Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. No serious business or developer is going to trust them. If governments get serious about ad regulation and damage their cash cow, Google is in trouble

Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? That's a genuine question. He doesn't seem to be solving existing issues related to culture and incentives. And the company hasn't landed any big wins recently. I mostly see increased monetization of products from 10-15 years ago. I know I'm only seeing this from the outside looking in though. There must be a reason why one of the world's biggest companies has him at the helm, but it's not obvious to me what that is.

In other words, people are culture. When a company grows large, the culture regresses to the mean.

There was an "exit only doors" fiasco a year ago, and the man couldn't say either:

* "yes, VPs get special permissions to access the buildings" or

* "that is a security risk and everyone needs to go in through the same lobbies"

He just said "thoughtful" and the VPs lost their exit-only door access for a while until it blew over.

This was such a small, petty thing that I pretty much lost all respect for Sundar over the fact that he couldn't take a stand on it. He absolutely refuses to provide an opinion about anything to the wider group of Googlers. His underlings know that, and they know they can do stupid shit and work against each other without accountability.

Just agree with everything and everyone so you're not seen as someone who creates conflict. But then just silently ignore or drop issues you don't want to deal with.

Don't take risks or take responsibility for difficult problems so your reputation is clean of any failures.

Jump on board only the largest and most well supported of company initiatives so you can claim success.

And the thing is, I'm not sure it's the fault of these managers that behave this way. I think it's the result of the promo system adopted by so many tech companies. As long as you have some good things to write about each promo cycle and nobody has anything bad to say about you, you can coast your way up the management chain. And with each promotion comes more money. There is no incentives to take risks as it can only hurt your promo chances and then once you're high enough up the chain, why would you risk the huge comp package? Pichai complained about engineers who "rest and vest" but only because that is exactly the behavior incentivized by the company culture and the absolutely stupid promo process and comp structure.

With leadership like that, it's sure that nothing will ever change.

Basically a lot of people have promoted weak leaders all the way up to premierships and presidencies and have pushed out anyone that could potentially criticize them. The result is this shitshow we're in right now.

https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...

Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels

Page 112-113

Scholars who have quoted Key’s colorful phrase have mostly failed to note that he used it derisively. “The Founding Fathers,” he wrote in the final edition of his influential textbook on party politics, “by the provision for midterm elections, built into the constitutional system a procedure whose strange consequences lack explanation in any theory that personifies the electorate as a rational god of vengeance and of reward.”

In the first edition of the same textbook, Key (1942, 628) offered an even clearer dismissal of the rational interpretation of retrospective voting, noting that voters seem to have rewarded and punished incumbents at the polls for good or bad times

Even before it could be said that the national Government could do much of anything to improve their condition…. Yet if the party control of the national Government had little or nothing to do with their fate, how is this behavior to be explained? Is it to be considered as a rational seeking to better one’s status by the ballot or is it merely blindly striking a blow at a scapegoat? To throw out the “ins” probably had about the same effect on economic conditions as evangelical castigation of Satan has on the moral situation. Perhaps the swing against the “ins” can best be described as a displacement of economic resentment on political objects. By this catharsis discontent was dissipated and the peace kept.

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...

The laws around medical malpractice don't fix it when doctors screw up, but they make it a lot less likely for the screw-ups to happen, since those laws force doctors to adopt reasonable standards of care.

To me what you are describing is basically regulations. Personal accountability only derives from regulations because there are punishments, in that case it aligns incentives.

Regulations are only one form of personal accountability. Regulations, in theory, create uniformity and transparency. These can be good things. In practice, regulations are often selectively enforced, which leads back to the same situation as in a dictatorship, but with a formalized process of input for the dictator.

I actually disagree with you that malpractice lawsuits are examples of regulation. More often, when something goes wrong and a doctor is involved, there is an argument about whether the doctor was negligent or not. There is no fixed "standard of care" that is written down, only a set of practices that are known throughout the industry. Experts argue about whether negligence occurred or not. There are regulations that the experts can cite in their determination of negligence (some of those rules carry separate penalties too), but you don't need to have broken any rules to commit malpractice. This is a prime example of accountability without regulation.

It’s really hard for a CEO who had nothing to do with the current success of the company to have any type of credibility with employees.

Let’s look at the CEOs of the other BigTech companies.

- Apple: Tim Cook had as much to do with the current success of Apple as Jobs did. He worked for Apple from the time it was broke until today.

- Amazon: Jassy (my skip*10 manager) led the AWS division from its “real” founding until he became CEO.

- Facebook - still founder led

- Microsoft - the CEO came in from Azure and had a vision for what the “new MS” should look like - completely different than “Windows Everywhere”

No kind of strategy is ever communicated to employees, just defensive + responsive TGIF responses. Truly bizarre.

Then he was the product lead on the Chrome team. I don't know if it was him who lobbied Page to create Chrome.

Which means there has to actually be a vision. As far as I can tell, the vision at google is just to keep making boatloads of money off AdWords, and not really care about anything else.

You forgot "and spending it on annual chat apps"

> Everyone is playing it safe and not risking their high pay checks for the off chance of rocking the boat and landing a moon shot.

Mark has majority of the voting shares of Meta. He could run it into the ground and still could stay in control.

