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Google Doesn't Need Innovation
AI Notes
Three days after Why I Left Google to Join Grab went viral, the press came calling for the hot take and Steve, busy with his new Grab job, wrote a single short clarifying Medium post to head them off. Critics had read the original as a prediction that Google was dying; he hadn't said that. He'd said only that Google had lost the ability to innovate, which by itself isn't fatal. Most large companies don't innovate at scale. It's normal. They acquire the innovator — Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Amazon/Twitch — or they execute harder on someone else's idea (Uber Eats; Microsoft's Xbox as a defensive response to PlayStation). Bezos is the exception, partly because he never gives up on a good idea.
Google's specific problem, Steve argues, is that it has slowed both acquisitions and competitive responses, because it doesn't "go to the ground" enough to see what it is missing — Cloud and Social are his examples of products Google waited "years too long" to ship. Fixable, he says. Short and undefensive, and it turns on one line: most big companies don't innovate at a large scale. It's normal.
Related listings
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2018
Why I Left Google to Join Grab
The post this one is a clarifying follow-up to. Three days after the viral original, the press wanted a hot take and Steve refused to escalate — instead he wrote this calmer companion piece. Read in sequence.
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2018
Who Will Steal Android from Google?
The longer, structural argument that this short note prefigures. Google's slow-to-respond pattern is the same one that lets three different competitors all chip at Android in 2018. The two posts are the short and long versions of the same claim.
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2018
Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, and the Quest to Kill eBay
The other 2018 essay in which Bezos's stubbornness is the foil for everyone else's complacency. Bezos here, briefly, is the exception that proves the rule Steve is laying down. The eBay piece is the long version of how he kept hammering until he was right.