Google is the new IBM::Years of being one-upped on AI and cracking down on innovation turned the poster child for Silicon Valley cool into a dinosaur.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But the past few years have introduced new troubles: lower tolerance for risk, crackdowns on innovation, layoffs, and a narrative that its famed products like search and Gmail are getting worse.
In 2012, Business Insider listed 10 reasons Google was “the greatest company in the world,” including that it “made sick perks standard for startups” and created “a little something we call ‘Google Glass.’”
“In the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant,” Page wrote in a memo to employees at the time.
A Google spokesperson noted that employees were still encouraged to pursue other projects, and pointed to work like AlphaFold and quantum computing and products like Magic Eraser as examples of innovation.
Still, X — a moonshot lab that birthed Google’s self-driving-car unit and explored exoskeletons and space elevators — has also curtailed its ambitions as it faces increased pressure to reduce losses.
Rivals like Meta and Microsoft have turned their fortunes around in recent years with more-decisive, top-down leadership, forging a cultural compromise between unconstrained innovation and corporate efficiency.
The original article contains 2,475 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 92%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Does that make OpenAI the new Google?
The new who?
🤦
I mean, excepting that google isn’t even really the main offering when it comes to institutional compute (that’s Microsoft/ azure).
Like IBM had mainframes and legacy infrastructure on lock.
The only thing google really has on lock still is gmail, but honestly, take it or leave it.
They had search, but I get better answers asking a space heater to hallucinate a couple hundred characters for me these days.
ChatGPT is nowhere near being able to replace search, and even if it was remotely similar, many people don’t even really know what it is, whereas Google is ubiquitous with search.
To say they only have a lock on Gmail is doing them a huge disservice. They own a huge part of online advertising and search.
For Gmail if you mean a lock on consumers who generally don’t pay for the product I would agree, but I have done more g-suite to Office 365 in the past 12 months than I have in the past 5 years. It is too bad because we could really use some competition and different ideas in the office productivity space.
