Comment by Slackwise
2 years ago
Uhh, no, not really; quite the opposite in fact.
Under Eric Schmidt they were engineer-driven, during the golden era of the 2000s. Nowadays they're MBA driven, which is why they had 4 different messaging apps from different product managers.
Lack of top-down direction is what allowed that situation. Microsoft is MBA-driven and usually has a coherent product lineup, including messaging.
Also, "had." Google cleaned things up. They still sometimes do stuff just cause, but it's a lot less now. I still feel like Meet using laggy VP9 (vs H.264 like everyone else) is entirely due to engineer stubbornness.
I would say that Microsoft's craziness around buying Kin and Nokia, and Windows 8, RT edition, etc etc, was far more fundamental product misdirection than anything Google has ever done.
Microsoft failed to enter the mobile space, yeah. Google fumbled with the Nexus stuff, even though they succeeded with the Android software. But bigger picture, Microsoft was still able to diversify their revenue sources a lot while Google failed to do so.
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20 versions of .net is wonderful. Changing the names of features over and over again is great too. I am also pleased that windows ten is the last version of windows.
The same Microsoft that squandered MSN messenger and Skype and then brought us the abomination that is MS teams?
The same Microsoft that recently brought us "New Teams" and "New Outlook" and gave us a reskinned version of the same programs but now we have it installed twice?
Those are two messaging apps regular people can actually name, unlike all of Google's messaging apps. MSN Messenger survived 13 years supposedly. Skype was also a big thing for several years MS owned it.
And I hate Teams personally, but lots of teams use it.
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The golden era of the 2000s produced no revenue stream other than ads on Google Search.
Exactly. I never cared for the "golden age" Google. Maybe the old days were fun, but it wasn't going to be tenable forever.