This is what really sunk Eastman Kodak. The popular wisdom about them missing digital isn’t really true. Heck they owned many of the key patents. But everyone was too busy focusing on growing their little fiefdom for the company to use its assets and market position effectively.

I recall one year the CEO announced he was reducing headcount by some number and the next year it had actually gone up.

At the same time, there were a lot of stories on the internal social network about people walking in behind them, so I kind of get why the policy might have been changed. I would have been one of the people mad about it!

(I posted one of these following-me-in stories once; I unlocked the door and someone pushed me out of the way to go into the office ahead of me, and I didn't see their badge. I tracked down security, they reviewed the tapes, and it turned out to be a legitimate coworker. I shared the story with the angle "this is what you should do if someone follows you in", but I got panned for not doing enough to protect my coworkers. I probably didn't post this, but my takeaway was "if your security depends on me being able to beat someone up that is larger than me, you're already dead". One of the few times the internal social media hive mind turned against me, and it was really really weird.)

There are also now rules about how many badge readers need to be between public and private areas. This turns into a mess in historic buildings that have technically-public stairwells littered throughout. (The Munich campus is particularly bad for this.)

In the NYC office, when I was there, we definitely had to badge in from a lot of stairwells. Also, the bathrooms that weren't completely contained in Google spaces had number pad locks on them.

(I was very annoyed when I worked on a floor that didn't have any dedicated Google-only bathrooms; I asked to have the locks removed just out of principle and was told that "people will wander in from the street and set up camp in there." You had to badge into the building though, so I wondered how true that actually was. I wish for once in my life someone would just tell me the truth instead of making something up to get me to go away. "We don't feel like paying someone to disconnect them, and other tenants in the building will complain if we do." That's totally fair!)

Like, what do people post on it?

So they maintain google plus code, but shut down it for general public?

That's gotta get axed or Google will stagnate even more than it already is.

Then again, I'm not sure what can come in and usurp its place as a "global-leader-company". Maaaaybe Tesla if every single little thing goes right for them (and that's a stretch)?

Or perhaps, the way things are going lately, a defense company... I hope not.

It seems to mean "there is no easy win for me in this situation, so I am passing the buck to (presumably) a committee of other people who will think about it instead, or perhaps a power-hungry VP who has a vested interest in making it happen."

In retrospect, I realise it was his code phrase for not doing anything at all.

What?? Sundar is the CEO. All the buck stops with him. Why are you pretending as if he doesn't have agency? The problem here is his actions and/or lack thereof, not people under him doing stupid things and he's somehow the victim. He gets paid the big bucks to lead.

It looks like Google not giving a zit about users is the problem. Deprecating stuff on people's faces. Backwards incompatible updates. They treat everyone as if everyone works at Google - like everyone works in a large organization with ample funding so that they can take time to go through deprecation and backwards-incompatibility hooks.

Grand majority of the public doesnt have any of that. So when something is deprecated on their face out of the blue, its a great 'f you' to them. Their businesses, their very own personas.

So they aren't taking risks building things by relying on Google.

Most user loved or impact making products like YouTube and Android have been acquisitions. I tried setting up Google Analytics for a business and touched it after many years. And the sheer complexity of the documentation and puzzling talk of UA to GA4 migration left me with a sour taste. I instantly switched to setting up plausible.io instead.

Notwithstanding the popularity of their tech ecosystem (because they are coming from Google), it is often painful to use. For all the flak Meta gets, the developer oriented technologies released by them: Thrift, PyTorch are fun to use as compared to Protobuf, Tensorflow.

But as someone who loves small companies taking on giants, it is heartening sign. Hopefully with ineffective leadership and employees focused on activism instead of actually building things, in next five years, un-bundling of Google will happen. Vertically focused players will bleed them by thousand cuts.

That, also it feels like it replicates the college environments like MIT, where projects get funded by the university, large enterprises or the state (especially defense), so when a project gets 'deprecated' its generally due to the project funders wanting it. Since these are the end users, there is absolutely no problem in it - the end user wants it deprecated anyway. As far as I know, Google was born literally from such a state-funded project in MIT. This likely makes Google environment somewhat like a postdoc extension of that environment.

But this attitude is totally destructive when facing end users: Small businesses, individuals, artists, freelancers, NGOs, municipialities - practically ENTIRE rest of the world do not have the large funding and time that Google has inside and outside Google.

They can't risk their businesses getting broken every other year, less every 6 months, because some people at Google thing that v2 is something is 'better' even if its incompatible with v1 of the earlier product, breaking everyone's sites, apps, whatever and expecting them to spend the money and time they don't have to jump through those upgrade hooks.

Worst, are 'deprecations'. They are literal 'f*k you's to end users. Even if some service is deprecated with 3 months' of warning, the small business or individual won't have the time or energy to salvage everything and move it to somewhere else. It will cost a lot to them, and it will affect their income and livelihoods.

So people just avoid Google. Build on or use the most reliable organization that does not literally sh*t on their users whenever they feel like it.

> I tried setting up Google Analytics for a business and touched it after many years. And the sheer complexity of the documentation and puzzling talk of UA to GA4 migration left me with a sour taste.

Good example. How complicated analytics have become shows just how little Google understands its users and how little it is able to accommodate them. Yes, there is 'great engineering' behind a lot of the stuff, but the complexit, ugprade hoops, backwards-incompatible updates and outright deprecations literally kill any benefit.

