I was born in 1980, and for my entire adult life the tech industry in general and "founders" in particular have been celebrated as wizards whose genius and dedication have brought about countless wonders, with endless more wonders yet to come.
The last few years has shown this to be utterly false. Most tech companies turned out to be one trick ponies, only capable of creating one or two great products from scratch with that product often based on publicly funded research.
Lax antitrust enforcement allowed companies like Google to achieve market dominance and then use their access to cheap capital to buy any potential rival. As @pluralistic has noted, Google only really ever built 2.5 products themselves: Google Search, the Chrome browser, and a Hotmail clone. The rest of the empire was purchased. YouTube. Google Docs. Even their ad tech stack was bought. The same is true of Facebook.
@MadMadMadMadRN @pluralistic I remember using Writely before Google bought it.
@mtechman @MadMadMadMadRN @pluralistic google bought Piknik for a tidy sum. It was the best photo editor ever. If it was still live, it would be the best today. But they pulled the plug on it and told their users to use the shitty Picasa instead without porting any Piknik features. WTF? Just lazy and stupid.
It would be one thing (not a great thing) if they at least had good instincts about companies and products to buy, but they don't even have that!
In addition to destroying Piknik in favor of Picasa, they've got a long history of buying and launching things before pulling the plug pretty quickly.
Horrible business practices, lousy business acumen, and these days, not even good search results.
@pwinn Gah. This makes me so sad. Picnik was so cool. I know some of the founders. They got their payout. None work at Google anymore.