Comment by PunchyHamster
7 hours ago
What products ?
They lost battle for office software, they can't even exist in chat space, despise trying to make chat that sticks for 2 decades now, they squandered on video chat space and office space too.
IF Alphabet was actually efficient they should own office space, but 365 ate their office productivity and even the utter turd that is MS teams is beating them out on chat.
Even their search gets worse and only places where they actually have progress is AI.
Search, Android, Chrome, Chromebooks, Maps, Gmail, Youtube, Gemini.
They definitely have embarrassing failures (chat especially), and some are not as successful as you'd expect them to be (Gsuite, GCP). But overall I'd say they are doing pretty damn well.
Compare to Amazon for example. They've only ever had two really successful products: shopping and AWS. Alexa could have been too if they hadn't spent a gazillion dollars trying to monetise it.
Or Facebook. They've only ever had one successful product - the rest they bought after they were already successes.
...yeah but that's just adding to point that shares buybacks are for companies that are stagnant and can't make successful investments.
> Search, Android, Chrome, Chromebooks, Maps, Gmail, Youtube, Gemini.
There is a single thing there that's not at least 10+ years old. And Search if anything is getting worse
> They've only ever had two really successful products: shopping and AWS
AWS is not "a product", it's a suite of hundreds of different ones. You're also forgetting Kindles which are fairly popular.
I think they sort of failed upwards in chat space with their RCS push.
> failed upwards
"became monopolistic entities."