Will Google ever launch a successful new product again?

I think you're overlooking some decent wins because they weren't world changers for general consumers.

For hardware, I think all of the following could be considered a success:

- Pixel phone

- Chromecast

- Chromebooks (as school computers)

For software:

- Youtube TV seems to be a massive hit.

- Google Classroom has a lot of users in the ed tech space.

- Just in my social circle, I'm noticing more and more people using Google Photos in the past few years (even iOS users). I think might be due to growing usage of Google One.

[infrastructure bias]

Kubernetes and TensorFlow should count, and are successful.

AlloyDB is IMO most likely to be successful (especially since AWS Aurora already proved the market): https://cloud.google.com/alloydb

Since this question seems to be much more about the consumer side, I think both Google Home and YouTube TV are independently considered successful though I have no doubt many people will chime in to note how much they hate either or both of those things.

Google Cloud launched in 2008, but subproducts within it launch all the time. I don't use Google Cloud, but presumably some of these must have been successful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cloud_Platform#Timeline

Google Home/Nest is 2016 and has been fairly successful.

Google Fi is from 2015 and still seems to be going strong, I use it and am happy with it.

Chromecast launched in 2013, I think that has to be considered a success.

Let me ask you a question: why does it matter if a new successful product comes from an acquisition or is homegrown? Everything on your list other than Gmail and Chrome (which relied on Webkit FWIW) were acquisitions.

Some acquisitions just mean billion of dollars spent for nothing and these get a lot of attention. Remember when AOL bought BeBo for $850m? But every acquisition is a gamble. Most won't pay off but some will, spectacularly.

Like in 2022 can you really believe that Google paid less than $2 billion for Youtube? Is that not the biggest bargain of the century? Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion. Were it a separate company, at least until the last couple of years, it probably would be worth 100x that.

Most ideas don't turn into billion (or trillion) dollar companies. Expecting a company to do that multiple times is like expecting to win the lottery twice. Taking a $1 billion company and turning it into a $100+ billion business is itself a massive success. I'm not sure why the homegrown product is assumed to be somehow more virtuous.

Actually Google didn't create YouTube. They bought it in 2006, 18 months after it was born. To be fair they grew it fairly well.

I feel like Google Photos is a pretty incredible product.

They might, but not under the current management.

The product that stands out to me is Stadia. As a technical achievement, Stadia is impressive, but Google managed to maximize all of the downsides to fully online gaming and minimize all of the benefits. No amount of engineering is going to save a company if the management is deluded or consumed with infighting.

One could also look at their history of undermining their own social or communication networks by throwing up a series of incompatible clients like Chat, Hangouts, Allo, or Duo. Same for Buzz, Orkut or Google+. Any of these could have been successful if they just stuck with it, but their behavior makes it extremely clear that we should expect these to be very short lived.

There are major business opportunities out there and Google is in a sound technical position to capitalize on them. But this would require a a degree of foresight and backbone that's absolutely anathema to the current management culture.

I'm pretty happy with Youtube TV, which I think is relatively new.

I think with the size they don't have a lot of interest in running "small" businesses even if they have some traction. Something like Stadia was maybe just wholly unprofitable but maybe had some benefits if they developed remote gameplay tech that might be re-used in another product someday or offered as apart of their cloud offerings.

I guess they'll eventually jump in on the upcoming AR war, but it might be hard to beat the offerings from Meta and Apple. Maybe they'll have the Android of AR?

Just a reminder: not every company has to have a startup mode of operating where new products are important to the success of the company and the satisfaction of its customers.

Exxon, State Farm, Keller Williams Realty, Five Guys, Morton Salt, your local dive bar, so many successful businesses out there have introduced almost nothing in terms of a new product in decades or sometimes even centuries.

Probably? Unless ads, cloud computing, and android all die at once there will be money to pay for some new R&D, and success is relative. Is 10M customers success? 100M? 1B?

Maybe an even better question is will Alphabet ever launch a massively profitable new product.

I figure AGI is on the table with both Deepmind and Brain pumping out new SOTA models every few months.

Flutter has been great for me. Still think it would have benefited from focusing on only mobile/desktop and fixing some of those Github issues instead of web support. As a backend developer working on simpler apps it's been great. It's a product I would be more than happy to pay for.

GCP was also 2008. But like, that's a shit ton of successful products across a lot of verticals to come out of one company. And they've done a stellar job at keeping those products at the cutting edge and relevant to their users. YouTube in particular was a niche product for cat videos when it was acquired and now it's a huge revenue driver that has at least much of a cultural presence as Twitter or Facebook.

