Isn't Search pretty much the only thing Google was known for before Schmidt's tenure? Everything from Gmail to Android to Chrome to Maps to Self-driving cars has been developed whilst Schmidt was CEO.
When Schmidt joined, Google was a search company. A damn good search company, but still just search. Now they're a phenomenally influential technology company, who's products affect billions of lives every day. The fact that they didn't just sit on piles of cash but have used it to revolutionize field after field of endeavour is a striking achievement in diversification.
I agree with what you say, and I also don't want to play down Google's achievement. I just wanted to say that imho currently Google doesn't own any technology that would be truly indispensable - for any of their product, I can use competitor product without losing that much value.
Yes, 10 years ago they were "still just search," because that was the indispensable way to navigate the internet, it was a core technology. During the last five years, the focus has shifted so "just search" is not that important anymore, but Google somehow didn't evolve, but instead has been developing new and new products. And while some of them are very good, in the future they all can be replaced by the competition. Google is just not essential for the Internet anymore, or at least that's my feeling.
And it's a good thing for us that this is the case. Every time we say we wish a company dominated a field (like many of us say regarding Apple or Google) we basically say we wish it to be a monopoly, or close to it. For the most part, Google has grown in search, maybe not as fast as it did in it's beginnings, but grown none-the-less. It's competitors have grown as well, and maybe that's one of the reasons it doesn't seem like it's doing such a good job : competition is stronger and the difference between search results is not the way it used to be. Again, for me, this is a good thing, and we should be so lucky, to have globally, 5 or 10 companies duking it out in each major technology field, where we currently have 2 or 3 evolving incrementally.
When Schmidt joined, Google was a search company. A damn good search company, but still just search. Now they're a phenomenally influential technology company, who's products affect billions of lives every day. The fact that they didn't just sit on piles of cash but have used it to revolutionize field after field of endeavour is a striking achievement in diversification.