Microsoft have not shown innovation. They have bought innovative companies at regular interval including github and openAI which is op's point. Otherwise they have blatantly copied alternative and forced them to enterprise companies like Team. Only innovative product from Microsoft itself in last 20 years is VSCode. Contributed significantly less to deep learning and distributed system research compared to google, meta or amazon
Microsoft is a very talented copycat. With the added expertise (that all the other FAANG companies are sorely lacking) of how to sell to enterprise and small business users and lock them into their portfolio.
I wonder if Microsoft is a talented imitator, but I think it can be said that they have a strong base mainly for customer companies, so they can easily spread their products by bundling them even if the quality of their products is worse than their competitors.
VSC is a great product but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call in innovative when text editors and IDEs is a saturated market and have been around for literally decades.
Language Servers could be seen as innovative I guess but they weren’t the first to attempt this sort of thing. It’s just other solutions didn’t have the weight of Microsoft to gain wider adoption.
None of this is a criticism of VSCode though. Something can be really good without being an innovation.
VSCode might be the best thing since sliced bread. But for Microsoft's bottom line, it is utterly irrelevant. At best, VSC is a marketing win with a subset of the programmer population, but it doesn't even do anything for the adoption of "real" Visual Studio licenses or anything. VSC is more of an accidential side project gone right.
People forget how bad most Windows laptops were before the Surface. Decent-looking basic and premium Windows laptops are common enough now, and Microsoft is falling behind in every way, but there was a time where everyone was paying attention to them the way people do Apple.
I dont think that is a product. Google have created dar more important products including kubernetes, go, flutter as well many ML architecture including transformer
Those are some big gaps. It looks like Google is in the position Microsoft was in for so long right down to being dependent on a cash cow (their ad network) and lock-in (Workspace). They've rested on those laurels for so long they forgot how to innovate. The difference is Microsoft realized they were on the path to irrelevance and started working on it years ago. Google just realized there's a threat to their dominance, and that threat is moving faster than anything that challenged Microsoft. LLMs are making leaps measured in weeks and months.
Google Tables (2020) could be amazing, but who's going to risk it with their reputation for shuttering new things once the people responsible have been promoted? Think about your list: it's all open source. Nobody's trying new Google stuff unless they know it can be forked.
I would have expected it to go to Workspace. It seems to fit in more with office suite database applications. But you're right, the GCP timeline on Wikipedia shows no shuttered products. Maybe I'll actually use that CRM template.
While innovation is often good, it's a side issue.
Google's problem was deciding to go all-in on advertising as essentially the only revenue source for the entire company. Worse, as others have noted, this revenue source has the side effect of cheapening and distorting their main claim to fame (i.e., search).
Apple and Microsoft both have numerous revenue-generating products. Google basically just has ads (all the other stuff they have is a rounding error).
Now, Google has had other products that could have become revenue streams, but they have a terrible history of killing those products off. They've overtaken Oracle as the place where good products go to die.
If they don't get the advertising people on a leash, I don't see Google winding up anywhere good over the next decade or so.
They’re here to stay - but they need a cultural shake up
Sundar might end up being looked back on as the Ballmer of Google - the leader who wouldn’t take risks in order to protect the golden goose (geese in the case of MSFT)
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Apple and Microsoft are bigger than Google and both have managed to show a lot of innovation in recent years.
Google's problem isn't size. It's their poor product management.
Microsoft have not shown innovation. They have bought innovative companies at regular interval including github and openAI which is op's point. Otherwise they have blatantly copied alternative and forced them to enterprise companies like Team. Only innovative product from Microsoft itself in last 20 years is VSCode. Contributed significantly less to deep learning and distributed system research compared to google, meta or amazon
Microsoft is a very talented copycat. With the added expertise (that all the other FAANG companies are sorely lacking) of how to sell to enterprise and small business users and lock them into their portfolio.
I wonder if Microsoft is a talented imitator, but I think it can be said that they have a strong base mainly for customer companies, so they can easily spread their products by bundling them even if the quality of their products is worse than their competitors.
VSC is a great product but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call in innovative when text editors and IDEs is a saturated market and have been around for literally decades.
Language Servers could be seen as innovative I guess but they weren’t the first to attempt this sort of thing. It’s just other solutions didn’t have the weight of Microsoft to gain wider adoption.
None of this is a criticism of VSCode though. Something can be really good without being an innovation.
VSCode might be the best thing since sliced bread. But for Microsoft's bottom line, it is utterly irrelevant. At best, VSC is a marketing win with a subset of the programmer population, but it doesn't even do anything for the adoption of "real" Visual Studio licenses or anything. VSC is more of an accidential side project gone right.
People forget how bad most Windows laptops were before the Surface. Decent-looking basic and premium Windows laptops are common enough now, and Microsoft is falling behind in every way, but there was a time where everyone was paying attention to them the way people do Apple.
I'd say TypeScript was pretty innovative.
I dont think that is a product. Google have created dar more important products including kubernetes, go, flutter as well many ML architecture including transformer
2009: Go
2014: Kubernetes
2015: TensorFlow
2017: Flutter, Transformer
Those are some big gaps. It looks like Google is in the position Microsoft was in for so long right down to being dependent on a cash cow (their ad network) and lock-in (Workspace). They've rested on those laurels for so long they forgot how to innovate. The difference is Microsoft realized they were on the path to irrelevance and started working on it years ago. Google just realized there's a threat to their dominance, and that threat is moving faster than anything that challenged Microsoft. LLMs are making leaps measured in weeks and months.
Google Tables (2020) could be amazing, but who's going to risk it with their reputation for shuttering new things once the people responsible have been promoted? Think about your list: it's all open source. Nobody's trying new Google stuff unless they know it can be forked.
Google Tables was an experiment, but…
…its been declared a success that will be moved to a GCP product. How often has GCP cancelled products?
I would have expected it to go to Workspace. It seems to fit in more with office suite database applications. But you're right, the GCP timeline on Wikipedia shows no shuttered products. Maybe I'll actually use that CRM template.
How much money are those things making Google compared to Search?
Exactly. And how much money typescript is making for MS. This are not products
While innovation is often good, it's a side issue.
Google's problem was deciding to go all-in on advertising as essentially the only revenue source for the entire company. Worse, as others have noted, this revenue source has the side effect of cheapening and distorting their main claim to fame (i.e., search).
Apple and Microsoft both have numerous revenue-generating products. Google basically just has ads (all the other stuff they have is a rounding error).
Now, Google has had other products that could have become revenue streams, but they have a terrible history of killing those products off. They've overtaken Oracle as the place where good products go to die.
If they don't get the advertising people on a leash, I don't see Google winding up anywhere good over the next decade or so.
In 2022, GCP revenue amounted to $26.28 billion, accounting for 9.2 percent of Google's total revenues.
They’re here to stay - but they need a cultural shake up
Sundar might end up being looked back on as the Ballmer of Google - the leader who wouldn’t take risks in order to protect the golden goose (geese in the case of MSFT)