What is Google's last successful new product — home-grown or acquisition?

Define successful any way you see fit.

I don't think new + success is a thing at Google, especially if we factor in profitability.

~All of the obvious successes today took a decade to get there (Android, Gmail, Cloud, YouTube, etc). Even the Transformer paper is 5+ years old and not technically a success for Google yet. 🙃

A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.

shazow.net

Currently: WhatsABI

There's an internal meme that any time you go to use some tool, there are always 2 options: the old deprecated option, the new incomplete unsupported option, (and secret third option that nobody knows about — my personal version of the meme).

After sleeping on it: Majority of new+successful products at Google are internal, there's a huge focus on infrastructure and tooling innovation. Probably starting since the mapreduce paper from 2004? Transformative things like that but every few months, just not consumer facing.