Half of the projects at Area 120 were cut by Google earlier this week. The goal of Area 120 was to give employees a place to experiment and chase their passion projects, with the hope that they could find the next big idea like Adsense, Gmail, or Google News.
As the economy has turned, it seems that Google is losing its appetite for big bets and experimentation, instead focusing on what makes money today, or services that it really just has to run. In order to be more efficient and productive, the company needs to be 20 percent more efficient and productive than it is today. He urged employees to be more entrepreneurial, but it read more like a demand to work harder and find ways to cut costs rather than to bark up trees that may or may not bear future fruit.
Outside of the company, that perception has been pervasive. According to a recent report from The Information, some recruiters looking to hire employees for startup companies are starting to look elsewhere because they have the impression that the tech giant's employees mostly maintain legacy products rather than build new ones.
It is hard to imagine that the lineup will change soon.
The company's hardware is the most obvious example of this idea. We reported earlier this week that the cancellation of the Pixelbook project left it up to other companies to push the Chromebooks category forward.
Monica Chin pointed out that the originalPixelbook felt like a halo device meant to inspire other manufacturers and show what was possible with Chromebooks rather than something that people would buy. It is safe to say that launching any sort of laptop wouldn't be a guaranteed home run for the company. It would have to convince people to choose its laptop over those from trusted brands, something it has failed to do at any sort of scale with the new Pixelbook Go.
The parts of the lineup that used to be bolder are no longer. Did you remember the Pixel 4, which came with a radar sensor, or the Pixel 2, which came with a squeezable side? The features gave you a good reason to consider a Pixel. Everything we have seen about the Pixel 7 so far makes it seem like it will be a relatively minor upgrade, complete with a very similar design to its predecessors. On October 6th, we will find out if that is the case, but I will not be surprised if there is nothing shocking about the next phones from the company.
It would be unfair to say that there isn't anything new happening with thePixels. Adding a smartwatch and a tablets to its lineup is something it is doing. The latter has a design that feels years out of date now and will feel even more so next year after we get a fresh new crop of iPad. It doesn't feel like a halo device that will inspire other manufacturers, and it's not clear if these devices will even be competitive.
This phenomenon has been going on for a long time and is not limited to hardware. In the past year or so, it has turned around on plans to integrate banking into Google Pay, which has largely been replaced now by a reincarnated version of its wallet. There is a difference between giving up on a project and changing your culture to be more conservative. Transferring assets from a failed experiment to a startup and then investing in the company feels less ambitious than just restarting the project yourself.
The core apps and services are still getting new features, redesigns, and tweaks, and that's not to say that they're all standing still. The messaging platform wall is still being thrown at by the search engine. The company spends a quarter of a billion dollars on research. I wouldn't think of any of the company's recent work that made me want to cry. I like to watch the occasional TikTok but I don't like web tracking as much as I would like, but those changes are not revolutionary.
The future doesn't feel like it's happening right now.
It has been difficult to get excited about the efforts of the company. Recently, it introduced a flurry of changes to workspace, adding "chips" that allow you to blend your documents, spreadsheets, reminders, and even meetings and emails together. Meet is its competitor. Adding new features to an office suite doesn't seem like it would be a good idea to build the future of me.
Even if it were to stop all experimentation, it would still survive because its services are ingrained in the way most of us use the internet. It will be hard for it to come up with the next Gmail, Google Assistant, or ChromeOS if it doesn't take big bets. If companies want to attract the kind of people who are going to build the future, they need to be a place where people can actually go out on limbs and not be worried about getting in trouble. If that wasn't the case, it would be a shame.
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