Comment by taeric
17 hours ago
Do they have more success in software products than other companies, though? Most of the software many of us know from them, were acquisitions. They still do heavy acquisitions. Notable that they have double the acquisitions of Amazon. They are on par with IBM. A colossal amount of money spent to make things happen.
So, again, are they that much more successful at software than other companies? They have more hilarious flops than any other company.
Don't get me wrong. I still use some of the stuff. I don't hate them. I don't even think they are particularly bad at things. I just don't think they are any more successful than other software companies. Specifically at the software side of it.
Think for a large tech company, they did a really good job with success in software. For exammple, they were probably the first large tech company to realize AI was actually working, and made it their focus:
https://www.businessinsider.com/sundar-pichai-wants-to-build...
And yeah, they did/do a lot through acquistions, but seems like most major companies screw up acquistions. Google has it's fair share of failed acquistions, but especially in the earlier half of the company's lifespan, they really did some great one: Youtube, Google docs, Nest...
maybe am biased, but have always thought Google in general does do it better than most tech companies. think it's their focus on the love of interesting ideas vs the love of money (although, that changes more and more as the company ages)
My point on the acquisitions was that a surprising amount of their successful software was not made in house. Again, I don't mean it as a knock against them, necessarily.
AI is an odd example. For one, a lot of the research there is from acquisitions. Somewhat feeding back to my first point. They also were seen as tripping up on a lot of the current AI race, no?
Referring to DeepMind in the UK? Ah yes, that’s definitely through acquisition.
But even though their AI models aren’t the absolute leaders in every field, all their models are near the top, across the board. Yeah, their recognition of this current dominant trend before any other major company has given them a big advantage in the number of fields they’ve applied AI to. For example, by putting their full weight behind DeepMind early on, they had a bunch of models before anyone else dealing with topics from protein folding to playing games. Think for them, this might be the right strategy. Explore as much in AI as you can, and figure out the ways it is truly revolutionary. Don’t focus so much on creating products that will make money today or even in near future. Take the long view… hmm, actually, a good example of this is Waymo, it seemed stalled out a few years ago, but is the clearly the best self-driving cars currently out there and finally growing market share.
Also, it was their researchers who kicked off the LLM race with their seminal paper on transformers in 2017 (yeah, they should have released an LLM first, but think they have made up for it since then).
Yeah, am trying not to be overly enthusiastic, but still, despite a couple of big mistakes in AI, they seem to have made mostly correct calls for the past ~10 years. It’s an impressive track record at least to me.
> My point on the acquisitions was that a surprising amount of their successful software was not made in house.
First, that's just not true. Their biggest products by revenue (search/adwords) and biggest stock value driver (AI/Gemini/Datacenters) are clearly in-house creations.
But even then, the two biggest "acquisitions" you're probably thinking of are YouTube and Android, acquired in 2006 and 2005 respectively. What fraction of the software base of those products do you think has survived the intervening two decades? To be blunt: most of the software being shipped out of those groups is being authored by engineers who couldn't even read when the ancestral code existed outside of Google.
Honestly the "acquisition" thing is just a cope meme promulgated by Apple stans, as it were. It's not a serious point.
1 reply →
The thing to remember about Google and software is that consumers don't see the vast majority of the software it produces and uses, from the distributed filesystem colossus (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer...) to an enormous number of other internal projects just as complicated as that.
It's user-facing stuff may or may not be great--and the consumer level flops are legendary--but that is only the tip of the software iceberg.
Like the most widely used browser and most used mobile phone operating system?
Certainly fair. But they have tried some amusingly ambitious projects that make it pretty easy to raise eyebrows. Stadia alone is enough to make me nervous on any efforts they announce that are ambitious.
Stadia was pretty technically awesome, and also a rounding error on Google's overall engineering budget.
"Ambitious" engineering means something very different inside of Google. Example: Spanner. Infra Spanner is correctly described as a "generational achievement". Very few people outside of Google have any idea that it exists, or what it does, and that's fine.