I think they'll continue to struggle in the consumer realm until they massively upgrade their marketing and branding. Android is the "cheap" option compared to iPhone. People don't show off Google-branded products the way they do with Apple and maybe never will. If they ever plan to try social again, it should be spun out of YouTube.

Launch - or acquire?

I'm sure there's a list somewhere of what's actually homegrown and what's bene bough (youtube, streetview, doubleclick, ?).

I surely hope so, Project Fuchsia shows a lot of promise and there are also rumors of the return of Project Ara, so who knows

Google Fi and Google Fiber both seem to be chugging along. I know Fiber isn't expanding but they also didn't shutter either.

I don't know, I kinda like when big companies just throw stuff at the wall. They have the talent might as well experiment. If it doesn't work and it was actually something that had potential, a smaller company could make something similar avoiding some of google's pitfalls. After Google killed off the rss reader, how many other companies doing rss suddenly got an influx of people. I wouldn't be using the old reader now if it weren't for that.

But other than sanitation ...

Google Photos was launched in 2015. Drive in 2012. App Engine in 2008. Many many other changes that you will obviously derogate as incremental even though they are real achievements.

During the last decade, Google has overextended itself in new ventures. This thread is full of "successful stories" from that era. there is sooooooo much potential for maturing what is in there already, and I think this is their mindset for the time being.

What I'm really curious about is: if zuck has his metaverse fantasy and musk his twitter conquest, what about Brin and Page? All I remember from recently is some "Airy" stuff (literally):

      Sergey Brin’s airship startup grows rapidly (https://www.ft.com/content/ae625a25-d2ac-4bca-9508-a5f0d3c7dd09)
      Larry Page's electric air taxi startup is winding down (https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/22/tech/kittyhawk-larry-page/index.html)

That depends on whether there's a critical mass of Googlers dedicated to the product who want to see it through to success, not only initially, but in 10-20 years. You'd think that Reader wouldn't take much effort to keep going, but no one was interested.

Google Podcasts is pretty good, and definitely more recent than the ones you listed.

Successful consumer product? Probably not. Google's competitive advantage is their technical infrastructure and scaleability, which are helpful to have for but not really what makes/breaks a consumer product.

This is a really important question and one that MBAs miss all the time (speaking as one myself). The value of a tech company isn't in its existing product portfolio and revenue stream, it is in its ability to create and launch new successful revenue-generating products in the future. Personally I do think Google has that history, starting obviously with Gmail, Maps, etc. But nobody can predict whether that will continue or if they'll end up like an IBM or Facebook, largely dependent on their legacy products.

Chrome might have been started in 2008, but it was tiny and unimportant at that time. It took almost a decade for it to get to 55%[0] of browser market share.

If we take that as the baseline, we will have trouble identifying newer companies/products that will turn out to be a big deal in retrospect.

[0]: https://nira.com/chrome-history/

I think the more pertinent question is will Google ever launch a new product that actually makes money. If that firehose of ad money ever slows down, look out.

I've been extremely satisfied with Android Automotive OS. So much so that the next family car replacement will probably shift to Volvo or some other OEM who is using AAOS for their infotainment system. One could argue AAOS isn't an entirely "new" product, but I vastly prefer it to running Android Auto off of a tethered phone.

Based on their acquisitions, I do expect something with robots from them (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisit...). See their Raxium and Vicarious acquisitions.

I think at least part of why we consider these to be successes is because they've been around a while without being killed. So newer products aren't considered successes on the same level as those mentioned by OP because they haven't been around as long.

If you don't provide clear criteria for what counts as a "product launch" and "successful," most of the discussion will be people arguing over those definitions. Why is Cloud Platform not on your list, for example?

They're too focused on the 'features' of their main products. They don't release Gmail-tier products anymore, they just iterate with features and improvements more than anything else.

Google’s recent locking of user accounts without recourse made me nervous that I moved everything away from the service that I valued. Really, they botched it for me when they killed Reader.

Google smart speakers

Google wifi router

Yes, but they need a god tier PM that can beat back the infighting with a big enough stick.

The Pixel is a success to me. Terrific phone without the obscene price gouging of Apple.

It could be the last invention of man though. (AGI)

If today's Google was the one building and releasing Google Docs, would they have cancelled it in the first year or two?

What is their last successful consumer product? Pixel? Chrome?