HN Explorer

Ask HN: Will Google ever launch a successful new product again?

84 points by CM30 ↗ HN
Because I'm struggling to think of anything in recent years, and most of the things they do try to launch tend to flop, even if the initial idea is pretty good.

Meanwhile, all their successful products and services have been around a while now. Search was 1997, Blogger was 1999 (not initially by Google), Gmail was 2004, YouTube and Maps were both 2005, Google Docs was 2006 and both Android and Chrome were 2008. So where's the next big hit? Is one even possible with Google's attitude of "if it doesn't succeed in a few months, kill it"?

What is likely to be their next successful story out of the things they worked on recently?

135 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] thread
rrdharan
[infrastructure bias]

Kubernetes and TensorFlow should count, and are successful.

AlloyDB is IMO most likely to be successful (especially since AWS Aurora already proved the market): https://cloud.google.com/alloydb

Since this question seems to be much more about the consumer side, I think both Google Home and YouTube TV are independently considered successful though I have no doubt many people will chime in to note how much they hate either or both of those things.

plorkyeran
Kubernetes isn't a product.
rrdharan
Strongly disagree.

Kubernetes is not a Google product. But it is "a" product, and it was successfully launched as a commoditize-your-complement / cannibalize-yourself kind of thing.

GKE meanwhile is a Google product, and is successful, and wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Kubernetes.

prepend
How do I buy kubernetes?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
prng2021
How do you buy Google search?
coryrc
Adwords
prng2021
Just because you have the option to pay for a free service isn't the criteria for being a product. There are tons of managed kubernetes services you can pay for just like you can pay for managed redis or elasticsearch.
andruby
Pay for the managed version on Google Cloud?
prepend
That’s the product. Not kubernetes. Amazon and Azure offer kuberbetes too.
lake_vincent
It's interesting how legacy companies are not making exciting consumer/commercial products anymore, but infrastructure and technical projects are booming.

Google TensorFlow and DeepMind, Microsoft WSL2, Meta AI, etc. Also worth mentioning the many quiet efforts to get quantum computing off the ground.

formercoder
I work at Google, but just want to say that AlloyDB is really cool.
davewritescode
Seems like Google's version of AWS Aurora?
formercoder
I don’t know the details of Aurora, but AlloyDB separates compute and storage for Postgres. Masters can scale up and down with no downtime, and storage is provisioned in real time. Only pay for what you use. There is also a columnar engine cache, basically BigQuery, for OLAP queries.
makestuff
Yeah that is similar to Aurora. Basically a query engine on top of S3. Not sure if it is based on postgres or not though. It wouldn't shock me if it was as I know AWS Redshift is a forked version of postgres.
formercoder
Redshift is a columnar database like BigQuery, so wouldn’t be based on an OLTP DB like Postgres. More I work for Google disclosures, but I think BQ kicks Redshifts butt.
makestuff
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34853204/is-aws-redshift...

Looks like I was mistaken. It uses some parts of postgres 8, but it is heavily modified. I agree Redshift isn’t that great though and it is super expensive for what you get. In the past when I have used Redshift I have not been that impressed.

Although one nice feature of Redshift is how well it works with other AWS services (COPY command from S3, firehouse can dump data into it, etc.)

Vt71fcAqt7
Interesting. Does it scale to zero like neon.tech supposedly can? Or does it always run a small daily fee of a few cents like Aurora? It wasn't immediately clear from the product page.
formercoder
I don’t think so, from what I’ve seen it’s a premium price to Cloud SQL.
grepLeigh
My most basic definition of a product is:

Something I can insert money into, which solves a more expensive problem.

Kubernetes and TensorFlow are extraordinary technologies - and very important to the work I do daily. I don't think they're products though, certainly not successful products.

rrdharan
> Something I can insert money into, which solves a more expensive problem.

Right. I would argue that "public cloud infrastructure" is such a product; GCP/AWS/Azure specifically. (See below also) Kubernetes enabled the existence of EKS/AKS/GKE all of which I believe are considered successful.

