I am not talking about opinions on quality. I’m talking about objective measures in introducing a new product that moves the needle as far as revenue/profit and market share that is not cancelled quickly
Again, the parent's point stands. Apple is not changing the game with Apple Vision Pro or Apple Intelligence. Microsoft isn't getting accolades for Windows 11 and Copilot. It's not always smart to bet the farm on a product that nobody wants to pay for.
Objectively speaking Google is one of the few companies that saw where the puck was headed and skated there. They built TensorFlow, they sponsored serious local AI research. Now they build their own in-house training and inference hardware. Relative to the struggling we see from the rest of FAANG, I would argue Google is perhaps the only successful competitor left. I despise their monopoly abuse of AdSense, but they're not going to be effectively prosecuted with protectionist American policy defending them. Google "won" the services sector and now everyone and their mother is butthurt.
TensorFlow is a technology not a product. Having things in a “research” lab are not products. What product have they introduced in the past decade? 15 years? Android is the only one that has gotten any meaningful traction.
Does Google have a better LLM based product than OpenAI’s ChatGPT? Well personally for my use case, NotebookLM is better for some things. But it isn’t a better product for most people.
Androids position is so bad in the market as far as convincing consumers with money to buy one, Google has to pay Apple $20B+ a year to be the default search engine. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google pays more to be the default search engine on Apple devices than Google makes in mobile for Android.
From a consumer standpoint, Android has seen declining market share in the US, the Nest acquisition is floundering, Stadia was a failure, Pixel ships about the same number in a year that Apple ships iPhone in a a couple of weeks, WearOS has gone nowhere, no real tablet strategy (I Chromebooks have been a success in education so that’s kind of a mitigating factor), their tv strategy has pivoted a half dozen times, their messaging app strategy is schizophrenic (they had 5 separate messaging apps simultaneously at one point), AI summaries for Google search are half baked.
On the business side, GCP is just pathetic. I don’t mean as far as technology. But their account management, enterprise sales team and customer service is lackluster. I mentioned in another comment that when I worked at AWS ProServe, we never considered them a serious competitor.
GSuite has gained some traction in smaller companies. But hasn’t made a dent in government and enterprise where the real money is.
Look at Microsoft and Apple’s product mix as far as successful profit generating products and compare that to Google’s.
Almost every part of the iPhone is also based on acquisitions. Android was a bad BlackBerry knock off before Google acquired. Android as it exists today is mostly Google.
YouTube and even AdSense were based on an acquisition.
Heck, Apple as we know it today was based largely on the Next acquisition.
