Google CEO digs into rival tech companies, says industry needs more innovation - Page 2

"YouTube, Chrome, and Android"
Dear Larry,
As I recall, you bought two out of three of those innovations. So much for internal innovation. And I beg to differ, I think there is shockingly little that has been accomplished in human history without the benefit of competition.
However, this patent back and forth stuff IS nonsense. I say lets give up the lawsuits and put Eric Schmidt in jail for violating his trust to Apple shareholders when he was a member of the Apple board. He will find much in common with his new friends in the pen and we will all get to go on with our lives.

 

So his examples of Google innovating are something that they bought, something that nobody wants and something that they bought and stuffed full of stolen IP.  Yeah, great examples!

 

Google is making products, no doubt (albeit all centered around their core advertising business), but what we're talking about - what Page is talking about - is original innovation.

 

Google Maps - An outstanding mapping product, arguably one of the best, but based on a project Google obtained in 2004 when it purchased the company that created it. No original innovation there, just that "incremental improvement" over the years.

 

Google Earth - Originally called "EarthViewer 3D" when it was created by another company, which again, Goggle bought. So, no original innovation there.

 

Gmail - A shiny web interface for standard email services, neither of which is was an original Google invention - not even by a long shot.

 

"google now makes siri looks like childs play" - Not sure what you're referring to, but if you're just talking about search results - about a decade of data-mining the internet, scraping <other> companies websites and sticking that information in a database isn't "innovative", not to mention that the relevancy of the results is questionable in a number of cases, thanks to the weighting results based on advertising considerations.

 

Android - A linux-based operating system (not a Google innovation) heavily leveraging Java for functionality (also not a Google innovation). Does it have some nice UI features, perhaps, but what are the novel innovations Android has actually brought to the table?

 

Chrome OS - another linux derivative which is essentially intended to only support a single application - a web browser. Low-cost, sure, innovative, nope.

What's the matter Larry?

 

Is Google running out of things to copy?

 

 

 

Edited by hill60 - 1/17/13 at 3:57pm

That's almost like a lesser jazz musician saying to Miles Davis "you didn't innovate enough."

He's right! Google was the first ones "crazy" enough to come up with search engines, Internet maps, mobile OS and an over business model wrapped around collect people information for advertising and marketing!!

No wait...

Bingo, rbalmer! :)

 

Apple sells products, Google/Facebook sells.... "you!"

 

No thanks.

"Page gave the examples of YouTube, Chrome, and Android, saying, "If you?re not doing some things that are crazy, then you're doing the wrong things."

 

YouTube, purchased by Google then updated with iterative improvements. Android purchased by Google, add several splashes of iOS flavour, now updated with iterative improvements. Chrome is the closest thing to "innovative" out of that lot, albeit from open-source roots, and it's still just a means for Google to gather information to sell to advertisers. Nexus phones and tablets, nothing innovative or game changing there - Amazon heads the pack when it comes to loss-leading.

 

Where is your major new disruption, Google? The world has been waiting since 1999.

 

 

"Ground breaking work" like what?

Aren't those open-source roots in Chrome webkit which is in-house developed by Apple and then released so that Google can do an iterative improvement?  

Google, the company that's bought over 120 companies and incorporated them into their own products/services.

Google is, by a mile, the most prolific company in the world when it comes to buying out others. Is that what they call innovation?

 

On the "nice UI features" of Android, those were mostly taken from the iPhone.  I dgaf if the Android cheerleaders want to argue that Android is now as good as iOS (thanks to "Project Butter" for example.)  The bottom line is the basic UI on Android was lifted from Apple.  And don't forget about Apple's WebKit contribution to Chrome! 

 

As someone else said much better than I can:  "Outside of Search, Google’s products — Android, Google Docs — are shit."

 

 

But Page didn't mention any of that.  The "innovations" he highlighted weren't really Google innovations at all.  They were either purchased or adapted or stolen, depending on your point of view.   

What would be your hypothetical charges? No one outside of these boards has accused him of abusing his position at the time.

I didn't talk about where WebKit came from.  I talked about Apple's "contribution" to WebKit, which Google then used to build Chrome.

Chrome doesn't exist without WebKit. Android doesn't exist without Sun's creation of Java. Android doesn't exist without Linus Torvald's Linux Project.

Google is founded upon other innovations. There own Search Engine is the result of pioneering prior work that they saw an opportunity to evolve.

Google isn't known as first to the game.

Hell, without some former NeXT/Apple Engineers that took positions at Google, Google is much farther behind.

We are 17 days into 2013 and Apple has already been granted 98 new patents.

If Google thought Apple wasn't innovating of late, take a deep and long look at 2012 granted patents and the new 2013 batches coming out. The depth of innovation is going to once again leave the industry flat footed.

 

When did I even mention Apple? I was speaking to Google's innovation (or lack thereof), in response to your comments on the same. Call Apple a photocopying knock-off factory if you like, but it's irrelevant and changes not one whit the fact that Google has not a single innovative bone in it's body (which by the way you just agreed with).

