Comment by andrehacker
3 days ago
>> Or Google Maps after having used MapQuest for a few years. Google invested their resources correctly in building a product that was head and shoulders above the competition.
Except that they didn't: they bought a company that had been building a product that was head and shoulders above the competition (Where 2 Technologies), then they also bought Keyhole which became Google Earth.
Incidentally they also bought, not built, Youtube .. and Android.
So, yes, they had a good nose for "experiences that will make a customer say "Wow, I need to have that.""
They arguably did do a good job investing their resources but it was mostly in buying, not building.
.. and they are good at marketing :)
Google Maps as it launched was the integration of 3 pre-existing products: KeyHole (John Hanke, provided the satellite imagery), Where 2 (Lars & Jens Rasmussen, was a desktop-based mapping system), and Google Local (internal, PM was Bret Taylor, provided the local business data). Note that both KeyHole and Where 2 were C++ desktop apps; it was rewritten as browser-based Javascript internally. Soon after launch they integrated functionality from ZipDash (traffic data) and Waze (roadside events).
People read that YouTube or Android were acquisitions and don't realize just how much development happened internally, though. Android was a 6-person startup; basically all the code was written post-acquisition. YouTube was a pure-Python application at time of acquisition; they rewrote everything on the Google stack soon afterwards, and that was necessary for it to scale. They were also facing a company-ending lawsuit from Viacom that they needed Google's legal team to fight; the settlement to it hinged on ContentID, which was developed in-house at Google.
> They arguably did do a good job investing their resources but it was mostly in buying, not building.
They did build a large part of those products, Keyhole is just a part of Google earth google maps in general has many more features than that.
For example driving around cars in every country that allowed it to take street photos is really awesome and nobody else does that even today. Google did that, not some company they aquired, they built it.
Android was nothing like the Android today when it was bought. The real purchase was the talent that came with Android and not the product at the time.
YouTube now, well only someone with deep pockets could have made it what it is today(unlimited video uploads and the engineering to support it). It was nothing special.
After all they sell to marketing people...