To be fair, Gmail and Chrome are 16 years old, and Google acquired Android 15 years ago. Their main search algorithm of course was developed over 21 years ago. That doesn't leave a good track record for the last 15 years or so...

There's nothing on par with the main search product, but here are some of their products that seem successful from the 2010s: Google Drive, Google Flights, Google Hangouts, Tensorflow, and Google Photos. This isn't an attempt to be an exhaustive list, but these are all products that a lot of people on this board probably use frequently and have stuck for years.

Hangouts is an example of a failure: Google had a huge hit with Talk/Hangouts and for a while it was THE leading chat app. ...And then they mostly abandoned it, told everyone to use one of a half dozen different replacements which all failed as people moved onto other things. Had they continued to modernize and prioritize Hangouts, all of the newer chat startups would never have even existed. It "won" the early chat app fight and basically heralded the death of AIM, YIM, and MSN messenger, only to be murdered in-house by Google's own product teams.

Google Photos I think is reasonably successful, but mostly as "where your Android's photos end up". I am not sure how many people have a strong relationship with Google Photos. And I still hear about people upset about Google killing Picasa in favor of it. It is worth nothing that Picasa, the foundation of Photos, was not something Google developed, but something Google acquired from outside.

I disagree, Google Hangouts was a failure from the start.

Former Google Talk supported XMMP, including federation, which meant you could connect with multiple clients and talk with people talk with people that don't have Google accounts.

With Hangouts politics took over. They eventually told people the line about XMMP not evolving fast enough for their needs. But I remember their leadership complaining about their competition not playing nice.

So when Hangouts happened I saw absolutely no reason to use it. There were plenty of alternatives on the market already, at work we were all using Skype. And at that time I was working with former Googlers that preferred Google's shit.

You might give me the line about the general population not caring, bla, bla, but Google is in the habit of betraying their power users and early adopters. They did it with Google Reader. They did it with Inbox.

And I was actually glad to see Hangouts fail. It might have been a good implementation of yet another chat app, but few people cared.

For my social group.. what killed MSN was a combination of Facebook and moving to mobile.

Picasa was damn good software. I still miss it.

It gets ever-more rickety but it's still usable, and I still use it: the combination of decent face recognition, useful tools, fast UI, locally-stored photos is a combination that I value and I've yet to find an acceptable substitute on Windows or Linux.

If it gets too rickety for you, you should try PhotoStructure. It's locally hosted, can be run on docker/headless or on a desktop, the libraries are read/writeable across platforms, and it has the most robust asset merging and tag inference that I'm aware of.

My beta users are using it for free in exchange for their feedback. I'm hoping to release the final beta within a week. After beta there will be free and paid tiers.

Read more: https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/

Changelog: https://photostructure.com/about/release-notes/

Have you considered Digikam? It does a lot more, but you don't have to use that.

Edit: why is this being downvoted? My point was that even the things listed as recent successes are not especially recent.

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Flights is from 2011, nine years ago. And they bought the logic at the core of it from ITA.

Google drive is a genuine success, but from 2012, eight years ago.

Even hangouts, which is a failure, is from 2013.

What became Tensorflow appears to have begun seeing internal use in 2009-11.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Flights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Drive

Discounting tensorflow is such a ridiculous argument. All of these products were used internally in some way or form before released outside. You will find some reason or the other to not count successes.

I’m not discounting it. My point is that it doesn’t seem especially recent.

Even by official public release it’s almost five years old.

The OP was arguing that google had had several recent successes, but their list tends to be 5+ years old. The point is that such a list is not especially convincing.

I should note that my point in mentioning the early origins of tensorflow was that google had a reputation for being more innovative in those years. So it is also meaningful that Tensorflow’s origins are from that period.

Google’s modern reputation is introducing a new chat app each year and deprecating the old one.

That's the reputation HN wants to impose. Especially the people who couldn't clear the interviews.

Do you have any recent successful products you can mention? I’m open to there being some.

I think you’re adding stuff into my comment that’s not there. My point was that nothing on the list was from newer than 2015. Except maybe google photos, but that came out of Picasa/Google+

Google Flights is great but of course Google had nothing to do with it. ITA Matrix was an eerily-useful flight-finding tool for many years before Google bought it and renamed it.

