Google blew a ten-year lead

There are now a lot of startup ideas in my inbox as a result of this post:

• Stock tracking / ticker tracking (finance.google.com)
• Better calendar for teams/internal meetings
• Better calendar for external meetings, like salespeople etc.
• New ways of thinking about Sheets or GDocs
• Domain-specific search or resource curation

I was personally inspired by HEY's recent launch, which is part of what prompted me to write this article. Well-designed, well-engineered software can dramatically improve a "commodity" service that nobody has attempted to improve since Google sucked the air out of the room.

One of my posts that made it to slot 31 of HN talked about the phenomena behind how Big Tech companies work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23305216 It's based around working at Microsoft and talking to friends at FB and G.

From a perspective of an aspiring entrepreneur or GFan, it might seem like a lot of waste. But if you google "Google stock price" and set it to "max" you'll see they did not in fact blow a 10 year lead. They've made their shareholders super happy, which is their primary job.

Projects that don't generate significant revenue but are used by millions of people are their culture of internal entrepreneurship. It's what keeps amazing engineers retained and working very hard. These projects don't often affect the bottom line for Google which is why they don't care what happens to them once they reach the 80/20 spot. The ones that have a potential to significantly affect their revenue, they pour their resource into.

ChromeOS still fills a need gap at low-mid end - 'Children, aged people, anyone who just want to run browser, apps on a secure device (Provided you don't feel Google as a threat to your security)'.

Because,
• Inexpensive, for around $250, You get a good computing device.
• 6-8 years of OS update support. Which means the probability of ransomware locking your files, malware etc. are low; crucial for any computer user who don't understand them.
• Has proven to be best computing device for education in a school setup, a place where many other previous devices like MIT's OLPC had failed. I bet, every parent who's child received a chromebook from the school is grateful for it during current virtual education setup.

But, expensive Chromebooks undo the price advantage and doesn't offer much value.

More thoughts on ChromeOS for 2 years from using the Chromebook which Google sent me for free here - https://abishekmuthian.com/reviewing-the-chromebook-google-sent-me-for-free-after-2years/.

Oh cool! Author here. I'm curious if anyone who works/worked at Google has any insight.

While I agree with the premise of the post with respect to Chrome OS, I don't agree with the author on how they are moving away from Google because others are better.

• @Hey is not even publicly out. Are you sure you want to give away your decade and a half email history on GMail and move to a product you are not even sure if it will exist next year?

• Google Meet was Hangouts till sometime back. I would credit them for quickly pivoting to Meet when the Covid pandemic forced everyone to move to video calls and Zoom was getting bad rep for security

Yeah, it could be personal preference. But I don't see Google losing its share on its market leader products. Yeah, they launch a tons of products and deadpool them. For a juggernaut company like theirs, that's a positive IMO.