No need to go out of your way to provide rationales, this person is most likely misrepresenting himself.
Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't. I mean even at face value his logic is unsound: all mobile services are cloud supported, there is no conflict between being mostly about mobile and providing developers with a backend on which to build their wares, which in any case are also increasingly mobile.
> Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't.
I don't mean to sound crass, but if Google employees are so smart why is Google so collectively bad at doing anything right for an end user experience? Adwords does awesome, Google X has a mind of its own, but the rest of Google? The only thing somewhat decent that comes to mind is Calendar, Gmail, and the latest versions of Android.
Mind you, I'm a huge Google fan, but it (as an org) makes some pretty terrible decisions collectively.
It's not an individual that is making these decisions, it's a complicated set of groups, technologies, and directions.
Does that mean having bad user experiences is justified? No. But it's incredibly complicated to tie together such large projects (at a complexity most people won't fathom) and do it well.
I would look at it the other way and be amazed how good some of the things work.
Also, it's perfectly acceptable to enter new markets through acquisitions and apply Google's innovations there. That is a form of innovation in my opinion.
Oh come now, surely you can't be this ignorant of the way any company (of almost ANY size) works? Take Microsoft as an example: For the last decade, they've been the prototypical example of a dysfunctional company flailing around, and yet you'd have to be a complete fool to think that that suggests anything about how talented their engineers are (all the ones I've met have been exceedingly so). Ignoring all the layers between the intelligence of rank-and-file employee and the output of a corporation with ~50,000 employees and tying the two together is honestly just stupid. You even alluded to this with "(as an org)".
You're also hopping the goalposts around a bunch between revenue, success, and some subjective measure of "quality", but Android has over a billion activations, Chrome has three-quarters of a billion active users, GMail has 600+ million active users...again, one would have to be a complete fool (or a recent immigrant from Mars) to think that "only GoogleX and AdWords have had success".
By the way, in case you're planning to move the goalposts again to focus on only revenue, if you can't understand the concept of a product having monetary value without directly being a source of revenue, then I'm honestly just in awe of how little you understand how any of the industry works.
Anyone can append a disclaimer to an anonymous comment claiming all sort of stuff.
Also one would expect Google employees to be smart his/her comment conveys the opposite: there is no inherent conflict between being mostly about mobile while providing developers with a backend on which to build their wares which are also becoming increasingly mobile.
There is a large amount of malice targeted at Google and much of it manifests in HN comments, as this threat would suggest.
I give it a little bit of stock because if someone came on HN and claimed "Larry and Sergey lit a pile of Bibles on fire and professed their love for Satan in front of the company," I'd be comfortable within the confines of my nondisclosure agreement saying that never happened even though TGIF is a confidential meeting. It'd have to be that ridiculous for me, but I'm sure the threshold for others is lower.
If "joebar" here completely made up the question and answer I bet one of the numerous lurking Googlers would have called him on it by now, even though it's a confidential meeting because (a) not everybody cares about nondisclosure to the same extent you and I do and (b) it's not like you're divulging corporate secrets, you're just saying that's a made up story. Pretty simple. "That story isn't true." Done. Legal gray area, but Google is pretty lax on social media until you fuck up.
I should clarify that it's probably a safe bet that the Q&A happened (and, honestly, sounds like Larry) but I disagree with the commenter's analysis.
Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't. I mean even at face value his logic is unsound: all mobile services are cloud supported, there is no conflict between being mostly about mobile and providing developers with a backend on which to build their wares, which in any case are also increasingly mobile.