Comment by majormajor

Most of their best products are VERY old. Gmail, Search, Docs/Drive, Maps, Street View, Chrome, all solid but old consumer apps. A lot of early entrants/market defining products, too! Most of them are still very good. Calendar is... fine. Gmail/Calendar as corporate products in some ways feel like downgrades compared to the functionality of the older Office desktop suite, but they integrate nicely into a lot of things.

The bad rep Google gets now is because while they've polished their nice money machine very well, they haven't done much to pioneer new segments and the old stuff is pretty stagnant. When's the last time Gmail gained a must-have feature? Maps?

Ok but maybe those old products are just mature and there's not much room for product innovation? Even if we assume that's the case (though there are third party email and calendar apps that I use instead of Google's first-party ones on my phone), let's look at some newer stuff:

Android was a copy of Blackberry that turned into a copy of Apple before being launched. It's done well numbers-wise, particularly in lower-cost markets, but hasn't got a lot of novel product stuff going on in the last decade or more. Less luck as a tablet platform. A lot of the nifty novel stuff in mobile space (wireless earbuds, "find my" stuff, mobile payments, magnetic wireless charging) was done first by Apple.

Meet vs anything else - well, Meet is cheap if you're already on Gsuite, at least.

Voice/Hangouts/Chat/Duo/Whatever - whole lotta abandonware or dead attempts.

Google Plus - famously mis-targeted product.

Google Assistant - Siri copycat then with Alexa copycat hardware. Didn't do anything novel.

Chromecast - nice novel product, caught on decently well, lost the market to a combo of set-top boxes (Roku, Apple) and native-TV integrations. Tried doing Google TV as that native platform with a copycat pivot vs the original Chromecast, no particular success.

Stadia - abandoned quickly, never set itself apart from the things it was copying.

Smart home hardware (like alarms and smoke alarms) - dramatically scaled back and now pretty unambitious.

Gemini - copycat of ChatGPT which is particular damning since so much of the original research came from Google in the first place!