In the case of analytics, all that complication is not really worth wasting time (and therefore money) for upgrading. The products came to a point of looking like phd thesis projects more than anything intended for the end users - you have to spend considerable time even as a technical person to learn the system to be able to even use it at an entry level.

I also have analytics on all my sites. I will probably replace it with something else when the upgrade time comes. No way in hell I want to go through another upgrade hoop in 2-3 years and spend all that precious effort and time for doing that.

I think this has always been the case for Google. It just so happens that sometimes what Google chooses to do happens to align with what's good for users. But when it doesn't align, a bit like a sociopath, Google doesn't appear to be concerned for the impact on users.

Obviously this applies to the whole automated moderation/banning situation that's been a moderate risk for years.

Sociopaths are good at manipulating people into believing favorable things about them until too late. Google is just... different.

I suspect this is pretty universal at large companies. And especially managers seeking to make their way up the hierarchy are always looking to grow the size of their teams.

In practice, I get the impression that the move to Apple Park stopped and maybe somewhat reversed that trend. Areas can be, and mostly are, locked down by sector and floor, but rarely finer grained than that. And maybe that was a subtle design goal to begin with.

  > The only metric that matters to most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

This is how I feel about promos at my company and it's ~1/10th the size of Google. It feels like something that occurs at all tech companies. When times are good promos get handed out like candy.

Good old Parkinson’s law strikes again.

This is very common. Every large company I worked with is like that.

These companies become victims of their own successes and eventually become hollow money machines that are preyed upon by professional executives. The culture dies and all the good people leave except a small cadre of highly paid early employees who have worked on core services for decades.

Google's problems are so pervasive and famous because they don't care. Why fix hiring? That requires effort and time for a questionable payoff. Why fix promotions? Same problem. Why fix customer service? That's just a cost. Why enforce stable APIs that are well documented for cloud services? Not my problem. At the end of the day, a small core of people will keep ads going and everyone else will decorate their resumes for their next jobs.

The Steam Deck is an incredible device. And Alyx is one of the truly great games made for VR (which they pioneered generally). It might not be much but I'm not writing off Valve entirely.

Now if they do Half Life 3 - that’ll be a mainstream blockbuster, but they won’t, as they’re not the company that can pull that off anymore.

I'd happily place a bet today on there being a family of Steam Deck devices forming a material part of the PC games industry in 5 years or earlier. Much of the implementation such as the store experience is already leagues ahead of the garbage Nintendo get away with on the Switch.

When they inevitably release a second one with an OLED display and more performance and battery life, its going to be massively compelling. Sure we can all point to failures like the Steam Boxes, but from those failures came Proton which has been directly responsible for the Deck concept working so successfully.

On the other hand, I know that a bunch of people are unhappy that the Steam Controller has been discontinued. Secondhand prices are through the roof.

> https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/07/26/windows-8-i...

Obviously none of that came to pass, we are two more Windows releases on and much has changed since. It is serendipitous the tech built is so great for delivering a portable experience - I think Valve's actions and words demonstrate it to be far more committed to the Deck than prior efforts, I don't see this as hedging bets. And why wouldn't they? At this stage they appear to have a hit product on their hands.

In 2022, Microsoft and Valve have strategic partnerships too, which certainly wasn't the case in 2012:

> https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18645250/microsoft-xbox-g...

> https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/26/22952086/valve-microsoft-...

> https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/25/22550103/microsoft-new-wi...

I'm not sure what the impetus was for the Steam Deck. I could see it as a hedge against anticipated future, dwindling laptop sales. I could also see it as an attempt to expand into the same space that the Switch occupies. After all, with the exodus of Sony from portable gaming, Nintendo's only competition is cell phones.

AMD finally delivered a chip that can make the dream of desktop-ish performance in a handheld work. That simply wasn’t all that possible until very recently.

I've never used the original Steam Controller and I still think the dual analog stick setup is better for some games but having the trackpads is good for many others.

The 5200 joystick didn't self-center, though. The only centering force was from the rubber boot. This ended up being advantageous in a game like missile command, but is widely seen as the Achilles heel of the controller.

Really? I never use mine - guess I'll have to look at selling it!

First, Half-Life Alyx, from the technical standpoint, is a more complex project than a regular AAA fps due to the sheer amount of innovation that was required to make it work. They also developed their own VR set alongside it.

Second, measuring a company's capabilities by how popular their products are is not fair, imo. Activision, Ubisoft and the like have been churning out "blockbusters" for years at this point, essentially packaging the same game under a new title. Are they really more capable than Valve, which has released an innovative product in a completely new field?

Third, the reason Valve does not release HL3 (and this is me speculating) is not because they are unable to "pull it off" - technically, they are, they just did it with Alyx. The real issue is that the amount of hype generated behind the title is so immense almost anything they make would be underwhelming. Their decision to venture into VR complicated matters even further. VR, still being niche, would essentially make the game inaccessible to most of the fans. With valve having developed their own set, it would have looked like an intentional rip-off.

No company could ever pull off Half Life 3. This game is hyped to death before it's even announced and everyone would come in with sky-high expectations. To make matters worse, everyone would expect that game to be something different and it would be impossible to make even just half of the players happy. There's no point in creating a Half Life 3, it's a guaranteed disappointment.

they may not really be in the AAA game business as much but I'm not sure that's a bad thing

I agree with you on VR though, that's very nice atm.

