Google has celebrated its birthday with doodles for the past few years, including a throwback to the original logo for its 10th birthday and a painting of a cake from 89-year-old Los Angeles painter Wayne Thiebaud last year. But doodle milestones aside, Google has accomplished a mind-boggling amount of work in the last 13 years—building the company to almost 30,000 employees and $9.03 billion in revenue last quarter.
With over a decade in the business, it’s natural that there will be hits and misses. We love Gmail and 43 percent of Americans are now using Android phones, but Google might want us to forget certain missteps like Google Wave and Buzz.
Google TV is also not the blockbuster hit the company probably hoped it would be, but then again, even Android got off to a slow start. Google had some trouble in the social arena, facing confusion and privacy complaints surrounding Wave and Buzz, but it might be able to make up for it with its nascent Google+ social network.
Google is still thriving with its original product—search. And what better way to access Google.com than through Google’s own Chrome Web browser, which captured more than 15 percent of the market recently.
Hit the slideshow for a look back at some of Google’s biggest hits and misses. This list is certainly not exhaustive; Google has had hundreds of smaller projects that both took off and fizzled. Let us know some of your favorites, and which ones you hope will end up in the garbage bin. For more on Google’s doodles, meanwhile, check out PCMag's slideshow of recent homepage creations.
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