My take is that they probably just don’t care enough. It’s like Intel and their forays into all kinds of adventures outside of processors. Eventually these things are so small compared to their dominance in the core market that as an organization they simply don’t care enough to make it work.
It probably started as an initiative of someone high enough to get the resources, but the org never doubled down on it or change one inch of its roadmap to make it work.
Google had the first mover in modern email and maps and had very easy onboarding for both from search. Google somehow made Android work (which seems like a miracle in retrospect) and also Chrome (some would say they had to make Chrome work), but that’s all I can think of (it’s still huge, obviously, but also narrow in scope for an organization with that magnitude of resources).
As long as Google is filled with connected, talented, bored people it will keep pushing out all sorts of product experiments.
It probably started as an initiative of someone high enough to get the resources, but the org never doubled down on it or change one inch of its roadmap to make it work.
Google had the first mover in modern email and maps and had very easy onboarding for both from search. Google somehow made Android work (which seems like a miracle in retrospect) and also Chrome (some would say they had to make Chrome work), but that’s all I can think of (it’s still huge, obviously, but also narrow in scope for an organization with that magnitude of resources).
As long as Google is filled with connected, talented, bored people it will keep pushing out all sorts of product experiments.