Chrome was built out of the frustration of Firefox didn't get any faster. And at the time they have a real need to compete with IE which was holding back the web, their search engine, and hence their ad money.
Gmail was built by an employee as their 20% project, got traction within the company, improved the Spam filter for their own use before it was open to public ( or invite ).
Both of them were born from product mentality, where they see a problem, have real frustration and have vision of where it should be.
It was quite clear Stadia was born out of a business revenue idea rather than real needs. ( That goes the same with Apple Arcade, although one can argue it was designed for kids ) And whether there is a market for it remains to be seen.
Despite all the criticism Apple gets, and all the flaws it has lately, they are still very much a product mentality company, and possibly the only one out of the big corps. Google on the other hand, is more like a one off success. I cant even remember a Google product on top of my head that are not from acquisition or 20% project and was born out of a product mentality.
I thought chrome and Gmail (and android and maps) were built specifically to gather user data. That's why they launched Gmail for free literally months after Hotmail (outlook) started moving towards a charging model. The big plan for Google has been user data since at least 2000. They realised that's what would make them "more than a search engine". And they were right, and ahead of the curb by at least a decade.
Im not sure how or whether other services Stadia fit in to that. Maybe the fact they don't is why they get cancelled so easily? But I don't think it's accurate to say Chrome and Gmail were just standalone projects solving single issues, they were part of a wider strategy that has paid off.
> It was quite clear Stadia was born out of a business revenue idea
I'm guessing the cloud gaming stuff is planned as a way to generate revenue with spare GPU capacity in their server farms. They're already spending a ton on GPUs and network bandwidth, so why not sprinkle some kubernetes on top and run games on it when it's not running training datasets?
Chrome was built out of the frustration of Firefox didn't get any faster. And at the time they have a real need to compete with IE which was holding back the web, their search engine, and hence their ad money.
Gmail was built by an employee as their 20% project, got traction within the company, improved the Spam filter for their own use before it was open to public ( or invite ).
Both of them were born from product mentality, where they see a problem, have real frustration and have vision of where it should be.
It was quite clear Stadia was born out of a business revenue idea rather than real needs. ( That goes the same with Apple Arcade, although one can argue it was designed for kids ) And whether there is a market for it remains to be seen.
Despite all the criticism Apple gets, and all the flaws it has lately, they are still very much a product mentality company, and possibly the only one out of the big corps. Google on the other hand, is more like a one off success. I cant even remember a Google product on top of my head that are not from acquisition or 20% project and was born out of a product mentality.
Edit: Ok there is one, Google Map.