Your comment history is exclusively limited to posts about Google product releases and stock performance (and one about Sergey Brin's airship), so I'm sorry if I don't consider you an unbiased observer. And sure, maybe you honestly believe in the company, and that's why you invest in it. But just because you think you've aligned your incentives (stock portfolio) with those of the company, doesn't mean you've accurately assessed its health and future outlook.

For those of us closer to the ground - the "HN hive mind," if you will - in the same industry but not at Google, the signs are far from positive. Top line revenue looks good, but Microsoft grew more in the past decade than Google. There is a massive dependence on advertising revenue, which is so large that it's basically an existential threat to the company (although admittedly, GCP is beginning to show promise after recently posting its first profitable quarter). The rest of the industry is actively fighting Google's ability to display ads to their users. The quality of the flagship Search product is possibly the lowest it's ever been. YouTube is driving users away while picking pennies up off the floor. Employees are leaving to build startups like OpenAI with the tech they researched at Google. Morale is extremely low. Recruiting pipelines are likely suffering; most developers with an offer from Google and a company paying equivalent salary (in other words, the best developers) will not choose Google. Public perception is hostile, amidst both the general public and early adopters like developers. Governments are litigating, potential anti-trust breakups are on the horizon. But most importantly: Google has failed to fundamentally innovate since about 2005; if you disagree, please name an innovative product created from scratch at Google since that time.

The Waymo self-driving car product seems like it will be quite transformative to entire industries once they get clearance to deploy it further than San Francisco where it is already providing rides day in and day out. Or does that not count for some reason?

Disclaimer: I own Google stock simply by virtue of being invested in mutual and index funds, as are most people.

Isn't that the product that had to scale back recently because it required an average of two humans per car to remotely operate it?

I'm (mostly) genuinely asking. I might have it confused with another company, and I have to admit I don't follow self-driving closely.

But also, Waymo was an acquisition (slightly arguable, since Google merged it with its own self-driving efforts, but the founding team was acquired). I asked for an example of an innovative product created from scratch at Google.

You're thinking of Cruise. Waymo has not scaled back in any way, and in fact is in the process of expanding to LA with a limited pilot through the winter.

I don't think the fact that some of the first people on the team had worked together previously makes Waymo not "created at Google". The project they worked on before, the DARPA challenge, was not a commercial product, and at the time no company was seriously investing in self-driving cars as a viable technology. This isn't like YouTube, which was a well-known brand and viable business pre-acquisition. It was Google resources that made it possible to build the rest of the Waymo team, lobby governments to allow self-driving cars on the road, work with hardware manufacturers, and leverage the rest of Google's software stack, ML expertise, street view data, and datacenter capacity to build and train the driver.

You're thinking of Cruise, which had to stop operations for malfeasance. If you want to tell me that the Google Self-driving Car Project, which is what Waymo was called before it was spun out from Google, didn't come from Google, I'm not sure what to say.

Waymo is cool, but it's not a product, it's PR. If it ever really ships then we can talk.

What's your definition of product? I use it every few days to get around (a very specific) town. Is that not real?