Maybe they should bring back "20% time"? That's sort of the whole idea of doing that, to encourage people to experiment and innovate.

Lack of ideas hardly appeared to have been Google’s problem. They’ve been ahead of nearly every major trend. Chat/Video call tools, AI, etc.

What they seem incapable of doing is actually sticking with an idea and making it work for a market.

Compare Google with their chat/call tools, versus Microsoft with Teams.

Google kept trying to replace their chat/calling tools. The number of versions of chat/calling tools has become a joke in itself. When MS was doing the same (futzing around with Skype, Lync, Skype for Business, etc) they also looked hapless and lost.

However, since then MS focused and doubled down on Teams and have seen immense growth despite basically being really late to this party. They’ve worked hard to make sure it fits corporate needs and kept iterating it to the point it’s become the leader, eclipsing some very formidable challengers.

Sure, MS leveraged some very important moats to achieve this (O365). But that’s exactly the point. Google has deeper and wider moats they could leverage. Gmail, for example. Which they did initially, and GChat was highly successful. But then they just seemed to lose interest in it and it’s become an awkward ghost town now.

No they didn't. They failed to capitalize on existing ideas and past ideas.

While I generally agree with this, it totally misses the mark by leaving out Chrome. As long as Chrome dominates the web, Google stays on top

It's a bit strange but so many people still think they don't know what the choral singing of jackals sounds like.

Why does it need big ideas? Youtube, search, and adsense are huge cash cows. All it needs to do is not screw up, while making incremental changes to existing services. It could branch out into cloud or what amazon or shopify are doing, but this is obviously harder.