Facebook is about the only company attempting to do this at the size of the big tech companies with Oculus. I think because it’s viewed as an existential threat that they otherwise don’t have their own platform so temporary headwinds / market punishing them for investing so heavily is less a concern for the board and Mark. Ford had to outsource this with Cruise and it’s a delicate balance even then. Apple is interesting to watch because they make very few moves in public that it’s hard to see what’s going on even from the inside in terms of innovation. Toyota is an example of taking a bad “market risk” investing into hydrogen although I think that’s an example of either saving face until they fix their EV story, truly making a misstep, or the story being misreported (eg hydrogen for fleet vehicles and trucks but EV for individuals).
I disagree. Search was the original product, and since then, Google has launched the following other products/technologies that I would also describe as revolutionary: Gmail, Maps, Android, Chrome, Ads/AdSense, YouTube (depending on who you give credit to), MapReduce, Kubernetes, TPUs, TensorFlow, and I'm sure I'm missing some.
The trajectory of these revolutionary launches over time does seem to be decelerating though even as the company gets larger. And with these layoffs it'll likely get even worse, not better.
And to be clear. I’m not talking about technical infrastructure pieces (eg k8s was kept in house for forever as Borg and then an open source version was built when it was clear they could sell it). Google has a lot of good pieces there and whether or not you can scale is mostly (but not fully) question of being right. When it’s a question of being right on a binary question, these soft politics phenomena disappear because reality is immune to that.
However.
Search: yes. Their first product alongside ads. Today it still represents something like 80% of ALL Alphabet revenue (and probably a much larger share of the profit provided). Anyway, bad example because search and ads were developed when the company was a startup. By necessity that’s your high risk bet.
Gmail: yes. Still early enough in the company’s DNA to take a bold bet. They’ve totally failed that space though by failing to invest and take gambles. Back in the day this also captured almost all IM traffic because EVERYONE had gmail. Now you might get a fresh can of paint every once in a while but there’s nothing bold. The reason? You have billions of users: if you make any meaningful change you’ll lose the ones that aren’t early adopters, especially if a change in direction has instability or feature loss (see Inbox). See their total incoherence on what to do about messaging, a problem they wouldn’t even have if they continued to take risks and innovate a decade prior.
Orkut: they could have had a social network. Gave up on it before truly figuring out how to make it work. Then G+ as an emergency Hail Mary that went nowhere for many reasons, not least of which is that bold risks need to still start small and grow and they went immediately for the billion+ market (notice the copy of GMails rollout strategy that was a poor imitation and failed to realize why that worked - cache and buzz driving “must have this” demand instead of a product copy that was meh and invitations that were more just how far away you were from the elite).
Speaking of social. Google Wave. See: Slack eating their lunch here. Heck, even FB workplace is miles ahead of Google Chat which still can’t figure out scrolling, scheduling posts and reminders, and requesting messages to be silent.
Maps: yes, fantastic. They’ve failed to keep innovating and taking bets here though. Notice the acquisition of Waze. In the long run, expect Maps to falter. The only saving grace is that Maps is important to their ad strategy so as long as users and revenue are aligned they won’t let it get too bad.
Android: first, acquisition. 2. Bold bet that had leadership buy-in for same reason as Oculus at FB - you have to own the platform if you’re an advertising company as otherwise the owner of the platform has you by the balls. See Chrome.
Chrome: yup. Fantastic innovative bold product at launch. Since then, mediocre incremental value with no new bold risk-taking ideas (unless you count pissing off loyal users and enthusiasts).
Ads/Adsense: see above. Too early in the company’s life + it’s 80% of their revenue. They don’t take any bold bets with this cash cow.
YouTube: acquisition. See above - failure to capitalize on social graph, failure to take meaningful innovation risks instead of slowly and methodically growing the business.
MapReduce: neat technical idea that actually preexisted Google’s idea. Google has largely abandoned it anyway afaik as other techniques work better / have better modern tools.
Spanner: this one has some staying power and is innovative but it feels like they continue to fail to innovate here.
TPUs: not bold or revolutionary. Take existing embarrassingly parallel problem you’re running on GPUs and build an ASIC. They’ve done excellent innovation and technical work here. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s not been a huge risky bet leading the market (and they don’t even sell TPUs as standalone units you can buy which would be truly a risky bet to eat their own cloud offering).
So in essence, they’ve always been slowing down for a long time and most of the things you listed as big risky bets just aren’t that. Certainly none of the technical stuff - that’s driven by in-house demand / obvious market demand. I’m talking about changing the rules of the market. If you own the market you’re not going to change the rules because you might not end up on top. See Clayton Christensen. I do think we should limit the ability for a market leader to enter new spaces though and how much they can charge. Once you’re big your ability to manipulate the markets creates meaningful market inefficiencies. The common belief is that these get sorted out over time but I’m not so sure / I’m not sure that regulations can’t help shorten how long market inefficiencies promulgate.
I'm talking about the next category of innovation down, whatever you want to call it if you feel "revolutionary" needs to be reserved for generation-defining technologies. Because with your current definition, the vast majority of even large tech companies will never have a product that meets it.
At the moment it's also the most reliable source of information for what happens across Google's PAs (Product Areas).
I'm unfamiliar with this term and a quick search didn't produce any meaningful results.
What is it?
Why do you think you know what is in Google's best long-term interest? Do you think you could run the company?
