydrogen for fleet vehicles and trucks but EV for individuals).