Google's Lost Moonshots
After 6 years of consulting and startup adventures, I’ve been trying to get back into big tech. While browsing Reddit and Blind to get a pulse of FAANG nowadays, I’ve noticed something fascinating: Google, the company that defined “moonshots” in Silicon Valley, no longer commands the extreme prestige it once did.
Moonshots
Google’s still a great company, but once upon a time, Google was defining the future. They didn’t just build products - they invented the language we used to talk about innovation. In that period, “moonshots,” “10x thinking,” and even their slogan “don’t be evil” were legendary, at least in my eyes and those of my peers aspiring to go into computer science. I don’t think they were just marketing; I like to imagine they were genuine artifacts of a culture that believed in doing massive, world-changing things. I know that’s an idealized version of them, but it was easy to believe when you’d hear conversations about the tiers of their free food, silly hats, and even slides in their offices, all in contrast to the boring desk jobs we’d come to imagine for the typical white-collar worker.
And for a while, they delivered. Google Maps revolutionized how we navigate. Gmail made every other email service look ancient - Remember Hotmail? Chrome redefined what a browser could be. Android “democratized” smartphones. Even their famous 20% time methodology was enshrined as creative freedom for the “average” engineer, lauded for yielding products that billions now use.
But what about now? Although Gemini just launched its latest iteration, consider this: it’s been launched months after competitors and offers only marginal improvements, if at all. I have trouble not tagging it as a “follower product”: It almost feels like something built because they had to, not because they saw the future differently.
Google Glass of course was a cautionary tale. Google Plus? A textbook example of how not to compete with Facebook. Meanwhile, Google acquired Nest for $3.2B and managed it into lost its innovative edge. Fitbit cost them $2.1B but hasn’t yielded any groundbreaking health tech. Remember Motorola? $12.5B spent and sold for $2.9B just three years later. And I’m sure we’ve all encountered some beloved product that’s been bought or launched and quickly killed by Google: Inbox, Reader, Wave, Allo, Stadia, Hangouts, Project Ara, Boston Dynamics (sold to Hyundai), Firebase (a shell of its former self), and dozens of messaging apps. Each one started with fanfare and ended with a quiet blog post announcing its “sunset.” For fun, check out the graveyard: https://killedbygoogle.com/.
Meta
Switching modes for a moment, let’s talk about my alma mater - Meta (formerly Facebook). How is Meta’s stock at an all time high?
I think one part of the puzzle is that Zuck too keeps making enormous, future-defining bets - and enough of them work to matter. When mobile threatened to disrupt social networking in 2008, Zuckerberg didn’t just create a mobile team - he rebuilt the entire company to be mobile-first. When Instagram emerged as a threat, he dropped $1B to buy it when it had 13 employees, a move that was highly publicized and questioned at the time. WhatsApp for $19B? Everyone thought he was crazy. Now look at those acquisitions: How WhatsApp ate the world, How Instagram changed our world. To quote The Guardian here: “It started as a photo-sharing platform, but quickly rose to become the most influential app of our generation.”
Even their current AR/VR bet, burning billions a year, shows a level of conviction that Google doesn’t seem to be able to find anymore. Meta renamed their entire company! They’re willing to look foolish, take massive losses, and keep pushing forward.
The contrast is striking. But why? What happened to Google’s moonshot capability?
Hindsight is 20/20, but watching this play out over the years I think there are three systemic issues that explain it:
1. Misaligned Incentives
Google’s innovation machine is driven by PM careers, and PM careers are driven by metrics. If you’re a product manager at Google, what’s your incentive? Ship something small that looks good on your performance review, or spend years on a project that might fail spectacularly? It’s like trying to work on decade-spanning climate change projects with politicians who need to win the next election and have term limits of 4 years. You take your wins, and you get out before the bridge collapses. Which inevitably it will, because can you expect any human project to only ever be winning, quarter after quarter?
2. Moonshot-scale Budget
This is crucial: moonshot-scale problems need moonshot-scale resources. Think about how VCs fund startups. When something shows promise, not only do they need more funding, the fundraising often jumps by orders of magnitude. What Google calls moonshots often feel more like well-funded experiments. Meanwhile, Meta commits resources at a scale that matches their ambitions. Look at Reality Labs - they’ve burned more money than most companies will ever see, but they keep going.
3. Institutional Learning
And maybe the hardest problem: institutional learning. Both companies fail, but they fail differently. When Google Glass flopped, what happened to all that knowledge? Sure, some of it probably lives in internal docs, but the teams scattered, the context was lost, and the deep learning - the kind that only comes from failure - largely evaporated. I also heard that Google Plus’s assets were also cannibalized internally; Please let me know if you’ve interacted with any part of Google Plus’s remains recently.
Meta approaches failure differently. I mean they have their product teams too, but I want to point out that they started working on AR/VR as early as the purchase of Oculus for $2B in 2014. Their journey shows a clear learning curve from Oculus to Quest to Ray-Ban Meta glasses. The teams or orgs mostly stay around in one way or another, and the context persists. Every failure feeds directly into the next attempt.
Takeaway
So maybe the idea is this: Maybe moonshots can’t be managed through traditional corporate processes. Maybe they require a kind of personal conviction and long-term thinking that’s hard to maintain in a public company with rotating leadership.
At the end of the day, Meta has the Zuck factor. We saw it when he restructured the company while retaining the controlling shares, and at the time I thought wow, is that selfish? But it makes sense that if you’re building the future, your methodology and structure might need to be different. Maybe you can’t just “process” your way to revolutionary innovation. At some point, someone needs to have enough conviction to bet big and keep betting, even when the metrics say stop. For Meta, Zuck was able to keep the alignment with his own beliefs, continue investing resources despite criticism, and maintain the organizations to continue learning and make progress.
I think in the end, the biggest risk at this scale isn’t failing - it’s being afraid to commit.
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