• psivchaz@reddthat.com
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    11 months ago

    It’s unfair to discount Google’s early days. They DID have technical excellence. Search was leagues better than the competition. Gmail was an amazing leap from other providers. Android started as trash but improved rapidly. The Nexus line of phones was amazing. Google Maps was a huge improvement over what else existed. They did a lot right.

    I can’t pinpoint exactly when the fall started. Was it when Pichai became CEO? When they removed “don’t be evil?” I remember a speech Pichai gave where he talked about “more wood behind fewer arrows” as why they were getting rid of employee child projects, so maybe it was that.

    • baltakatei@sopuli.xyz
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      11 months ago

      I can’t pinpoint exactly when the fall started.

      In my opinion, it was when anti-trust laws did not trigger upon Google acquiring YouTube because Google Video couldn’t compete. That meant it was open season on start-ups that otherwise might have grown to kill Google or other big tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.

        • baltakatei@sopuli.xyz
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          11 months ago

          See List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet for the graveyard list. Sorting by Price helps. Some other notable companies that Google acquired rather than compete with:

          • Nest Labs (home automation)
          • DropCam (home automation)
          • DoubleClick (advertisement)
          • FitBit (wearables)
          • Waze (GPS navigation)
          • Skybox Imaging (satellite mapping)
          • Like.com (shopping)
          • Meebo (social network)
          • GrandCentral (VOIP)
          • Picasa (photographry)
          • Tenor (GIF search)
          • PhotoMath (LLM; became Bard)
    • chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz
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      11 months ago

      Android started as trash

      It started off by beating the pants off of iOS in terms of features, but was not nearly as polished.

      Definitely not trash. But also not polished for the masses.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      Gmail was an amazing leap from other providers.

      Gmail really wasn’t any better than Hotmail at first, it was just that they gave you a huge (at the time) amount of storage, when Hotmail users regularly had to delete old mail or attachments.