alt Hacker NewsHow are Google products anything but outstanding in their categories? What are you comparing to?
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Other than search, in its heyday of the early 00’s, every google product success was either a 20% time project (e.g. Gmail) or an acquisition (YouTube) or a direct clone of someone else’s working product (android).
The Pixel series outside of security (to which their own flavor of Android doesn't even take advantage of like we see with GrapheneOS) doesn't have any particular outliers that would make it any more or less enticing than another company's phone.
Their ChromeOS hardware was nice but had lackluster software and by the time it was EoL'd, never got the love of ChromeOS-present.
Google TV generally gets outpaced by onn (Walmart's brand) on cost and value proposition.
And also the fact they have shown time and time again that they just kill products over and over again.
I think both can be true. Google has a history of annoying churn while still being good enough (or just … being large enough) that switching to competitors is still too high a cost for most.
For example, their "chat" app has churned 3? 4? times now? Their assistant app has churned from whatever the OG assistant was to now Gemini. Wave churned to "+" in the social category, and that's dead now.
The default placement in Android probably helps a lot, or other things, like forced signups into adjacent products (e.g., like + was doing for a while).
Have you tried to admin a large team using Google's admin? :(
Arguably, "exceptional" products are not ones that can vanish on a whim, like a great, great many of Google products have. Or they actually compete with other products in the same space, like a great, great many of Google products have not. Also, one would argue a good product is not one that is bought out and then deliberately destroyed to prevent its expansion into or development of a market for itself. Google is an advertising company with tremendous reach because of a handful of very aggressive and very fortunate business decisions that successfully exploded. It now uses its massive influence to exert market pressure, but the market does not always bend to its whim because sometimes it does things wrong, some of those products it pushes fail, and I can only assume some products are slaughtered because of projections on their performance regardless of their quality or utility.
An email client (Gmail app) that is 500mb? What’s _outstanding_ about that? Almost everything Google makes now is terrible. Try some alternatives.
The about 7 different text chat applications they had?
At some point GoogleTalk was one of the leading global text messengers, and then it was basically destroyed by Google itself.
Which products are outstanding in their categories?
Gmail isn't outstanding, search isn't outstanding, maps isn't outstanding.
They are all pretty par for the course. Google used to be outstanding... but I'm not sure of a single product they have that is outstanding (def: significantly better than the competition) anymore. On the other hand I rarely use any google products these days, so maybe I'm not the one to be judging.