> Google has never, since the development of its search, innovated<p>This (a direct quote from the interview, not just a subtitle) seems false to me. Unless we tweak the definitions to <i>desirable</i> innovations, or to <i>the leadership and not the employees of</i> Google, this has to be false.<p>At the very least we need to credit them for Gmail, which by showing that a non-terrible app could be done in the browser, lit a fire under web devs’ collective arses that is still going today. (Again, whether this was a good idea is orthogonal—one way or another, it was a contribution to the state of the art even if the browser tech was already there. IIRC it was also born as an employee-driven initiative, but that’s also orthogonal.)<p>We’ve also forgotten what a wonder Maps and Earth were at the time. Perhaps ladling out a gigantic pot of money in exchange for every commercially available bit of satellite imagery in the world isn’t that inventive. And yet—for some reason nobody did it before that in such quantity, and that quantity acquired a quality of its own.<p>Books were castrated by copyright law, but they’re still an impressive achievement. You still encounter those Google-watermarked PDFs on Archive.org (proper, not the Wayback Machine), and if they don’t have the polish of pirate libraries, neither do they make you remember how much OCR sucked in the 2000s.<p>And Search, well, web search is a moving target, and what reads as operational competence at a high level is almost certainly dozens of researchers inventing new things for years. I can’t say it’s been an unequivocal good for the world, but to call it staying still seems an exaggeration.<p>Also, Chrome. It was great at first, the thing that finally made me abadon Opera. And V8 brought to the mainstream the more dynamic bits of the Self research from Sun that wasn’t useful for the JVM. Not only Node—I don’t think we’d have LuaJIT today if not for V8 and the *Monkeys, and the initial V8 work was what breached the ivory tower there.<p>(Does Android count? Undeniably most of what it is now is from after the Google acquisition, but they say it’s an enclave with a separate culture within the company. Dunno.)