[smoe]

I don't think Google is bad at building products. They definitely are excellent at scaling products.

But I reckon part of the sentiment stems from many of the more famous Google products being acquisitions orignally (Android, YouTube, Maps, Docs, Sheets, DeepMind) or originally built by individual contributors internally (Gmail).

Then here were also several times where Google came out with multiple different products with similar names replacing each other. Like when they had I don't know how many variants of chat and meeting apps replacing each other in a short period of time. And now the same thing with all the different confusing Gemini offerings. Which leads to the impression that they don't know what they are doing product wise.

[Arainach]

Starting with an acquisition is a cheap way of accelerating once your company reaches a certain size.

Look at Microsoft - Powerpoint was an acquisition. They bought most of the team that designed and built Windows NT from DEC. Frontpage was an acquisition, Azure came after AWS and was led by a series of people brought in in acquisitions (Ray Ozzie, Mark Russinovich, etc.). It's how things happen when you're that big.

[kelnos]

I think it's a little unfair to give DEC credit for NT. Sure, they may have bought the team, but they did most (all?) of the work on NT at Microsoft.

That's not like Google buying Android when they already had a functioning (albeit not at all polished) smartphone OS.

[cma]

Why wouldn't you count things initially made by individual contributors at Google?

[oidar]

Because those were "free time" projects. It wasn't directed to do by the company, somebody at the company with their flex time - just thought it was a good idea and did it. Googlers don't get this benefit any more for some reason.

[lmm]

Because they're not a good measure of the company's ability to develop products based on the direction from leadership.