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Engineers at Google aren't supposed to be designing new products, they ostensibly have separate people for that.

They are doing shit job with keeping existing ones competitive too

You’re thinking PMs rather than engineers.

I always see this and it always rubs me the wrong way. You're presuming that the only form of innovation is an entirely new consumer product.

But keep in mind that Google regularly launches new products and features that are more profitable than many startups, and then shutters them, and regularly launches individual features or pieces of infra that are industry leading (or defining, as in the case of k8s). They just aren't new consumer products.

Where are these “profitable” new features?

it's not a product, but that transformers paper that came out of there is proving to be pretty, er, transformative

Not for Google, though...