For example if you want to play Batman Arkham Asylum, you need to go into desktop mode, download a different Proton version then go back to the console mode, switch the used Proton version and then you can play. There's a whole bunch of other games where you have to tweak settings, maybe use the CLI to tweak things. And then add on top of that of managing settings to get optimal FPS and battery life.

That's a lot to throw at kids or non-technical people. It's quite a different experience than a Switch where you just download it and it works at optimal for the device resolution/fps.

[0] Earthbound inspired platformers about how it’s okay to feel sad sometimes

They have less to fear about "professional executives" worming their way in because Valve is not a publicly traded company, unlike the other examples you mentioned. It's private, Gabe Newell calls the shots at the end of the day. There's no real avenue for people to buy their way onto a board of directors and exert influence on the company from on high, or oust its historic leadership. Valve's pretty well protected from that. But it can't protect itself from sloth induced by a lack of competition.

Does it just become a bozo filled public-company at that point, chasing quarterly numbers? I think it's the biggest risk to Valve, speaking as a customer who loves their products/services today.

I would not at all be surprised to see it end in a Microsoft acquisition or joint venture of some kind, given their current appetites.

This is absolutely what will happen.

Ah, this is what Valve is working on...

Who knows, this could be how the Machine God is made.

Passing to “people you really trust” is not an ideal foundation for an entity which has the potential to exist for many decades.

Being private, we also don't really know how much of Valve Gabe actually owns - there may be other sizeable stakeholders with a say too.

But it's difficult to set up a business when your baseline is "Google Ads".

I thought they have it with Cloud. I'm still puzzled how it went wrong.

People at companies like this are only provoked to action by what affects company revenue, whether increasing it or preventing loss. And hardly anything can be demonstrated to have direct effect on revenue. (Certainly, unhappy users don't, as Microsoft was first to discover.)

... you do realize that goes for 99% of people posting here? In my biased experience in consulting for ~4 years, the distribution is more like 80/10/10 for AWS/GCP/Azure.

gcp has a lot of business continuity guarantees.

still, I don't recommend them. because google acts like a dangerous savant at this point.

If you look at stadia, they built the cool streaming platform, but failed to actually sell it.

$15 x 6 million players is good money but it's peanuts to something like Google. I wouldn't be surprised if Google spent that much just on Stadia itself in some years.

This fact reminds me of the resource curse.

I've long struggled to find a way of expressing this sentiment in a few words, but this approaches perfect. Thank you!

The same goal as most other Fortune 500 companies CEO, to earn as much money as possible for themselves while they are at it.

It is funny I was extremely sceptical but I remember all the hype around Sundar Pichai becoming CEO and how it would improve Google. Repeating something similar to what Satya Nadella did to Microsoft. And it wasn't media / VC or submarine PR article hype, it was real hype on HN, by Silicon Valley fellows. And Google wasn't considered "evil" back then, even though nothing much has changed, only the perception of the public.

I would say things have changed: directly in google services, they are worse everyday (ads in youtube, useless search engine etc.) and also indirect: they forced their black box in all sites' SEO and also adsales on so many sites that they are slowly ruining the internet for everyone else too.

I find having to quote things more and more, to the point where all or almost all keywords are quoted. Lately, somehow, even that produces results that don't actually include everything that was quoted.

I also wonder why almost no web forums I use are coming up in results at all, despite their robots.txt allowing indexing. Feels like Google is becoming a bit like East Germany...

If Google is so large and so arrogant that they can't even take feedback from internal employees then it's probably game over for them. They certainly aren't listening to developers and power users on forums.

Sure, but you don't get a company working in concert or particularly well if all you have is "go make money"

1. Get stock grants 2. Sell it as soon as it vests 3. Apres moi le deluge.

It is definitely hard as hell to develop another business the size of ads alongside it, but it really doesn't seem like there's a clear idea here.

Or maybe, just maybe, you've just made that up.

I understand that the market demands infinite growth but internally it feels like horseshit to see the ridiculous numbers and also get told that basically nothing is high priority enough to get funded.

You don't just build stuff for the sake of it. It has to be a better investment than what you currently have, and Google doesn't have anything better than doubling and tripling down on ads.

The way for GCP to compete is to give customers (presumably high level customers) some real deep integration into Search/Gmail/YouTube/Ads/Drive/Maps, including data. That would not only be a killer differentiating feature, it would signal to everyone that Google is serious and won't shut this down on you like they did all those other services.

They probably won't do that, but I'm not sure why they really want to run GCP if not. If they're not going to give customers something only Google can give them, I don't see them capturing much more of the market.

It's mindboggling that you can't cast Google Shorts to a Google Chromecast. My hypothesis is that because Chromecast casting is so buggy and unresponsive (compared to Bluetooth), swiping from one Short to another would be such a frustrating experience that they dare not enable it.

Dear God how annoying it is to use. Buggy, laggy, drops randomly ... still can't play videos from my computer in an easy way.

I forgot how bad Chromecast were since I last used it 5 years ago.

Really sad with the state of things.

Dunno why none used a T9 type of letter entering system. All remotes but one had number pads. It is really inconvenient to use "Smart" TVs.

So I went with the spare for a while.

