alt Hacker NewsThe only good products Google has ever built in-house are search and GMail. Everything else is acquisition or crappy product.
So we should ask “why would it be different this time.”
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IMO google maps and google earth were revolutionary when they came out. And maps stayed well ahead of competition for many many years.
App Engine was good for its time, and I don't think that was an acquisition. Similarly, Cloud Storage and Google Cloud in general are pretty good products.
I started using AWS when EC2 and S3 first came out, but was forced to switch to Gcloud by the most recent company I joined. I was pleasantly surprised. In many ways it's more techie-focused than AWS, which is more enterprise-focused. And their managed Kubernetes is second to none.
Chrome was pretty great as well, it was desperately needed.
Youtube, hate it or not, is really good. The amount of data they have to handle everyday is on different level.