Separately, TensorFlow enabled Azure Machine Learning, TensorFlow on AWS and Google Cloud TensorFlow Enterprise, and generally expanded (IMO) the market for IaaS.

kro
Flutter also comes to mind
wanderingstan
As a user, I can say that Google home has become a dumpster fire after starting out rather well. I’ve sworn off buying any future Google hardware.
theandrewbailey
That depends on whether there's a critical mass of Googlers dedicated to the product who want to see it through to success, not only initially, but in 10-20 years. You'd think that Reader wouldn't take much effort to keep going, but no one was interested.
jeffbee
This is not accurate. There were tons of people who would have willingly developed it but Vic Gundotra did not tolerate products that had social aspects and were not part of Google+, so he had it murdered.
johannes1234321
It's not about a mass of googlers interested in it, but about leadership being interested in such a small consumer product.
vishnugupta
What is their last successful consumer product? Pixel? Chrome?
superfrank
I'd argue it's Youtube TV
the42thdoctor
I have heard about in this thread genuinely interested. Specially if it's included in YouTube Premium.

In fact, they could release Google Prime and give us a lot of free products for a reasonable price .

pyb
First time I hear about it, looks like a US-local service.
eachro
Successful consumer product? Probably not. Google's competitive advantage is their technical infrastructure and scaleability, which are helpful to have for but not really what makes/breaks a consumer product.
jmyeet
Let me ask you a question: why does it matter if a new successful product comes from an acquisition or is homegrown? Everything on your list other than Gmail and Chrome (which relied on Webkit FWIW) were acquisitions.

Some acquisitions just mean billion of dollars spent for nothing and these get a lot of attention. Remember when AOL bought BeBo for $850m? But every acquisition is a gamble. Most won't pay off but some will, spectacularly.

Like in 2022 can you really believe that Google paid less than $2 billion for Youtube? Is that not the biggest bargain of the century? Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion. Were it a separate company, at least until the last couple of years, it probably would be worth 100x that.

Most ideas don't turn into billion (or trillion) dollar companies. Expecting a company to do that multiple times is like expecting to win the lottery twice. Taking a $1 billion company and turning it into a $100+ billion business is itself a massive success. I'm not sure why the homegrown product is assumed to be somehow more virtuous.

megaman821
I would love to see Tech Journalist Sentiment vs Tech Company M&A to see who got it right more often. I distinctly remember tech journalists lambasting Facebook for spending so much money on Instagram.

That said Google should bring back Google Labs. They are tarnishing their main brand by cancelling so many projects. Tell people anything that graduates to the main Google brand gets at least a 10-year support cycle.

crconover
I feel like Google Photos is a pretty incredible product.
nyrulez
They still don't have folders and have ignored years of feedback. The only reason I don't use it.
dudus
I use albums pretty heavily. Never really missed the ability to create folders.
matart
The fact that I can search for anything I want means I don't need to really organize it besides albums.

The search is amazing and scary. I was looking for some pictures I took mid renovation and searched `wood` and they came up. I can search for lakes and trees. Quite impressive.

aussiesnack
> I feel like Google Photos is a pretty incredible product.

It was until they removed the Google Drive integration.

whitewingjek
There are many other products especially privacy focused, ente.io[1], PhotoPrism[2] that look interesting but as of this writing they can't touch Google Photos in many respects, which is why my wife and other family members still use it heavily. It's probably the only reason I'm still holding on to my google account.

[1] https://ente.io/

[2] https://photoprism.app/

selectodude
I think the more pertinent question is will Google ever launch a new product that actually makes money. If that firehose of ad money ever slows down, look out.
superfrank
I think you're overlooking some decent wins because they weren't world changers for general consumers.

For hardware, I think all of the following could be considered a success:

- Pixel phone

- Chromecast

- Chromebooks (as school computers)

For software:

- Youtube TV seems to be a massive hit.

- Google Classroom has a lot of users in the ed tech space.

- Just in my social circle, I'm noticing more and more people using Google Photos in the past few years (even iOS users). I think might be due to growing usage of Google One.

chasil
For the moment, the Pixel phones are the largest family that supports an independent ROM that implements VoLTE.