Photos has some kind of weird resolution limitation that turned me off the product immediately. (Plus I'm not crazy about Google having all my personal photos to mine.)

Tensorflow seems pretty good; I'd prefer not to be controlling high-speed computational resources with a super-slow interpreted language that cannot even multitask, but everything runs on Python nowadays.

I don't use the rest enough to comment.

Python can multitask. There's a global lock, but most time consuming things don't hold it, so these things run in true parallel.

Photos allows you to upload in original quality. You can always pay for services.

I wonder if anyone else was surprised by how useful Google Keep is, and how it doesn't seem to get any publicity (like people don't seem to know about it, but when I've introduced it to family members they've generally loved it).

Also I really like my Google home, Pixel phone, and Nest cameras -- privacy concerns aside :grimace:

I tried Keep, it is OK but the refusal to add an API is scary. It looks like it will not be a product integrated or supported like the others are.

Sadly, Keep fits the pattern of a good but not wildly successful product that will likely receive an "Update On" notice someday.

Drive, Photos, Tensorflow. Are you going to choose another arbitrary time period ? I"ll still come up with products.

Also: https://killedbygoogle.com

I have also noticed how few people use any of these products :D

I think the real problem is when google releases a free[1] product they have a track record of discontinuing them seemingly (from user's point of view) at random so that people are beginning to feel that it's not safe to build on any new products from them.

[1] "Free" in this case meaning actually free, e.g. doesn't actively support their core spying + advertising business

Did you miss this?

> so if a product does not do well in a set time frame, it is shut down

Gmail was a success from the beginning. Android is doing pretty well. Chrome did a mix of growth because it was just better at the time, and ads which made it popular. They all did very well.

> Gmail was a success from the beginning

Interestingly, I don't think that was obvious from inside the company.

Maybe some day this will be declassified by one of the early PMs or engineers, it's a great story.

Interesting. The amount of invite code sharing / trading was huge from the moment I learned about gmail. I'd love to hear the story of the issues!

Some thing driving the invites was the promise of some GB of free storage, which some people abused in creative ways via their APIs (I remember a fuse driver storing files as mail attachments ...)

I remember a lot of buzz around invites for Google+, too.

And early on, despite a lot of anti-marketing that I still suspect was simply bought by FB, it was really great and vibrant. In its most original implementation, even.

Later on, the campaign of "complaints" about how empty it was got them to change bits of it, pushing "follow those people" on you that was filled with brain-numbing celebs and the like, and the magic was gone.

Whoever orchestrated that campaign should get a raise (and shouldn't meet me, as G+ was last web-based social media that I could earnestly use)

I believe it was an internal product before it was ever a publicly available one. IIRC it was successful inside and was public dogfooding at that point. Maybe I am mis-remembering.

I mean if they don't try things - "Google just sits on cash". If they do try things and fail "Google just kills products". HN will never be happy with what Google does. I just wish people here are consistent with these attitudes across companies.

There are other options than not do anything or kill what you don't need. For example the news reader could be easily split off or sold. theoldreader seems to be doing well even though they had to reimplement the whole service.

Wave got partially opensourced, after a while. I'm sure someone would buy Google trips.

Sure, Google itself wouldn't benefit much from those, but if they're killing the service anyway, it would improve the image.

> For example the news reader could be easily split off or sold

For things on the Google stack selling isn't really easy.

Things they acquired , like picassa, could probably be sold again, but there they wanted to migrate to Google Photos.

>> For example the news reader could be easily split off or sold

> For things on the Google stack selling isn't really easy.

If Google would build their new products using only publicly available GCP features, that would be a really smart move.

It would signal that they're confident enough about GCP to build their own products on it, and they can spin off products that are small successes but not large enough to move the needle at Google scale. Or if they're not profitable, open source them and allow people to run their own instance of it on GCP if they want.

Interestingly one of the few things they spun off - Niantic (ingress/Pokemon go) runs on Google app engine (and/or other Google cloud offerings)

Please apply the same standards to other companies. How many big tech sell off killed products. There are numerous IP issues etc.. Not to mention how ingrained these products are to internal infra. Google is pretty good about open sourcing internal libraries as a counter point.