And I remember that it was different back in early Nexus days - they had Miracast, but deliberately ripped it out.

And even then I wouldn't place a bet on Waymo producing anything interesting from a revenue perspective for the next couple decades+. And, while I'm sure Google is doing other interesting things with AI--especially from an internal operations perspective--it's not like Google Home is doing anything earthbreaking or that Google search etc. is--from a consumer functionality point of view--particularly differentiated from other major players. And plenty of AI research is happening outside of Google.

Investing in Stadia is 100 times better than Google using that money to buy back stocks and making day traders rich.

Projects contantly being half-assed and rug pulled aren't good for users or the developers being bounced around between them.

The way it is now, I have to be very cautious investing my time or money (even just time really) in any Google service because I'm worried it might be canceled at any time if it isn't Search, Gmail, or Maps. Will my Google Photos albums suddenly disappear one day because they decided it's not the #1 in its field? (Luckily, I don't use Photos as my main photo storage, only a way to share with others.)

The just ended it because it didn't scale.

There's certain problem spaces that are just different if you have different amounts of money and dedication behind them. Working for AWS is likely much different than working for Linode, even aside from the culture of each company. Longer runways, better access to cutting-edge tech, a pre-existing global-scale infrastructure pattern... Even working on a failed project can be an interesting experience sometimes.

I'd say he's trying not to be remembered as the "Steve Ballmer" of Google. You know - that second-run CEO who drove the company into the ground while keeping the wall street numbers looking good. Cuz that's exactly where he's heading right now.

I think he knows he needs to fundamentally change the culture of the company. He's been making public statements as such. He knows it's a problem that Googlers have been treated as unicorn snowflakes with free massages and all the gourmet food they can complain about, with zero accountability for getting anything done. And despite this obvious rot, most of the world (like everybody here who dreams of a google job) still reveres Google as an idyllic place to work. Which makes it all the harder for the company to admit to itself that anything is wrong.

Cultural change is really hard. And it's not at all clear that he's got what it takes to do it successfully. Googlers are so pampered that any attempt to push them out of their comfort zone is going to get serious pushback. I say this as a former googler. There was a hilarious post on HN not long ago which I can't find where a googler said something to the effect of "no way in hell my manager is gonna make me work."

The entire company is built around solving HARD problems, not USEFUL problems. Obviously they've pulled off a lot of truly amazing things, but that difference is pretty important when your company's entire revenue stream is still coming from key insights made in the late 1990s. To me it's clear they need to change their promotion criteria, which solidifies this and drives so much of people's energy and bad patterns. But the arrogance built into the culture of "solving the world's hardest problems" means that any changes there are likely to insult the fragile egos of all those snowflakes and cause them to go on strike or make the good ones just leave.

Google can't VC new projects with a 50 billion to play with in excess/above line revenue to fund them a year?

How does google not have self driving car revenue? They should have highway driving (as in trucks on superhighways) solved 10 years ago and been rolling in money.

How does google not have a competitive IaaS offering? How does google not have THREE competitive IaaS offerings? Buy one or two, and have them compete against each other internally and externally.

Why doesn't google have a competitive Desktop OS based on some combination of Linux / Android / Chrome and Macbook pro level hardware?

Their AI products are all dystopian.

ChatsChatsChatsChatsChatsChats.

Why didn't they buy Java/Sun. Stupid. Why don't they buy Keybase? Actually don't then the servers will be shut down.

Silicon Valley is too woke? Start new branches.

What is the biggest recent success of Google? Chrome. Why not repeat that a dozen times over? Take important Open Source software, and make it good, and don't make it utterly dystopian until 10 years later. Linux Desktop? Open Office? WINE? Steam clone on Linux?

You know, why not have a hardware division that can deliver? For IoT, Google Glasses, an actual decent phone, self driving sensors.

Be good at software. Be good at hardware.

What a clown show.

As a user, and customer of some Google services, I don't care about that. They should give a pink unicorn to each Googler if they want to. These are not relevant to me, as the user.

What I care about is the stuff that I am using not getting deprecated on my face because some mba thinks that it is not making enough gobs of cash and they should shut it down and do something else that will make more gobs of cash.

Cherishing and building up user trust. That's what is missing from Google. And that's not the engineers' fault.

I'm supposed to dream of a Google job? Man I've been messing up.

Maybe closer to Varys..?

People get wise to this dynamic and just start selling dreams. Everyone can buy into the dream of the next Billion dollar product, it's harder to get buy-in to just grind out a measly 50% YoY growth.

His primary job is to keep the FTC at bay.

He may not even be wrong, the biggest risk to google is some regulator getting unhappy so playing it safe makes sense.

[1]https://www.vox.com/2016/6/1/11830654/google-ceo-sundar-pich...

'Success hides all problems', but exactly what real problems does Google have making money?

Nobody would mind if Google just printed money with ads. That is what the trade desk basically does (TTD), and it's a comparatively very small company. Google could be the most profitable company per employee in history if it wanted to, and it wouldn't lose anything from its core money-making functions. Instead, Google wanted to build a grand technology empire.

If you're going to act like a rockstar, when the lights come on, you better be dancing up on the stage. The lights are turning on right now, and I don't think anyone sees anyone dancing.

I think CEOs are there to simply not screw anything up.

In other words, they were picked so that there wasn't someone else there who would screw up more.

