It's a bunch of very talented, bored engineers who realize that launching a product, even if it fails, is better for their career and resume than doing grunge work that might be better for google's bottom line
Basically resume driven development and Google hasn't done anything to prevent it. They probably don't care, they'd rather have them wasting money at Google than leaving due to boredom and potentially creating a startup or going to a competitor that might disrupt Google somehow.
Google has destroyed, or at least nullified, a generation of engineering talent with their unambitious, checkbox-resume based advancement scheme. We should all expect more from a supposedly engineering-driven organization.
Interestingly, the lifetime of a company is directly tied to the attention span of its customers. As long people come to the store asking for Coca Cola the company will endure, so this is probably generational. Enterprise software sticks around, so does Oracle. Internet consumer technology promotes attention span that's measured in seconds, Google can come crashing down quite suddenly.
Coca Cola is sticky through brand advertising, business deals, product placement, etc. Pretty much all that money spent by people on bottles of the sugary water was pumped into marketing, not into manufacturing. Over decades this created a very firm image in the people's heads, and the only way to dislodge it is to create a new brand for younger consumers (which Coca Cola will purchase as soon as it shows traction).
ERP software is deeply ingrained into business processes, removing it is akin to removing a person's neural system. The only way to dislodge that is to address up-and-coming companies, having them build their processes around a new paradigm.
You can't just beat any of this via superior quality product, they have "a moat" [1]
Google doesn't have that loyalty, and it's not that deeply ingrained. They ride on their default placement in Chrome/iOS and on the search result quality (which stems from quality engineering and superior scale yielding large data sets). If someone used NLP to build a more relevant search engine (of course serving more relevant ads), it won't be long before that new search engine starts using their revenue to pay higher $$ amount to hardware manufacturers to make a new engine the default. It's a shaky ground, and it's why Google is re-inventing itself and AI company - if they don't then someone else will. There is some strength in Google's name itself, but I'm not sure it can match to the visceral reaction to an addictive sugary drink.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/economicmoat.asp
The problem is there are too many Googlers, so they keep inventing busywork projects that don't need to exist (like reinventing messaging over and over) because otherwise there's nothing for them to do. The ideas:people ratio is completely out of whack.
Why are there too many Googlers? Because Google would rather spend money on hiring than returning excess profit to investors.
Why would they do that? Because their stock voting structure prevents investors from forcing their hand, and because of an essentially delusional culture/belief amongst senior management that they hire the world's smartest people, that they will never run out of ideas, that there's always more to do etc etc. Management can't accept that Google might have tapped out, ideas-wise, and maybe its natural size is smaller than today not bigger. It takes quite some humility to say "we're spinning our wheels, the profit we generate could be better deployed elsewhere" and they can't do it.
Watching this process play out gave me a new appreciation for why shares have voting rights.
There's lots of good examples of this [1], but from one particuarly recent example [2]:
> I should have done the opposite: figure out what the promotion committee wants, and do that work exclusively.
> I adopted a new strategy. Before starting any task, I asked myself whether it would help my case for promotion. If the answer was no, I didn’t do it.
> My quality bar for code dropped from, “Will we be able to maintain this for the next 5 years?” to, “Can this last until I’m promoted?” I didn’t file or fix any bugs unless they risked my project’s launch. I wriggled out of all responsibilities for maintenance work.
When you look at their products through this lens, it starts to make sense, such as continually launching "new" communication apps that might as well be from different companies.
I wonder if, and how much, this plays into the vast number of contractors Google pays to do that very "grunge work".
But Allo? My thought was "oh, another Google product I never heard of is shutting down."
You would want to back up your google documents offline or on another server constantly, which defeats the whole purpose.
(And on to the point, Facebook has also, of course, WhatsApp, which is massive)
Each one is good in isolation. But for a company whose primary user facing product is searching for things, Google sure haven't bothered to make the that work in drive. The search in GDrive is just plain atrocious.
At work we need to frequently ask someone working on a document or a set of documents to paste the sharing links, because GDrive's search will not surface the document or the drive folders you are looking for. Even with exact words or phrases.
And don't get me started on the latest incarnations of GSuite admin (slow) or Gmail (slower). But at least in those the search feature works.
On Google's philosophy versus Apple's: "I used to have this debate with Steve Jobs, and he would always say, 'You guys are doing too much stuff.' He did a good job of doing one or two things really well. We'd like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things."
I was a hangouts guy. That's what has me worried about their cloud services. Are they going to suddenly just add and remove things without any real notice?
Is Duo also being shut down?
I've never heard of anyone using it after its launch, felt it was very buggy when it launched and the name implying it only supports two users limits it severely ... but they seem to be happy with it.
... or they forgot it exists.
I spent all that time convincing my mom it was just as easy as facetime, and all for nothing after the stream kept cutting out the first time we tried it. Now we just facetime, which is the only reason I have an iPad.
Google is a company that follows a model called OKR. Here, in this model, the company is always supposed to be chasing moonshots.
There fore all incentives, pay, raise, promotions, stock grants etc etc are all attached to such moonshots.
There is zero incentive for anyone for to maintain anything.
The system is working perfectly as designed.
Yet waze is still a separate product, instead of a set of features to be enabled in Google Maps.
F-droid Maps user
Can you select a physical area that you are going to visit and download that you to your phone for offline use? Yes.
Perhaps you can explain to me: what does selecting an area from a list afford you that highlighting an area visually does not? I've even used this, on a couple of occasions, to download the roadmaps for entire, albeit tiny, countries.
you must be really fanboy if you need to have explained how it's choosing package of country/region data superior to highlighting some area
you also forgot to answer how it's offline navigation working in these great Google maps
It's the exact same story with Music applications too. Android Music and Google Play Music seems abandoned. YT Music is pushed down the throat with a ton of the features of GPM missing. Subscription pricing keeps changing around. Same story with Gmail/Inbox. One by one I have left all Google's products now.
That said, whoever is running Google Maps is a genius. It's one product that gets it right. The fact that overlayed business listing, transit, traffic and now ride share systems ...etc. is just brilliant. We take it for granted. But if Google Maps ended up in the hands of whoever was in charge of their messaging or music strategy we'd have - Google Maps, Google Directions, Google Transit, Google Businesses, Google Restaurants and Google Rides.