There’s definitely some risk of that but I’d put it more at 2008: that’s when Google acquired DoubleClick, and the sea change away from building products which people wanted to use seemed to start a bit later when the ad focus had set in. It’s hard to think of something they’ve done since then which has been a popular success.

>when the ad focus had set in

Isn't that the point? Something like 80% of their revenue is from ads so that's where their focus lies. As cool as a lot of the other products are, they just don't seem to do much for the "business" other than supporting the data for targeted ads. Meaning, anything that does support their main revenue stream is at risk during economic downturns. (I'd be happy to be proven wrong by someone who, unlike me, has real insight)

I think it’s a little more subtle: the ad focus means they’re unwilling to consider other revenue models or deeply appreciate how customers are different than high volume ad impressions.

The Google+ and messaging debacles are obvious examples but I think GCP and G-Suite were also seriously held back in a way which an independent subsidiary which had to make a profit on its own would not have been. Their executives just weren’t sweating the way they would have if they knew their shares would go down when they didn’t execute well. Contrast with AWS, whose leadership are running the service in a way which makes it clear they have no plan B involving ongoing subsidies from the parent company and thus aren’t blowing off customer support, features, security, etc.

G-suite definitely was held back by that approach. I was there during the critical years. Very frustrating.

I can only imagine. It amazed me how many great people you’d talk to and the company just squandered their efforts.

Yes it is. OP is pointing out that wasn't always the case - Google became an ads company, they didn't start as one.

You’re right and thanks for the re-focus. I guess I don’t know what else people would expect? All the incentives are for a publicly traded company to focus on what makes money. If you want to work on R&D solely for the sake of R&D, there are other options (notably in the public sphere). Expecting a company to continually funnel money into cool, but ultimately unsuccessful (by business metrics) ventures seems confused.

To be clear, my argument isn’t that they should ignore profitability but that they could have multiple revenue models for different products, not to mention a better understanding of what it takes to succeed in different fields.

I’d use GCP as an example of the problem: we buy services but their sales guys showed up like “we’re Google, of course we’re the best” and put approximately as much effort into selling as they do for Gmail. AWS makes a ton of people available, listens to what you need (and actually ships it), and follows up. Guess who gets the sale? Anthos was a cool idea, lots of smart people worked on it, … and none of that matters if you give up after begging them to show up to sell it.

The Chromecast was pretty market defining, and they’ve made huge inroads in education if you count that as “popular”. Chrome was technically around in late 2008 but it took a while after that to reach its current dominance.

Do you have any idea on what the Chromecast revenue stream was? I couldn't find it after a cursory look. I'm wondering if it's lumped into one of the "other" categories.

I think part of the distinction is how "success" is being defined. A product may be innovative and market defining, yet still not contribute much to the bottom line. It's still cool to work on, but these companies are still trying to make money at the end of the day. I assume their moonshot ideas still have the explicit long-term goal of being profitable.

Yeah, I don’t want to say there’s a line in the sand because nothing happens instantly or completely at a large organization but I’d say most of their successes were started before the ad culture became deeply entrained.

Chromecast is definitely good but it was years after Apple and Roku, and feeds data to the ad impression system so I’m not sure how much it defined the market rather than very successfully competing in it.

Google’s educational efforts are actually super interesting to consider: they had some initial success but seem to have lost their way. My wife is a teacher so we hear people talking about this: most of the districts around us have switched to Office 365 and almost all of the people who’ve mentioned that have been happy because it’s a better product without so many of the never-fixed warts they hit with G-Suite. That feels eerily similar to what I see with GCP where you really get the impression that incremental improvements aren’t favored by whatever incentives their management sets.

ChromeOS was a game-changer too.