They are supposed to be quiet, run of the mill, go with the flow kinds of people. This is the implicit requirement. The explicit one is, "just keep the overall revenue growth stable".

There is no requirement about "solving existing issues" because that's not part of "the bottom line" or even to land any "big wins" because growth is already "good enough" and it's better to maintain it, than risk it and lose everything.

Why this profile for CEOs?

These days, everything is amplified and the smallest mistake can mean big trouble. Top leaders are already magnets for attention due to their role, and if they start to make noise about anything even minor, it will be bad attention.

If the business is already good, "let's not screw anything up".

That's what I'm thinking. I feel that this applies to Pichai, Cook, Nadella and others like them [1]

The danger could be that the companies may become complacent and get disrupted eventually. But perhaps that is something they watch out for (maybe another part of the JD) – and they buy out any competitors that get too haughty, as needed.

[1] Zuckerberg is an outlier because look, he's still a founder CEO unlike the others, and that's because, no matter what you think of him (or even if he's a robot ;) ), he has a terrific track record in decision making. So he's there and allowed to make decisions, even high risk ones, such as the whole Metaverse invention or the stuff about culling headcount "who shouldn't be here". Though he's also doing those decisions due to privacy regulations which seems to affect the stable growth mentioned above.

I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone outside Facebook has much respect for Zuck in terms of decisionmaking for products or anything else in particular. This may look different to a Facebook employee, of course.

Alphabet seems to have been a mistake, too. Instead of shielding their bets they flounder and wither.

Just terrible strategic thinking.

There is no failure here, it's working exactly the way they planned it to.

Google sells attention. Anything else it does is flim flam to support that.

What's embarrassing is that they keep trying other random things.

Give the money back to the shareholders and let them invest in new founders. Small team success is great for the world but impossible to care about at a Google scale.

If you cant understand the incentives to a thing, the incentives were never for you in the first place.

https://retailwire.com/discussion/google-rethinks-employee-r...

Fighting a growing wave of calls from all political sides to regulate Alphabet and Google in the US, and paying an endless stack of compliance fines to the EU who already regulate Google and Alphabet.

YoY only.

Tim Cook seems to be heading the same way, trashing the quality of almost everything Apple has achieved for the sake of financial results.

There was talk about the need to "land" rather than just launch but it never got baked into the promo process (or if it did, it certainly didn't appear that way to people below VP level...). My understanding is it's still that way.

It wasn't just Larry & Sergey either - early Google was filled with people like Craig Silverstein, Amit Patel, Paul Buchheit, Eric Veach, Matt Cutts, Peter Norvig, Hal Varian, et al who all thought deeply about just what the human consequences of a given social policy would be. Things like Google's promo & interview system were very well-designed for a company of 2000 people.

IMHO, the problem is that all of those folks ended up richer than you could imagine, which gave them the option of not putting up with the people that came after them. When the company grows from 2000 to 20,000 (which is what it was when I joined in 2009), 90+% of the people were not when it was 2000, i.e. you are outvoted 9 to 1 by ordinary people who don't think very much about incentives. If you're filthy rich, it's much easier to just jet off to some private island and let the tricky problem of incentives become somebody else's problem than it is to stick around and explain to tens of thousands of people why systems are the way they and modify them to fit the company's new reality.

Anyway, good insight, appreciate it. They both always seemed like smart dudes with a blindspot. Maybe it wasn't such after all.

It's even public: https://buildyourfuture.withgoogle.com/programs/grad

I was around during the pivot to "landings" - which didn't actually make many practical differences. For the most part people simply redefined "landing" to "releasing a product"... which was also the definition of "launching" :)

My bet is that Google is one of the worst places to learn anything, be it product, management or programming. You will only learn how to solve problems the Google way, and that is only applicable at Google.

It's like learning to govern from Xi Jinping. Sure, there probably are some interesting experiences to observe. But few will claim that let's say Norway will be better off implementing China's political system.

The money printing machine obliterates all economic feedback loops.

But you know what is needed : is some whistleblower from within google to tell us how the decisions are made for shutting down services…

And btw I don’t even know what stadia is!

Google, collectively, may be among the best (I'm not hazarding an opinion) at solving technical problems.

I, however, expect good engineers to help with product vision, understanding and addressing customer pain points, and amongst the senior engineers especially, be effective at communication and helping manage upwards to achieve those ends. Somewhere, Google engineers are dropping the ball there, or are so detached from those problems that their abilities in those skills are untested.

Running marathon is way harder than running 100m. Most people are not even capable of doing marathons.

But that doesn't mean that winning 100m is easier than winning a marathon. Might even be the opposite, because of harsh competition.

When you're building products, your goal is not run. Your goal is to win.

About 10 people on planet earth could have come up with Spanner.

I'm just talking about engineering. I'm not talking about building products which get market acceptance, which is a lot more than engineering, and might be your point.

I'm not convinced. I've worked in many industries and many company sizes and I've met smart people everywhere. I think a lot of devs who are busy pumping out CRUD could create these kind of systems if they were in a situation that called for them (hell, it gives you a chance to actually use all that stuff from your CS degree), just as I know for sure that a lot of devs who are busy pumping out CRUD are more than capable of creating a programming language. The bottleneck isn't technical ability, it's being in an environment that will actually pay you to work on that stuff.