A vast swath of LineageOS supported devices have been retired for this reason, and Pixels are the largest family remaining.

Oddly enough, if you want control of a device that minimizes Google's influence, then you probably want a Pixel.

sudosysgen
Actually that would be the Xiaomi/Redmi/Poco series.
chasil
I see 12 devices from Google on the LineageOS 19 announcement page.

Motorola/Lenovo has the next largest share, with 10.

The eBPF subsystem is described as the main driver for ending so many devices, instead of VoLTE.

https://lineageos.org/Changelog-26/

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
divbzero
I would also count the following as software successes:

2012 - Google Drive

2017 - Google Meet

asimpletune
Also google voice
crummy
I think Voice is great but it seems a bit abandoned from Google
guyzero
The feature set has not changed much since launch but it's definitely not abandoned.
Fatnino
The feature set has been reduced from the days when voice was still it's own company called grand central.

I had more than one phone number but some time after Google came in they said pick one and the rest have to go.

asimpletune
You can actually have more than one number still. I do at least. This happens if you add a number by porting your USA cell phone number to google voice. This gives you the option to keep both, although it’s $20 and you have actively elect to make your original google voice number permanent.
aussiesnack
> 2012 - Google Drive

The Linux version is lagging a tad: https://abevoelker.github.io/how-long-since-google-said-a-go...

jeffbee
By a huge margin the two biggest Linux clients of Drive are Android and ChromeOS. "Actually linux" is literally 5+ orders of magnitude smaller. Google maintains and updates 99.999% of Linux drive clients every month.
aussiesnack
I (and Google's comment, and the quoted link) am referring to deskop Linux, as is perfectly obvious.
jeroenhd
For what it's worth, Anbox/Waydroid can run the Android-based GUI quite well. The Android subsystem doesn't integrate too well with native applications, but for things like basic sync and even document editing it works, at least.
aussiesnack
In truth I'm not really looking for a solution. I was snarking really. I was a consistent user (and paid for Google One) until they removed the Google Photos integration, which killed much of the point of it for me.

Thanks for the suggestion anyway.

typon
Zoom's audio + video quality is so much better than Google Meet that I almost feel like companies that use it are getting paid by Google to use it? I have no other explanation.
maliker
Vice versa. Companies paid for a gmail + meet bundle that came in cheaper than gmail + zoom.
devinl
I've been on hundreds of calls for both and have personally had far more issues with zoom than google. I also prefer Google's UI and security model, and Google's pricing is better for companies using gmail.
aantix
Quite the opposite. I used Google Meet a few years back and it was terrible. Not even close to being a Zoom replacement.

But recently we've been holding standups with Google Meet, to give it another try and since it was already bundled with Google Business, and I've been very impressed with the lower latency.

Conversations feel closer to "natural" - I feel like there's less talking over each other.

The UI has become polished.

I was pleasantly surprised.

divbzero
I’ve also been pleasantly surprised by based on my recent usage. I also like that Google Meet is built for the browser by default—no need or pressure to install a desktop app for calls.
dangus
Meet and Drive are big successes in the enterprise space. Google successfully made Workspaces a compelling alternative to Microsoft’s business productivity suite.

I think with that in mind, the fact that Google doesn’t develop their own Slack clone to fit into Workspaces is completely bananas [edit: they actually did do that this year].

Other new product successes listed in this thread are things like Chromecast that only make Google money indirectly and/or represent an essentially meaningless slice of their revenue.

MivLives
They have one it's called spaces. we have it set up as a back up to slack. It's not that spaces (shutdown 2016ish), it's a subfeature of google chat.
dangus
Oh interesting, I never explored in there. Indeed it looks like a Slack clone. Seems to have support for interactive apps similar to Slack as well.

Of course, it still took Google all the way until this year to roll it out.

