Happy birthday Google: a party with all former failures
Google is blowing out the candles, and we want to celebrate in a different way. Not with the usual list of textbook successes, the search engine that revolutionized our lives, Gmail that buried old email accounts, Maps that sent road maps into retirement, but with a more human, more imperfect, and therefore perhaps even more fascinating perspective. Between social networks that never took off, futuristic glasses that became memes, and gaming platforms that remained deserted, Google built its empire even through spectacular stumbles and falls.
The origins
On September 15, 1997, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford University, registered the domain google.com with a revolutionary idea: to create a search engine capable of sorting results based on the number of times a link was mentioned on other web pages.
This idea arose from the need to manage and organize the immense and growing amount of information on the World Wide Web, which was experiencing unprecedented expansion. About a year later, on September 4, 1998, Page and Brin officially founded Google Inc.
So why does Google celebrate its birthday on September 27? The answer lies in an internal company decision made in 2002: September 27 was the day the search engine announced that it had achieved a historic record, indexing a number of pages never before achieved by its competitors. From that moment on, September 27 became the official date to celebrate the birth of Google, the digital giant that revolutionized the way we browse the web.
Google and the courage to fail
At Google’s party, the opening toast is to risk-taking, because those who don’t try don’t fail, but they don’t create either. On its journey from a simple search engine to a digital giant, Google has tried to revolutionize entire sectors: from social networks to smart glasses, from streaming gaming to communication apps.
Of course, many of these projects were resounding flops, but they are also the most entertaining guests at the party. Each failure represented a real laboratory for Google to experiment, learn, and improve. It has never been afraid to raise its hand and say, “This didn’t work, let’s try something else.”
The noisy flops: when Google believed too much
Among the most talked-about guests at the party are certainly the flops that made the most noise, as they fell so spectacularly. Google+ had the ambitious dream of being the “Facebook killer” but closed its doors long before it became famous, leaving behind only empty social circles.
The problem was that it wasn’t an idea born from listening to users, but from an internal political and strategic need: the desire not to be left off the social media podium occupied solely by Zuckerberg. So Google decided to force the issue, integrating Plus into Gmail, YouTube, and pretty much everywhere else, hoping that sooner or later someone would actually use it.
However, users found themselves with a Google+ profile they never asked for, and the level of interaction remained at an all-time low. As if that weren’t enough, in 2018, a scandal erupted over a vulnerability that had exposed the data of hundreds of thousands of people, and at that point, the choice was inevitable: turn off the lights and focus energy on more promising projects.
Google Glass, with its futuristic glasses, was supposed to bring augmented reality into our daily lives, but it turned into one of the most ridiculed and memed objects in technological history, more like a failed science fiction costume than a serious device.
Then there is Stadia, the cloud gaming platform launched to challenge giants such as Xbox and PlayStation, but which never managed to get gamers on board, quickly exiting the scene without applause, like a cover band at a village festival.
The silent flops: born and died without applause
On the contrary, other guests arrived almost unnoticed, entering and leaving the party without being noticed. Google Wave, conceived as a great revolution in collaborative communication, was so complicated and unclear that no one ever understood what it really was.
Orkut, the social network that enjoyed some success in Brazil, remained a complete unknown elsewhere, like the silent friend who writes in a WhatsApp group without receiving any replies.
Google Allo and Duo, other chat apps launched to conquer the messaging market, barely had time to say “hello” before disappearing from the technological horizon.
With so many former projects, a symbolic place was born: “killedbygoogle,” a digital archive that collects the virtual graves of hundreds of ideas that were born and died in a very short time. Each “grave” tells the story of a courageous experiment that did not work, but left a mark on Google’s growth. This graveyard is a sort of museum of failed innovation and the courage to try, a reminder not to fear failure.
An almost unwanted guest: AI
Every birthday party worth its salt has an unwanted guest: the one who wasn’t on the list but shows up anyway.
In Google’s case, that guest is artificial intelligence. On the one hand, the company continues to reassure editors and publishers, saying that the arrival of AI Overview will not ruin the party, but will actually bring more traffic and more opportunities for everyone. On the other hand, however, a very different picture is emerging in American courtrooms: documents filed by its own lawyers state that “the open web is already in rapid decline.” It’s a bit like admitting that the buffet is almost over.
If we look to the future, the web landscape no longer appears as a single large open square, but as a mosaic of increasingly closed and fragmented spaces, and AI risks reinforcing the mechanism of “information bubbles,” pushing toward standardized results and favoring the largest and most mainstream voices, while niche voices will struggle to emerge.
But we’re sure Google has a way out of this too, right, Big G?
Only Google can afford to fail
The question arises: why can Google rack up so many flops and continue to toast birthdays as if nothing had happened? Simple: it has broad shoulders and a full wallet.
Its core advertising business rakes in billions every quarter and covers the costs of every experiment that goes wrong. But it’s not just about money: at Google, every failure becomes a laboratory, a test from which useful pieces can be extracted for other inventions. Didn’t Glass revolutionize everyday life? No matter: certain technologies ended up in augmented reality projects for businesses. And then there’s the internal culture: that of the famous moonshot thinking, where making mistakes is not embarrassing, but almost a badge of honor. In short, Google can afford to fail because it doesn’t consider failure a tomb, but a springboard.
In the end, Google’s birthday party is an invitation to celebrate not only victories, but also failures. Google does not dominate the digital world because it has never made a mistake, but because it has never stopped trying, learning, and reinventing itself. Every failure has been a step towards success, and this is a lesson that applies to every area of life: failure is not the end, but the ticket to a better future.
So, happy birthday Google.
