Is Google Asleep?
By: Will Rocklin
Tags: Strategy, Google, B2c, Faang, Tech

The last great product Google released was…honestly I have no idea, how this threatens the company, and why this should worry all of us.

Sleep pods were a popular employee perk at Google. Is the whole company now in one?

Remember 15–20 years ago when Google consistently shipped revolutionary products like Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps and Google Docs? Each one was so far beyond what Altavista, Excite or MapQuest delivered that their competition back then still makes for reliable dinner party jokes today. Google’s products, on the other hand? They were powerful, simple and joyful to use. Best of all? They were free.

Remember 10–15 years ago when Google acquired good products and drastically improved them like Android, YouTube, and Urchin (later renamed Google Analytics)? Google bought these and other promising companies, and often gave them a massive talent and resource injection that helped make them ubiquitous today. Had Google not purchased YouTube for example, it may have been sued out of existence by the entertainment industry. Instead, Google’s deep pockets, robust legal team, and talented engineers created Content ID (plus a bunch of other features) to help YouTube thrive.

Whether Google built it or bought it, the implicit deal Google made was novel and wonderful: users get superb, free products in exchange for giving them user data. It was such a great deal that billions of us — including me — gladly took it. Google, however, has since broken that deal, and I now believe it puts the company’s future in some jeopardy. The losers in that scenario are all of us.

Before we press on, let’s back up. I’d argue there are 3 phases to building a modern tech giant. While the specifics may differ from one company to the next, the strategy is similar whether we’re talking startups or FAANGs. This strategy is the great flywheel in the sky (cloud?) that a large tech company needs to spin to ensure long term dominance. (Note: I’m referring to software companies with at least some B2C focus. The NVDIAs or Palantirs of the world probably differ.)

Phase 1 : Build great products people want. As mentioned, Google was a home run machine here for many years. As we’ll soon see, though, this is no longer the case and threatens the company’s existence.

: Build great products people want. As mentioned, Google was a home run machine here for many years. As we’ll soon see, though, this is no longer the case and threatens the company’s existence. Phase 2 : Create an ecosystem so compelling that it’d otherwise be extremely tedious, onerous and/or expensive for users to leave. If all your photos are on Google Photos, for example, the last thing you want to do is move them over to Facebook. Google has built a massively successful ecosystem which strongly encourages users to a) log in (something so important that the company has even done it unilaterally) and b) feed it data, e.g. “OK Google” voice commands, app downloads, ad clicks, YouTube video views, and yes, photos.

: Create an ecosystem so compelling that it’d otherwise be extremely tedious, onerous and/or expensive for users to leave. If all your photos are on Google Photos, for example, the last thing you want to do is move them over to Facebook. Google has built a massively successful ecosystem which strongly encourages users to a) log in (something so important that the company has even done it unilaterally) and b) feed it data, e.g. “OK Google” voice commands, app downloads, ad clicks, YouTube video views, and yes, photos. Phase 3: Build advanced proprietary artificial intelligence using all this data, deploy it to all relevant products/platforms and possibly also sell it to other companies ala Amazon’s AWS. Again mission accomplished. Google’s AI is responsible for some wizardly things such as automatically predicting phrases we’d otherwise have to type in Gmail and Docs (more on this in a moment). To use a creepy metaphor, though, AI is a virus that needs a host. That host is a product. After all, users can’t take advantage of AI without first interacting with some kind of interface, whether that’s a screen, speaker, robot or VR headset.

Enter problem. Around 10 years ago, Google’s release of great products slowed. Its acquisitions became confused (Motorola, Zagat, ITA, I could go on). Its execution stumbled. When I worked at Google from 2008–2012, one of the company’s main engineering priorities was integrating Google+ across the entire consumer product stack. Ooops. Somehow, Google got out of the habit of consistently shipping great products.

As a product manager (who learned the ropes at YouTube) I can assure you a great way of losing customers, employees and momentum is to stop shipping things that matter.

What’s your favorite new product that Google’s released in the last 5 years? I’d say the the contenders are:

Google Fi — basically Google’s version of Boost Mobile.

YouTubeTV — basically Google’s version of live TV + TiVo.

Recorder — a recorder app that can transcribe whatever it hears.

Although all are examples of expanding their ecosystem, these are evolutionary products. (Have you even heard of Google Fi? Even my most millennial friends are like, “Oh…yeah…I’ve heard of that…Google Fiber right?” Wrong.) Some might point to Google Assistant as an example of a recent and great Google product. Is it, though? Google Assistant while perhaps better than the rest is hardly the leapfrog over Siri and Alexa that Gmail was was over Outlook or Yahoo Mail years prior. And if your answer to this question is Google Photos, that came out 6 years ago.

OK, round two. What’s your favorite feature in an existing product that Google’s released in the last 5 years? I’d say the contenders are:

Gmail snoozing & nudging — pretty good, although already available with 3rd party apps like Boomerang.

Android fingerprint login — pretty good, although the iPhone already had it and FaceID upon launch.

Smart compose in Gmail & Docs — intriguing, and a rare tangible example of Google’s AI we can all see. It has shaved seconds off every email and doc I’ve typed since its release. But is it as helpful, exciting or wonderful as Google Search was when that arrived decades ago? Hardly.