MivLives
I'm curious if my company will ever fully ditch slack. Meet got good enough that we sorta ditched Zoom. And they keep adjusting our slack tier.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
JamesianP
As I understood it, Google Drive was mainly just the storage that was previously free with Google Docs (from 2006 or something).
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
marcammann
The education space definitely relies on Google (was also big during the pandemic) and the tools are decent.

But I was definitely surprised about the mentions of Chromecast and Youtube TV, particularly YouTube TV. All of the cord cutters I talked to opted for Fubo, Hulu or DirectTV. Good to hear it sees adoption. Is there a marketshare analysis that you're aware of?

dkarl
Chromecast has somehow become ubiquitous without attracting much attention. I think even among the iPhone and Mac users I know, more of them use Chromecast than Apple TV, since they're so small and cheap. I bought one so I could cast a specific show on a specific trip to visit family, and now my household has one for every TV, for about the same price as a single Apple TV. We always take one with us when we travel.
tomComb
That was my impression too, so I was surprised to read that they are kinda' giving it away by allowing it to be subsumed by Matter. The casting support in Matter will be a mandatory part of the related profile.

But, whatever the explanation, I think this is a good thing.

horsawlarway
I agree. I see this as heading back towards something like Miracast, which really birthed Chromecast in the first place.

That said - I'd really like for genuine screen sharing to still exist, outside of the confines of merely opening an app on the device in question and directing it at a specific URL, while sending user input. That's fine for a lot of uses - but is not really a comparable feature set. So far at least - I don't see that in the matter protocol (I've also not spent a ton of time looking - so if someone knows it's there, please point me at it!)

philsnow
(disclaimer: anecdata)

I also used to bring a chromecast to connect to hotel TVs, but no longer do. When I stay in a hotel and I see that the TV has a chromecast hooked up to it (or baked into it or whatever), I don't bother even trying to connect to it anymore. The DIAL protocol only allows service discovery on the local network, and in my experience local networks are more or less never configured correctly for it.

The several times I've tried connecting, when the phone fails to discover the TV automatically, the TV offers some kind of pairing code that I can type into the google home app (on ios). Before learning more about DIAL, I had thought that this would enable my phone and TV to connect through some google-managed proxy in the cloud, for just such cases where both the phone and TV can make outgoing connections, but can't open connections to each other for whatever reason.

I can't imagine why there isn't a fallback built into DIAL that lets me scan a QR code on the phone (or have the TV play some audio that the device decodes, if the mobile device doesn't have a camera or for a11y purposes, or whatever) and have both devices communicate through a proxy. Such a proxy would be extremely low bandwidth and would be latency-insensitive, so really really cheap to run. DIAL is predicated on both devices being able to access media URLs, so I think this fallback would only fail in a case where the TV/chromecast can't connect to the internet and is being used to display content from the LAN. This latter case is probably very niche compared to people not being able to connect their devices because of routing issues.

wordyskeleton
Pixel Buds, particularly the new Pixel Buds Pro as well. They are fantastic.
mynameisash
> Google Classroom has a lot of users in the ed tech space.

As a parent of a kid with ADHD and a Chromebook, I'm appalled at how wide open access to everything on the Internet is on Chromebooks. Trying to keep him on track when there's the constant temptation and ability to alt-tab over to YouTube means my wife and I have to be ever vigilant that he's actually working.

No, his ADHD isn't Google's fault, but they're designing and deploying tools for lots of kids who have impulse control issues.

ajross
There are copious and extensive managed access control technologies available for Chromebooks (and windows, and everything else). I mean, it's true that by default it's just a laptop-running-chrome and can get to anything. But that's not how my kids' schools deploy their Chromebooks, nor is it how we have their personal devices set up. Have you looked at Family Link, which is the default choice for this sort of thing? We've used Bark too. Both are sort of annoying to administer but do their advertised jobs pretty well.

I mean, yes, the internet is distracting, but...

dan_pixelflow
I'd argue that's not really something Google have wrong - parental/education control blockers aren't few and far between.
lost_tourist
full disclosure: never used a chrome book.

