1) Superb thread. Sun founder Scott McNealy was the first person I heard describe cloud computing, agree that Stadia is unlikely to succeed which is inline with Google's pattern of underachievement ex search/distribution and then a story from the the peak of the 2000 bubble.
2) McNealy was completely onpoint with his vision for utility (cloud) computing/Sunblade. Arguably wasn’t even too early from a technology/bandwidth perspective. Great lesson in product/market fit and execution dominating strategy and vision.
3) And Stadia is off to a similarly terrible start on both product/market fit and execution despite a compelling vision – AAA gaming anywhere, anytime - and impressive tech. Stadia is an inferior product to existing alternatives in most ways.
4) Stadia execution also weak. Beyond the disappointing visual/graphics quality, they are going after the hardcore/AAA gamer market dominated by “head” content with minimal “head” content. Most publishers just using Stadia to drive down Xbox/PS take rates.
5) This isn’t streaming music or streaming video where there is a vast amount of valuable tail content that benefits from superior accessibility/discovery via streaming.
6) AAA gaming is mostly about a few games and the content tail just isn’t that valuable - couldn't be more different from music/movies/TV in this respect.
Also - reminder that games are social networks and the Oasis/Metaverse is already here…
medium.com/@gavin_baker/m…
Also - reminder that games are social networks and the Oasis/Metaverse is already here…
medium.com/@gavin_baker/m…
7) Zero Stadia exclusives that matter when I could argue (but don’t believe) that the past console cycle winners were driven by exclusives (Halo, Gears of War when Xbox was on top and all of the current Playstation awesomeness this cycle).
8) And xCloud looming large with incredible content, which will overwhelm any potential technology advantages for Stadia. Stadia is a really cool technology looking for a consumer value proposition at launch. Completely inline with Google's history ex search/distribution.
9) Amazed at how *bad* Google is at executing anything other than search (Youtube, Maps essentially search) or distribution (Android, Chrome). Forget Buzz or Google Plus – I understand those failures.
Although blinking on Whatsapp inexcusable – imagine if they owned it.
Although blinking on Whatsapp inexcusable – imagine if they owned it.
10) But how did Google miss out on utterly dominating cloud computing, productivity and online/mobile payments? Talk about being an underachiever relative to latent potential.
11) Difficult to overstate how large of a technological edge Google had in the early days of AWS – they were the only entity doing “planetary scale computing.” That edge is smaller but remains to this day. Yet are a distant #3 albeit with some momentum under Kurian.
12) GSuite is vastly superior to Office 365 outside of Excel – no comparison – yet it remains a hobby while Office 365 is by far the most valuable SaaS franchise in the world and still growing fast.
13) OneDrive forces me to reconcile differences between documents several times per week and this has never once happened with GSuite. Search in Outlook is a joke. GSuite should be worth hundreds of billions and it appears to be an afterthought.
14) Obviously some improvement on GCP under Kurian, but no real forward progress on Gsuite. I would absolutely love to switch but missing a lot of enterprise necessities, especially for regulated entities.
15) And payments? How has Google managed to fail for so long when they have so many advantages and success would be so valuable to them?
16) Zuckerberg once described Twitter as a clown car that had driven into a goldmine. I often feel the same about Google ex search and distribution. Yet still worth almost $1 trillion and daily life is unimaginable without Google.
17) And while it may be a “country club,” they are also doing cutting edge research and moving the ball forward in AI and Quantum. If AGI happens, my bet is that it will happen at Google and Larry Page will be the first human to digitize his consciousness. Singularity, etc
18) Anyways, back to Scott McNealy. At the absolute peak in year 2000, McNealy came to my former employer and spoke to a packed room of fund managers and analysts. He took a call from Larry Ellison during the meeting.
19) And if memory serves, they compared notes on the best yachting destinations. Obviously planned. And so close to the top.
20) I believe he spoke at length about utility computing in that meeting after getting off the phone with Larry Ellison.
Imagine if Larry had listened to and believed his friend Scott rather than mocking the cloud until 2012ish! 😀
Imagine if Larry had listened to and believed his friend Scott rather than mocking the cloud until 2012ish! 😀
21) And am of course aware of his history with Netsuite, so what he did was different from what he said to customers, but still. World of tech would be really different in an alternate reality where Ellison had embraced the cloud 4-5 years earlier!