Folks like Jeff Dean at Google are really out there. He built a number of systems that very few people were capable of. But you have to be at a certain level to even see it.

> But that doesn't mean that winning 100m is easier than winning a marathon. Might even be the opposite, because of harsh competition.

If we go much, much farther into this analogy, it tells us that for any given agent, one of these races is always going to be much easier than the other one.

If you want to be competitive in marathons at a world level, you need to be East African. If you want to be competitive in 100m sprints, you need to be West African. Which race is easier? That depends who you are.

Not necessarily. FAANGs have an army of product/project/program managers, market researchers, and other analysts and experts to handle product vision, etc. for the engineering team. That's the big advantage of being a megacorporation: they can afford the overhead of having their employees be narrowly focused specialists.

(It's also why one sometimes see people who leave FAANGs stumble when they join a startup; they're used to having all that infrastructure supporting them and have to adjust to an environment where it isn't there.)

Now, I'm not denying they are super smart. But you need a mix of book smart and street smart to be successful. Google seems to only focus on books. They are incredible at solving problems. But they suck at picking which problems to solve.

They can indeed be good at building complex systems.

But when we needed simple systems, they would still build complex systems.

When we needed to ship product, they would still build complex systems.

Twice I had the experience where an ex-Googler would promise to rewrite a piece of software from scratch because it had a bad architecture, only to quit/get fired few months later (obviously the big rewrite was not finished by then).

Since this is a technical audience, I guess I should clarify that “program management” doesn’t refer to software development

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_management

Engineering leadership is not judged for their acumen in these areas, as they are separate job ladders, and thus to no surprise there is little cultivation of this knowledge or skill.

That evolved into a situation where program managers (mostly - programs have a sense of scale right??) exist in most orgs and are critical to keep things aligned. There were (are still?) even internal conferences just for program managers.

How does this even happen at any company that isn’t a conglomerate based on acquisitions?

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo...

And when you refer to pm-Ing in this way I’m reminded of the guy in San Francisco that did all the management for a huge eve online guild and he didn’t play the game he managed all their affects in a spreadsheet and whatever they were using to chat…. And he was making a boatload of human money a month…

I wonder where he is now…

Which metrics would you use to compare one infrastructure to another? Or one eng practice to another.

For example I heard multiple times that in a lot of projects at Google shipping something can take months (and I'm not even talking about search/ads). Compared to let's say Github, that deploys multiple times a day.

Google experiments constantly and shuts down bad experiments.

Experiments that probably aren't going anywhere for a long time:

1. Gmail

2. Maps (acquisition, but did not have a web interface and was not remotely popular prior)

3. Android (literally bought before the first launched devices)

4. Play Store

5. Cloud

6. Google Pay / Wallet

Most of these businesses are larger than most public companies in the world...

Google will likely continue to experiment. People should think of Google's new products as startups - because that's exactly how Google thinks of them.

Enterprises don't want to rely on some startup like Snowflake when their 1-2 years old.

Google does a very good job of distancing the Google and Android brands from things like Stadia.

All of us on here know Google owned Stadia. We're also all smart enough to know that we can keep using Gmail & YouTube without worrying about Google shutting them down.

Since Google Wallet launched in 2011, they added a physical card, replaced that card with Android Pay, dropped NFC and limited it to Android Pay, merged Google Wallet and Android Pay into Google Pay, launched Tez in India and then rebranded that to Google Pay (which was an entirely different app than the first Google Pay), then rebranded the first Google Pay as Google Wallet, while people in India still use their Google Pay app.

I think. I still can't make sense of it.

Imagine being a store/vendor and trying to make sense of which app your POS supports while just trying to run your business, what an absolute nightmare.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Pay_Send

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wallet

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Pay_(mobile_app)

https://www.androidpolice.com/google-pay-becomes-google-wall...

The initial Google Wallet launch irked the card networks because they presented their own proxy card rather than a card that clearly advertised the card issuer and the network. (Oh boy do they care a lot about branding…)

I assume they dropped NFC initially because it was done with the first generation tech that was very insecure and simply transmitted card numbers in the clear. Today’s contactless tech is all EMV based, and also needs to depend on a Secure Enclave chip to be blessed by PCI; that might explain why they cut off support for a number of devices. This happened around the time Apple Pay came into the scene.

The rebranding and all that though, well, that’s Google.

Almost everyone I knew used Google Wallet, which was pretty nice, until they shut down the cards at which time it became utterly useless since you could only use it in the Play store. That's one reason I've never used Android Pay or Google Pay or whatever it is now. Too unreliable.

A lot of us switched to Simple for awhile, but then that went defunct too.

So now we're all back to "Are you on Venmo or Paypal or Square Cash now?" whenever we want to transfer money. And sometimes just paper checks, because ancient as that is, it's still the most reliable (as long as both people have bank accounts). Most of us now have regular credit cards for payment, which are also more reliable than any app.

some XVII century stuff right here... it's wire transfers by bank account and phone number all the way basically everywhere east of the atlantic ocean

That is a total strawman. I think most people know Google has done other successful products, especially Gmail and Android.

> Enterprises don't want to rely on some startup like Snowflake when their 1-2 years old.