That said, isn't there some nanny software available to install and block websites except the ones you whitelist? They should also have ability to set access time schedules so you could let them have a free for all after school time is over.

mynameisash
Others commenting are, I think, missing the point: Chromebooks are school-issued and locked down to where I can't install software (or they're just not capable of it regardless of locking down). Even if I could, is it the expectation that every parent now has to monitor their kid's school-issued device? This should be handled at the Google or school district level, not at the individual device level.

And yes, I use Family Link and Android controls. Not great, but also not applicable to a device over which I have no control.

Ferret7446
It should exclusively be handled at the school district level, assuming Google provides the ability to do so. Some schools, including private one, may want to allow full Internet access, and some not.
thebruce87m
I wouldn’t consider the pixel a success until they truly fix the emergency call issues[1]. I wouldn’t recommend anyone buys one, and anyone who has one should demand action.

[1] https://reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/y039zn/i_compiled_...

Edit: Downvotes are a little confusing here, are people supposed to accept a phone that can’t make a call when you most need it?

Ferret7446
I'm curious how exactly would an emergency call fail. How is it different from any other phone call, from the phone OS level?
pragmatic
Isn't it a bit of a stretch to call these “recent” though?
CM30
You're right, I definitely forgot the Pixel Phone, Chromecast and Chromebooks, all of which seem to be doing well enough to get regular support and a decent userbase.
bkuehl
Google Photos is that silent offering that wasn't a big deal initially, but just slowly grew into easily the best option to store your years of smartphone photo memories. I pay for it and will always pay.

Chromebooks were also the thing that started out slow, but now are pretty ubiquitous.

Fire-Dragon-DoL
Google photos started inproving around 1 year ago (maybe two? With covid, it was a blend).

Bugs gone and new features popped up.

jeffbee
But other than sanitation ...

Google Photos was launched in 2015. Drive in 2012. App Engine in 2008. Many many other changes that you will obviously derogate as incremental even though they are real achievements.

tootie
GCP was also 2008. But like, that's a shit ton of successful products across a lot of verticals to come out of one company. And they've done a stellar job at keeping those products at the cutting edge and relevant to their users. YouTube in particular was a niche product for cat videos when it was acquired and now it's a huge revenue driver that has at least much of a cultural presence as Twitter or Facebook.

I think they'll continue to struggle in the consumer realm until they massively upgrade their marketing and branding. Android is the "cheap" option compared to iPhone. People don't show off Google-branded products the way they do with Apple and maybe never will. If they ever plan to try social again, it should be spun out of YouTube.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
burkaman
Google Cloud launched in 2008, but subproducts within it launch all the time. I don't use Google Cloud, but presumably some of these must have been successful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cloud_Platform#Timeline

Google Home/Nest is 2016 and has been fairly successful.

Google Fi is from 2015 and still seems to be going strong, I use it and am happy with it.

Chromecast launched in 2013, I think that has to be considered a success.

MonkeyMalarky
If today's Google was the one building and releasing Google Docs, would they have cancelled it in the first year or two?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
counters
I've been extremely satisfied with Android Automotive OS. So much so that the next family car replacement will probably shift to Volvo or some other OEM who is using AAOS for their infotainment system. One could argue AAOS isn't an entirely "new" product, but I vastly prefer it to running Android Auto off of a tethered phone.
pmontra
Actually Google didn't create YouTube. They bought it in 2006, 18 months after it was born. To be fair they grew it fairly well.
joshuamorton
It merged with the already existing Google video. Both made important contributions to the resulting product.
jeroenhd
As an end user, I never really saw much of Google Video's contributions. I'm sure they helped a lot in the backend, but the Youtube video player had all the core video features already when the two merged in my experience.
joshuamorton
A lot of the stuff YT video provided was market related, Youtube initially had no licensing with media companies. So what eventually became content-ID wasn't acquired if I understand the history correctly, and I doubt YT could have been successful without that.

But yeah most of it was infrastructural it seems, both technologically and otherwise.

