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miohtama | on: Gemini 4 Carbon
The 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.”

ptero | parent | next
IMO google maps and google earth were revolutionary when they came out. And maps stayed well ahead of competition for many many years.
Keyframe | root | parent | next
I'm one of those few that liked Google Wave!
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struant | root | parent | next
Maps was originally an acquisition.
gnothing | root | parent
Both were acquisitions.
mrheosuper | parent | next
Youtube, hate it or not, is really good. The amount of data they have to handle everyday is on different level.
afavour | root | parent
For sure. It was an acquisition, though.
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transcriptase | parent | next
Google finance was an incredible portfolio tracking and research tool. Until they released v2 which took away all the functionality and replaced it with a news feed.
gcatalfamo | root | parent
And think that somebody designed it, and somebody else approved it.
stingraycharles | parent | next
Chrome was pretty great as well, it was desperately needed.
nayuki | root | parent | next
Google Chrome didn't start from scratch. Blink came from WebKit which came from KDE's KHTML. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML
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baq | root | parent
It was the rare confluence of people needing the same thing the megacorp showing them ads needed. We all benefited, no hard feelings, but always remember to look at where the puck is going.
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raisedbyninjas | parent | next
Isn't Waymo the state of the art?
aardvarkr | root | parent
They’re still the same price as an uber and there’s no way to actually order one, it’s all random. I don’t understand why… like I actively would prefer them. If they were available so instead I find myself reaching for the cybercabs instead at half the price.
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diegolas | parent | next
HN is hilarious man lol half the world runs on the office suite and drive, at all levels
miohtama | root | parent
Workspace was acquisition.

Google acquired it from Upstartle (the company behind the online word processor Writely).

Writely was created in 2005 by Claudia Carpenter, Steve Newman, and Sam Schillace. Google bought Upstartle in 2006 and Writely became the foundation of Google Docs. Google then combined it with other acquisitions, such as 2Web Technologies for spreadsheets, and launched Google Docs & Spreadsheets in October 2006.

etse | parent | next
Calendar is my fav.
antonvs | parent
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.