Youtube, aquisition. Android, aquisition. Workspaces, aquisition. DoubleClick, aquisition. Waze, aquisition.
Feels like it has been roughly a decade since Google changed the world.
I'm not sure the history with workspaces, but Google Docs etc. were very important. Google also gets points in my book just by scaling YouTube, Maps, Gmail etc. To the degree they've published their work it's been revolutionary to the field.
Excellent engineering with terrible/conservative corporate strategy, imo.
Most acquisitions are kind of gigantic re-orgs: they cost a ton and rarely leave things better than when they started - oh and generally execs will always feel they were successful :)
Most of the examples you listed are the dream acquisition with exponential improvement. I have a hard time seeing Android on 2 billion devices or YouTube with millions of creators delivering HD content across the world without standing hand-in-hand with the rest of the teams at Google. Similarly Google would not be able to do it either (Google video would have been sunset without YouTube acquisition and no one was building a consumer electronics focused os).
Google certainly has screwed the pooch on many acquisitions but to chalk up all those other successes as a given or as pure luck is a naive statement. There was a ton of hard work, huge chance of failure and really impactful results.
Indeed.
Cloud Infrastructure = playing catch up to a player that set the stage (and still leads), Go I don't think "changes the world" quite as much as consolidates and improves things that already were available in everything from C to Python, but suited to a specific set of use cases that Google particularly cared about for their own business first and the "world" later. K8s came out in roughly the same window as other orchestration tech (e.g. Mesos) but had/s the benefit of the 'Google' name attached to it. It simplifies some things certainly, but is it really a "world changer"?
TBH, more seems to be about changing Googles world more than the broader one, but that goes to your original quote.
Borg's real win was the insane colocation and oversubscription it enabled, both of which K8s and all major public clouds have failed to replicate because you can't securely share bare metal between customers.
and K8s ended up being too little too late, despite beating Mesos and being quite successful, because VMs had won by that point.