If you are defining "pivot" as "abandon all other lines of business", then no, none of the BigTechs have ever pivoted.

By more reasonable standards of "pivot", the big investment into Google Plus/Wave in the social media era seems to qualify. As does the billions spent building out Stadia's cloud gaming. Not to mention the billions invested in their abandoned VR efforts, and the ongoing investment into XR...

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msabalau 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

G+ was a significant effort that was abandoned.

I'd personally define that as Google hedging their bet's and being prepared in case they needed to truly pivot, and then giving up when it became clear that they wouldn't need to. Sort of like "Apple Intelligence" but committing to the bit, and actually building something that was novel, and useful to some people, who were disappointed when it went away.

Stadia was always clearly unimportant to Google, and I say that as a Stadia owner (who got to play some games, and then got refunds.) As was well reported at the time, closing it was immaterial to their financials. Just because spending hundreds of millions of dollars or even a few billion dollars is significant to you or I doesn't mean that this was ever part of their core business.

Regardless, the overall sentimentality on HN about Google Reader and endless other indisputably small projects says more about the lack of strategic focus from people here, than it says anything about Alphabet.

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veidr 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, "pivot" implies the core business has failed and you're like "oh shit, let's do X instead".

Stadia was just Google's New Coke, Apple's Mac Cube, or Microsoft's MSNBC (or maybe Zune.

When they can't sell ads anymore, they'll have to pivot.

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swiftcoder 6 days ago | parent [-]

> Well, "pivot" implies the core business has failed and you're like "oh shit, let's do X instead".

I mean, Facebook's core business hasn't actually failed yet either, but their massive investments in short-form video, VR/XR/Metaverse, blockchain, and AI are all because they see their moat crumbling and are desperately casting around for a new field to dominate.

Google feels pretty similar. They made a very successful gambit into streaming video, another into mobile, and a moderately successful one into cloud compute. Now the last half a dozen gambits have failed, and the end of the road is in sight for search revenue... so one of the next few investments better pay off (or else)

	▲	devin 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		The link you posted has a great many very insignificant investments included in it, and nothing I've seen Google doing has felt quite like the desperation of Facebook in recent years. I didn't really see it at first, but I think you are correct to point out that they kind of rhyme. However to me, I think the clear desperation of Facebook makes it feel rather different from what I've seen Google doing over the years. I'm not sure I agree that Google's core business is in jeopardy in the way that Facebook's aging social media platform is.