Tesla, in contrast, has been busy executing the tech giant playbook. These last 5 years, they have delivered great products, strengthened their ecosystem, and advanced their artificial intelligence. Moreover, they are doing all of this simultaneously, with cars, and 56K fewer employees than Google. Let’s take a closer look:

Build great products. Telsa released new successful products like the Model 3 and Model Y (we’ll ignore all the the products they’ve announced like the Cybertruck) which have started to outsell rivals from BMW and Lexus. They also improved existing products by lowering the price of several models (which they did again today) and released a Model S with 402 miles of range, an 87-mile increase since 2016. Create an ecosystem. Tesla added over 753 charging stations in the U.S. — nearly a 4x increase since ’16 opening up longer trips, acquired Solar City so customers could generate electricity at home to power their cars, and brought their Nevada and Chinese factories online enabling them to lower the costs through economies of scale. Build advanced proprietary AI. Tesla’s most famous example of this is Autopilot, which would allow fully autonomous driving in all of its products. Tesla vehicles already deliver some advanced components of autonomous driving (aka Level 3), and on October 13, CEO Elon Musk announced that “Full Self-Driving” will be ready by the end of 2020. Once complete, Tesla then plans to deploy a fleet of self-driving taxis on the road next year in some markets.

Sidestepping the many debates about Tesla, the company’s progress is tangible and exciting. Tesla is playing to win. Google, meanwhile, increasingly looks like a company playing not to lose. The company’s entire consumer product line seems to be collecting dust: Chat, Contacts, Docs, Drive, Finance, Forms, Groups, Sheets, Shopping, Slides, Sites — all of it stuck in some kind of purgatorial maintenance.

You may be thinking, “What about Google X?” Yes, but Waymo’s driverless cars are not widely available, same for their delivery drones, and Google Glass was a dud. There is a big difference between a skunkworks project and delivering software products for the masses. How is a company with a 100B market cap shipping timid things slowly and moonshot things never?

Want more proof that their current strategy hasn’t worked well? Five years ago, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Netflix had nearly the same stock price. While stock price and shipping products are not a 1:1 (and stock price and market cap are not the same thing), one can argue there is correlation. Those companies that have been aggressive in shipping great products to end users seem to have performed better in the market. Simple, no? By eschewing Phase 1 of the tech giant playbook and NOT shipping great products, Google has underperformed its peer set.

Google trailing its FAANG peer set in stock market performance.

I can’t imagine this is the case, but if Sundar & team need ideas — things users can feel, that remind us of the old, impassioned Google — here are a few that might help Google get its groove back:

Improve Search with AI so that it returns meaningful answers instead of surfacing whatever site has gamed SEO the most. For example, ask Google an existential or experiential question and it’s likely to return something a Buzzfeed intern wrote. (More on this here.)

Acquire Calendly, sprinkle in some AI and integrate it into Google calendar so we can all stop wasting time figuring out when we’re free.

Mine Gmail using AI to resurface the most heartfelt emails I received from dear friends 5 or 10 years (kinda like Google Photos’ rediscover this day feature).

Augment Google Maps so we can use navigation and search for something else at the same time.

Create “wife mode” so Android always rings/vibrates if she calls or texts even if the phone is set to “do not disturb.” (More on this here. By the way, I estimate this feature would take them a week to build.)

Acquire Slack and Coda and integrate it into Google docs so users can enjoy a modern office suite. Acquire Superhuman and infuse it into Gmail.

F ine, fine so what if Google hasn’t visibly improved their consumer products much, and their stock has suffered? Who cares? There are two fundamental problems.

#1. Since Google’s products now evolve at a glacial pace, competitors can routinely deliver better (even if they are AI-less) products, and thus chip away at Google’s ecosystem.

Google no longer has the best music product (Spotify) the best news platform (Pocket) or the best video conferencing software (Zoom). 15–20 years ago, these would have been galvanizing and existential threats to the company. Competition is also coming from farther, deeper places — some believe Slack represents a serious threat to Gmail; same goes with Alexa and Google’s crown jewel of Search and Ads. (If you don’t use Google to search, but rather ask Alexa, then you bypass Google’s whole shebang.) Google’s response to competitive pressure is inconsistent and often uninspiring (YouTube Music Key, anyone?). When I was a PM at Square, we were worried about Amazon, but Google never seemed to come up.

Unlike Apple or Amazon, Google is more susceptible to competitors. As their former CEO Eric Schmidt used to say, competition is just a click away. I quit Chrome years ago, and now use a browser called Brave, primarily because Google has been wildly invading our privacy (one example see here, another here) and in the process, squandering much of the trust they’d earned. I know many others in the tech industry who’ve made the same switch. Consider this a canary in the coal mine — the cost of leaving at least this one part of their ecosystem has been painless.

#2. Google losing its swagger is bad for the tech industry overall and the entire internet at large.

Compared to the other tech giants, Google is perhaps the most benevolent and well-intentioned. At times, the company has taken principled stands (like this one or this one) which almost certainly cost it revenue, but earned it goodwill among users and employees, and helped guide industry and policy decisions that helped more often than not.

By giving away so many of their own valuable products, Google established a sense of generosity among the tech industry overall. The unspoken contract of giving away products and features is a practice countless tech companies have adopted, thus empowering all of us with better, competitive tools that have improved our lives. Imagine for a moment an internet whose culture was established by Verizon.

If Google’s influence fades (say to that of an IBM) then we lose a critical and often reasonable voice in monumental decisions around data privacy, facial recognition, AI, net neutrality, cyber security, cyberbullying, algorithmic transparency (of say credit scores or criminal sentencing decisions) and a ton more. Given that so much of our lives are now determined by tech, that our kids basically grow up on the internet, it’s essential Google retains influence given the less sanguine alternatives.

So, Google — wake up and ship something. Please?

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Will Rocklin is a product manager and startup advisor. Prior, he was VP of Product at Inamoto & Co., a tech incubator and strategic branding company. Before that, he was a Product Manager at Square, and helped build products at YouTube and Google.

This is a picture of Will and two Google engineers in 2008 after co-winning an internal product contest. (Will proposed Google Maps tell users when the NYC subways would arrive in real-time. Although he never worked on it, this feature did launch and subsequently helped people enjoy their lives instead of wasting it away on subway platforms.)