They flopped on wave and Google plus, hard. Those are the kinds of mistakes that kill most companies. Even Google glass still somewhat rankles and has left me with no confidence in any of their consumer things.
And I say this as a happy Google fi user. In that I'm not convinced any alternative is worth moving to. Still can't fathom why Android is wasting fully half of my storage for "system".
I'm not claiming they are crap. But I do have a hard time making all the things they do that are beyond the industry. Other than spend a ton of money.
That second example seems to invalidate your whole point, doesn't it? Yeah, they've had flops, but gmail has been an outrageous success, to the extent that more than a decade after launch it completely dominates internet email. I mean, yeah, I'm sure it could be faster (not a user, which makes me painfully aware of how rare my condition is!). But clearly they're doing this product "right" for any reasonable definition you want to use.
And again, it is more than just social. ChomeOS? Even still a thing? How is android wear doing nowadays?
Again, I'm not claiming they are bad at engineering. I honestly don't feel qualified to judge. But I don't know that they are qualified to judge success of new hire, either. Their main success seems to be to simply suffocate the talent pipelines of the industry by hiring the top talent first. But not by actually using it.
> Those are the kinds of mistakes that kill most companies.
All companies make big mistakes and burn lots of money on failed projects. The difference between a medium-sized company and a huge company is that a huge one can absorb the cost of failure, shrug and carry on. Medium-sized one will indeed die.
The difference between a large company and a huge company is that while both can survive the cost of a failed megaproject, for a large company the failure is probably enough to warrant a rethink and change in strategy. A huge company knows (from their aggregate financial metrics, of course) that what they are doing is right and proper, and will take the failure as just one more datapoint.
The moral is that there is no moral. (Or if we're talking business, morals.) Wild success begets arrogance, which begets organisational cargo-culting.
Chrome, as an example, had a ton of marketing push behind it. Still some solid engineering, but not really any better than Firefox. Wasn't really any better than edge, but ms decided to drop the push for their own tech.
So, my question is what engineering successes do they have to back up their data on what will succeed?
I think you could pull in some of the ml work they are doing. Not sure how much data they actually have there, though.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/12/...
