Google used to be search only. Now they have Android. That's pretty good.
I've noticed it's very hard for a lot of technical people to give credit to executives, marketing, finance, or anyone else when it comes to the success of a technical product, but very easy for them to assign blame to those groups. Whereas those latter groups often seem to be the first to credit engineers with successful products, and willing to share blame for failures.
Maybe it's because I'm in the technical group so I hear insider gossip and rantings, and the other groups project an overly generous facade, but unfortunately sometimes it doesn't feel like it. Ask a sample of nerds about failed projects near to their hearts. DEC, Sun, Boeing, whatever Google chat app they liked, the failed company or project they worked on, etc. 9 times out of 10 you'll hear rantings about greedy management, incompetent finance, the idiots in marketing, etc. who wantonly desecrated the Mona Lisas and Sistine Chapels of Engineering.
Many engineers are very good at taking a problem given to them by their company or one they've dreamed up and optimizing the hell out of it. Very few are capable of identifying problems that will be valued by others, and coming up with approaches to solving them in ways that are cost competitive and marketable. Very few people at all can do that well because it requires a measure of creativity and multi disciplinary vision, but at least executives are supposed to be thinking about these things so they have a chance.
They have competitive NICs, although they don't seem to be maintaining the lead there they once had.
They bought competitive network switches. These have largely languished, in part because they sat on the IP and then targeted it at weird niches.
They bought Altera. I feel like it had lost some momentum vs. Xilinx, but with AMD acquiring the latter, it's probably going to end up a wash.
The AI chips are kinda too early to tell, but at least they're playing the game.
Overall, I think they have squandered the massive advantage they had in CPUs for the last 3 decades.
The low end AI chips are a mess. Myriad-X can be used only through openvino, and they've been closing details about the internals... Keembay is... Years late?
Is there anything coming out of Intel these days?
And what happened to nervana systems, became plaidml then disappeared after bought by Intel? Maxas was really great and now, crickets.
Even profiling tools, which they used to be on top of, don't seem to work well on Linux w/ the TigerLake gpu. It's so painful to debug and program, they might as well have not put it in...
That's a reflection of their company culture. They're a bit stiff.
Yeah they do, Intel has the FPGA division they bought from Altera. That's a huge business on its own.
And my point still stands: having great engineers is not enough for great execution. You need great leadership with a vision a-la Steve Jobs or Jensen Huang.