Hacker News

points by Keyframe 1 day ago | 0 comments

I wish this was a joke. Turns out, Google turned into a joke. I was really rooting for them; They had everything in place to be the top dog. From people to research to hardware to internet.zip (and video.zip and emails.zip and newsgroups.zip and code.zip and android.zip etc..). I don't want to sound negative and what they built is probably great in its own right, but what was expected of them and what they have delivered so far, I can definitely say that they blew it hard. They did manage to turn gemini into search 2.0 on google.com and it does work.. but, come on. Where's the google of yesterday? Seems they put a ton of weight that's not on the level of people that were there before and I don't want to offend anyone there, but it sure looks like that.

[–] stingraycharles 1 day ago

The same was true 15 years ago when the cloud started hyping up and Google missed that in similar ways as well, so I’m not sure whether the “Google of yesterday” is who you think it is.

This is the Google of yesterday, they didn’t change.

[–] Keyframe 1 day ago

Fair point

[–] hsaliak 1 day ago

A good % of the Google of yesterday is now in working in frontier labs, crushing it.

[–] miohtama 1 day ago

The only good products Google has ever built in-house are search and GMail. Everything else is acquisition or crappy product.

So we should ask “why would it be different this time.”

[–] ptero 1 day ago

IMO google maps and google earth were revolutionary when they came out. And maps stayed well ahead of competition for many many years.

[–] Keyframe 1 day ago

I'm one of those few that liked Google Wave!

[–] antonvs 1 day ago

There are ones of you!

[–] struant 1 day ago

Maps was originally an acquisition.

[–] gnothing 1 day ago

Both were acquisitions.

[–] mrheosuper 1 day ago

Youtube, hate it or not, is really good. The amount of data they have to handle everyday is on different level.

[–] afavour 1 day ago

For sure. It was an acquisition, though.

[–] adrithmetiqa 1 day ago

Apart from search, what did Google make in house?

[–] masklinn 20 hours ago

Gmail? I don’t recall that being an acqui.

[–] transcriptase 1 day ago

Google finance was an incredible portfolio tracking and research tool. Until they released v2 which took away all the functionality and replaced it with a news feed.

[–] gcatalfamo 22 hours ago

And think that somebody designed it, and somebody else approved it.

[–] stingraycharles 1 day ago

Chrome was pretty great as well, it was desperately needed.

[–] nayuki 1 day ago

Google Chrome didn't start from scratch. Blink came from WebKit which came from KDE's KHTML. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML

[–] socalgal2 1 day ago

Entirely irrelevant - Chrome really stepped up both security and speed over WebKit at that time.

[–] nayuki 1 day ago

The comment you replied to was: "The only good products Google has ever built in-house are [...]"

I don't have enough information to judge how much of Chrome was original work and how much was pre-existing work. Though I guess by now, after nearly 20 years, Chrome's codebase looks absolutely nothing like KHTML.

[–] baq 1 day ago

It was the rare confluence of people needing the same thing the megacorp showing them ads needed. We all benefited, no hard feelings, but always remember to look at where the puck is going.

[–] stingraycharles 20 hours ago

I blame how things turned out more on Mozilla being distracted and forgetting about their own user base, to be honest.

[–] baq 18 hours ago

The fact that it made the browser itself impossible to monetize to fund development was a part of it. They were an antitrust insurance to Google and tried lots of stuff to improve its position. Granted they failed, sometimes quite spectacularly, but I still drive Firefox for personal use.

[–] stingraycharles 16 hours ago

The money earned with Firefox should have gone to Firefox but went to vanity projects instead. Firefox OS, Mozilla Social, Firefox Send / Persona, acquiring Pocket, etc etc. And all of it failed.

Nevermind the controversies of silly ad campaigns and CEO salaries and whatnot.

Mozilla should have just reinvested all the money into Firefox. Heck, they couldn’t even finish their rust-based rendering engine.

[–] raisedbyninjas 1 day ago

Isn't Waymo the state of the art?

[–] aardvarkr 1 day ago

They’re still the same price as an uber and there’s no way to actually order one, it’s all random. I don’t understand why… like I actively would prefer them. If they were available so instead I find myself reaching for the cybercabs instead at half the price.

[–] nhod 1 day ago

Uh, use the Waymo app?

[–] diegolas 19 hours ago

HN is hilarious man lol half the world runs on the office suite and drive, at all levels

[–] miohtama 14 hours ago

Workspace was acquisition.

Google acquired it from Upstartle (the company behind the online word processor Writely).

Writely was created in 2005 by Claudia Carpenter, Steve Newman, and Sam Schillace. Google bought Upstartle in 2006 and Writely became the foundation of Google Docs. Google then combined it with other acquisitions, such as 2Web Technologies for spreadsheets, and launched Google Docs & Spreadsheets in October 2006.

[–] etse 20 hours ago

Calendar is my fav.

[–] antonvs 1 day ago

App Engine was good for its time, and I don't think that was an acquisition. Similarly, Cloud Storage and Google Cloud in general are pretty good products.

I started using AWS when EC2 and S3 first came out, but was forced to switch to Gcloud by the most recent company I joined. I was pleasantly surprised. In many ways it's more techie-focused than AWS, which is more enterprise-focused. And their managed Kubernetes is second to none.

[–] FluffyPancake 1 day ago

> I was really rooting for them

may I ask why?

[–] pmontra 15 hours ago

I can't answer for another person but 30 to 25 years ago it was kind of Google vs Microsoft. The Don't be evil times.