alt Hacker NewsDo they have more success in software products than other companies, though? Most of the software many of us know from them, were acquisitions. They still do heavy acquisitions. Notable that they have double the acquisitions of Amazon. They are on par with IBM. A colossal amount of money spent to make things happen.
So, again, are they that much more successful at software than other companies? They have more hilarious flops than any other company.
Don't get me wrong. I still use some of the stuff. I don't hate them. I don't even think they are particularly bad at things. I just don't think they are any more successful than other software companies. Specifically at the software side of it.
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The thing to remember about Google and software is that consumers don't see the vast majority of the software it produces and uses, from the distributed filesystem colossus (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer...) to an enormous number of other internal projects just as complicated as that.
It's user-facing stuff may or may not be great--and the consumer level flops are legendary--but that is only the tip of the software iceberg.
Think for a large tech company, they did a really good job with success in software. For exammple, they were probably the first large tech company to realize AI was actually working, and made it their focus:
https://www.businessinsider.com/sundar-pichai-wants-to-build...
And yeah, they did/do a lot through acquistions, but seems like most major companies screw up acquistions. Google has it's fair share of failed acquistions, but especially in the earlier half of the company's lifespan, they really did some great one: Youtube, Google docs, Nest...
maybe am biased, but have always thought Google in general does do it better than most tech companies. think it's their focus on the love of interesting ideas vs the love of money (although, that changes more and more as the company ages)