Ferret7446
YouTube is 99.99% backend. The video player is peanuts to the infrastructure needed to process and serve the vomit-inducing amount of data. A quick search says 183 hours of video uploaded per minute and 694,000 hours of video watched per minute, served globally and rendered to dozens of resolutions and formats, and remember that unlike, say Netflix, this covers a much wider content library. (It's much easier to keep a few hundred gigs of data on global edge CDNs than god knows how many exabytes YouTube has.)
sergiotapia
The Pixel is a success to me. Terrific phone without the obscene price gouging of Apple.
e40
The low end Pixel 7 is $599 (save $100 listed on their site, don't know if this is with conditions). Low end iPhone 14 is $799.

Apple supports their phones for much longer. Google for 3 years. Apple has recently supported phones for more than 6 years.

If you factor in support, Google phones are more expensive.

So, not gouging at all.

EDIT:

An iPhone 12 would have longer support than a Pixel 7 and it is $599 from Apple.

joshuamorton
Pixel 7 is 499 of I buy it on the store right now, and gets 5 years of security updates.
dangus
At the same time, Pixel phones represent a minuscule slice of marketshare. I doubt the Pixel division is making a significant chunk of profit for Google.

Samsung sells 10x as many phones as of Q1 2022.

Google is behind Samsung, Lenovo, and TCL in the US.

The numbers are probably even worse in other regions where Huawei isn’t banned.

SuhitAgarwal
I surely hope so, Project Fuchsia shows a lot of promise and there are also rumors of the return of Project Ara, so who knows
prng2021
Google smart speakers

Google wifi router

pcthrowaway
Google Podcasts is pretty good, and definitely more recent than the ones you listed.
zh3
Launch - or acquire?

I'm sure there's a list somewhere of what's actually homegrown and what's bene bough (youtube, streetview, doubleclick, ?).

sgc
If you have owned something for 85-90% of its existence and rewritten it several times while guiding its marketing and philosophy over the years, does it really matter if it was bought or started in-house? There are brick and mortar stores with similar histories, and I attribute their success to their current, long-term owners - because at a certain point maintenance and growth are far harder problems to solve than the initial MVP.
zh3
Fair point (thought experiment: what would have happened if MS had acquired Google for a million or two in the early days?).
loudmax
They might, but not under the current management.

The product that stands out to me is Stadia. As a technical achievement, Stadia is impressive, but Google managed to maximize all of the downsides to fully online gaming and minimize all of the benefits. No amount of engineering is going to save a company if the management is deluded or consumed with infighting.

One could also look at their history of undermining their own social or communication networks by throwing up a series of incompatible clients like Chat, Hangouts, Allo, or Duo. Same for Buzz, Orkut or Google+. Any of these could have been successful if they just stuck with it, but their behavior makes it extremely clear that we should expect these to be very short lived.

There are major business opportunities out there and Google is in a sound technical position to capitalize on them. But this would require a a degree of foresight and backbone that's absolutely anathema to the current management culture.

benlivengood
Probably? Unless ads, cloud computing, and android all die at once there will be money to pay for some new R&D, and success is relative. Is 10M customers success? 100M? 1B?

Maybe an even better question is will Alphabet ever launch a massively profitable new product.

I figure AGI is on the table with both Deepmind and Brain pumping out new SOTA models every few months.

wollsmoth
I'm pretty happy with Youtube TV, which I think is relatively new.

I think with the size they don't have a lot of interest in running "small" businesses even if they have some traction. Something like Stadia was maybe just wholly unprofitable but maybe had some benefits if they developed remote gameplay tech that might be re-used in another product someday or offered as apart of their cloud offerings.

I guess they'll eventually jump in on the upcoming AR war, but it might be hard to beat the offerings from Meta and Apple. Maybe they'll have the Android of AR?

MivLives
Google Fi and Google Fiber both seem to be chugging along. I know Fiber isn't expanding but they also didn't shutter either.

I don't know, I kinda like when big companies just throw stuff at the wall. They have the talent might as well experiment. If it doesn't work and it was actually something that had potential, a smaller company could make something similar avoiding some of google's pitfalls. After Google killed off the rss reader, how many other companies doing rss suddenly got an influx of people. I wouldn't be using the old reader now if it weren't for that.