 

As for google now, "look it up" doesn't answer the question of what you're referring to, so again, is it the search accuracy? If so, then I'll repeat - data mining isn't innovation - regardless of who's doing it. Perhaps you're talking about response time? On that point, at present, Google's servers seem to be consistently responding faster than Siri's - so kudos, google now has more network and server capacity devoted to indexing and profiling your personal interests (so the big G can sell your data to advertisers ;)) than Siri does.

 

I'm willing to admit it if something I said was incorrect - if you're willing to point it out and explain why. So, do you care to refute what I actually said, or will you continue to try and throw straw men at me?

Gee! Where is the innovation from Google?

Stealing iOS was the big innovation Google did. Goggle is floundering in the tablet marketplace because Steve Jobs shut them out and they could not copy from Apple.

Besides the search engine what has Google done?

It is easy to bad mouth the industry but difficult to innovate. Take your own advice pal.

 

Poor excuse. Wired is a tech magazine, is it not? The readers are as much interested in the consumer end as the back end.

 

In any case, he chose poor examples as figureheads of innovation and people here are rightly calling him out for it.

 

Where is your major disruptor Google? Still partying like it's 1999, I see.

USEFULL innovation.  Sometimes people confuse innovation with just some cooky idea that doesn't go anywhere.  There is plenty of innovation, but once a good innovation becomes accepted, then it's all about perfecting the innovation and coming up with OTHER smaller innovations along the way.  No one can expect continual innovation all of the time.  For every good one, there's 1,000's of lousy ones.  Case in point 3D TV.  Dumb idea, how many people that own a 3D HD TV actually use them more than 1% of the amount of time they own the TV?  Not many.  Most don't use it much past the first couple of weeks as it's a novelty.

Hey Page, how are those Google Glasses coming?  SIgn me up for not buying them. I hope your company squanders every last penny of cash on that turkey.  All they are are annoying way to look through something while we go about our daily lives.  Those glasses are nothing but a neat demo for easily manipulated Android users.   

yes chrome uses webkit which apple developed and  licenses freely as part of the open source license.  As many others here have said the only thing google innovated was its original search algorithm.  Beyond that they are basically the webs Borg, assimilating smaller companies ip into there own at an alarming rate and then calling themselves innovative.  I call them the worlds biggest parasite.   Now there goal is to assimilate you and your information and sell you to the ad companies destroying your privacy.  I wish them a speedy demise and I would not touch them with a cattle prod.

Google is responsible for the modern Internet? What kind of drugs are you doing?

Maybe they have themselves confused with Al Gore.

Start with the jury decision where Samsung was ordered to pay over $1 B - most of it for IP that was stolen and placed into Android.

Do You?  Obviously not.

 

  The code that would become WebKit began in 1998 as the KDE’s HTML layout engine KHTML and KDE’s JavaScript engine (KJS). The WebKit project was started within Apple by Don Melton on 25 June 2001^[9] as a fork of KHTML and KJS. Melton explained in an e-mail to KDE developers^[2] that KHTML and KJS allowed easier development than other available technologies by virtue of being small (fewer than 140,000 lines of code), cleanly designed and standards-compliant. KHTML and KJS were ported to OS X with the help of an adapter library and renamed WebCore and JavaScriptCore.^[2] JavaScriptCore was announced in an e-mail to a KDE mailing list in June 2002, alongside the first release of Apple’s changes.^[10] WebCore was announced at the Macworld Expo in January 2003 by Apple CEO Steve Jobs with the release of the Safari web browser. JavaScriptCore was first included with Mac OS X v10.2 as a private framework which Apple used within their Sherlock application, while WebCore debuted with the first beta of Safari. Mac OS X v10.3 was the first major release of Apple’s operating system to bundle WebKit, although it had already been bundled with a minor release of 10.2.

However, the exchange of code patches between the two branches of KHTML has previously been difficult and the code base diverged because both projects had different approaches in coding.^[11] One of the reasons for this is that Apple worked on their version of KHTML for a year before making their fork public.

 

Before you go laughing at others get your facts straight.  The WebKit fork that google chrome and IE uses now is the apple fork.  I guess Don Melton at apple had nothing to do with WebKit lol.  And I certainly dont see googles name mentioned anywhere in there, wheres there contribution to WebKit?  Cant find it ?  Its because there is not one.  Apple has continued to refine WebKit and give away its refinements to others and continues to innovate.  Where is googles innovation?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHHAHAH.  Wow How naive can you be?  Sounds like your a google sycophant.  They can do no wrong in your eyes.  They have been caught red handed circumventing both safari and IE's privacy settings and you can really believe they dont use the info gained for there advantage?  They got caught recording network traffic from private home wifi's with there street level view cars LOL.  What planet do you live on?

 

LOL.

 

Go read Eric Shmidts quotes about how if you dont want us to know your dirty little secrets to have your name changed every few years, because according to him that is the only way google wont get your info lol.

Edited by Mechanic - 1/17/13 at 5:56pm

But where is googles contribution to that fork ?????   Chrome does not contribute, It uses khtml and apples combine fork.  Hense no innovation on goggles part.

Hell google wont even give back androids full fork to the linux opensource group which is illegal according to the open source contract.

The methods to allow interprocess communications in an operating system. For one.