On one hand, I agree with you, on the other, as a former Googler I think that "just needs better coaching" is a
huge barrier in Google's current corporate culture and environment.
Google as a whole has a long history of not being able to successfully build great products out of great tech. That seems wrong from looking at search, Gmail, Maps*, Docs*, etc., but I think these are cases where a single great insight or innovation so dominated the rest of the product qualities that it made the product successful on it's own (PageRank, AJAX, realtime collaboration). There have been so many other cases where this pattern didn't hold, and even though Google had better tech, it wasn't so much better on one axis as to pull the whole product along with it.
That's the problem I see here. Maybe they have a better model. Can they make it a better product? OpenAI and Anthropic seem to ship faster, with a clearer vision, and more innovation with features around the model. Is their AI hardware acceleration really going to be a game changer if it's only ever available in-house?
I do believe in Waymo, but only because they've been incrementally investing and improving it for 15 years. They need to do that with all products, instead of giving up when they're not an instant hit.
*Maps, Docs, and YouTube were acquired with their key advantages in place, so I wonder how much they even count.
Google as a whole has a long history of not being able to successfully build great products out of great tech. That seems wrong from looking at search, Gmail, Maps*, Docs*, etc., but I think these are cases where a single great insight or innovation so dominated the rest of the product qualities that it made the product successful on it's own (PageRank, AJAX, realtime collaboration). There have been so many other cases where this pattern didn't hold, and even though Google had better tech, it wasn't so much better on one axis as to pull the whole product along with it.
That's the problem I see here. Maybe they have a better model. Can they make it a better product? OpenAI and Anthropic seem to ship faster, with a clearer vision, and more innovation with features around the model. Is their AI hardware acceleration really going to be a game changer if it's only ever available in-house?
I do believe in Waymo, but only because they've been incrementally investing and improving it for 15 years. They need to do that with all products, instead of giving up when they're not an instant hit.
*Maps, Docs, and YouTube were acquired with their key advantages in place, so I wonder how much they even count.