Actually, I think the opposite may be true. A startup like Snowflake has one business, and they are all focused on that business. They will go through hell and highwater to make that business successful. I think the biggest risk with a company like Snowflake is not folks worried that they'll fold, but worried that they'll get acquired and their "goodness" sucked out (see Figma).

With Google, though, basically nearly everything besides ads is an afterthought. Nobody trusts them anymore to keep things around. Which has the ironic effect of making some of their "experiments" invalid, because if all potential customers know it's an experiment that may get killed at the whim of whomever got promoted, they'll be less likely to try it in the first place.

I'm not a Google hater. I'm a big fan of GCP, and also a big fan of Firebase. I do get nervous, though, when I see some simple, straightforward problems that languish for literally years because apparently they're not "sexy" enough to fix. Case in point, Firebase Auth (an Auth as a Service platform) still only supports SMS as a second factor for login, despite the fact that Google itself recommends against using SMS as a second factor. People have been complaining about this for literally years, yet it's crickets from Google/Firebase teams.

2004

> 2. Maps

2005

> 3. Android

2008

> 4. Play Store

Elementary component of the Android business, but well: also 2008

> 5. Cloud

2008 (also)

> 6. Google Pay / Wallet

A requirement for Play Store, but relaunch as general payment solution: 2011

Now the current year is 2022. And yes, they did improvements here and there and in cloud launched more services, but anything big new, with a chance of survival?

Google Photos is an amazing product, it has an amazing offering and works extremely well. It's also extremely popular and integral to the Android ecosystem. I'd absolutely bet of it not being shutdown in the next 5 years, yes.

Sure, Google hasn't done anything.

2008

I don't even think that search is very successful. Pagerank was successful, and was also pretty quickly made obsolete. They still own search because their competitors died as they replaced the verb "search" with their brand, and then created a browser to funnel people into search. Search is only important because of ads. And buying Youtube after failing with Google Video, in order to show more ads. So it all boils down to buying Doubleclick, building a browser, and buying a popular video site for me. Android is certainly key in this too, but its key was somewhat in funneling people into Google's ads, but mostly preventing Apple or some FOSS upstart from getting between users and Google's ads.

Google was successful at being a significantly better search engine for a very short time. It took the money it made and bought the largest ad company. Then it vertically integrated the entire industry from OS to final purchase (with varying degrees of success) to funnel people into its ads.

The only skill that Google has is taking advantage of and creating monopoly positions, not technology.

edit: Oddly, I think that their greatest success might have been to covertly corrupt Firefox. Without that, Chrome might have ended up a largely USA-locked thing like the iPhone is. Although releasing a brutally locked down and closed mobile OS masquerading as an FOSS upstart is a close second.

>literally bought

Is it Google's doing then?

Acquisitions happen all the time and later get turned down when they don't flourish. Many stories get posted often with negative sentiment right here on HN.

People build monopolies for the perceived benefits but this is the price you must always pay. You're no longer competing in a marketplace of customers, as you've flagged, your managers are now just competing in a marketplace of capital expenditure.

Google has never struggled as a company. Amazon barely survived the dot com bust, Apple almost went bankrupt and even Microsoft had to pivot or become the next IBM after Balmer and missing out on mobile.

Facebook being still founder led and having the advantage of knowing how fleeting social media networks have been in the past, keeps Zuckerburg paranoid.

Google’s ad revenue is covering up a lot of project/program mismanagement.

Them going all in on the 'metaverse' is basically 'microsoft missing mobile'-tier. I'm interested in it and even still I haven't seen a single impressive thing yet. It seems like a worse product than VR second-life. They're trying to sell an MMO to people who don't play games.

The internet is already a 'metaverse', and I think the role of our digital lives will continue to expand with increasing proliferation of consumer electronics, barring a major world war or natural cataclysm. But Meta is just trying to force a paradigm shift and EVERYONE sees right through it.

Having a golden goose that has very little risk of going away can definitely be a curse.

You also can’t block Amazon and Facebook ads.

On the YouTube side, you have TikTok that is becoming more competitive for attention and maybe Twitch (???)

Who gives Google money and what do they give Google money for?

When I was working for B2B companies, our “customers” were the IT department and the companies. Our customers weren’t the end users. We tried our best to make the software easy for the end users. But we marketed to the CxOs and made sure they were happy.

In the case of Amazon Retail. They (we) have to convince the customer to give us money in exchange for goods and services.

Right, and Google needs to convince users to love the products and continue using them, so that ads can be shown, and maybe even despite ads being shown.

I have noticed a strong sentiment against paying for products even here on HN where the average user probably makes quite a bit of money. People would rather block ads than pay for YouTube Premium, for example. It shows me that ads are actually a pretty good business model because if "wealthy" people won't pay for products, less wealthy people definitely won't.

Search for “bicycles” on Google with Ad blockers turned off. How do you like the experience?

It sucking less than all other alternatives is a pretty good reason to like it. There is a lot of vested interest in good search engines and the fact that no competitors, even from behemoths like Microsoft, have been able to do any better shows that it's a hard problem to solve.

I think a lot of people are naturally resistive to change and are stuck in the past when the web was simple and 10 links was all it took. Nowadays, the web is so complex that it's nearly impossible to tell what you want to see off a broad query. In my experience, it guesses very well and the complaints about Search having gotten worse are really complaints about the Internet as a whole having gotten worse. What used to be dedicated websites are now uncrawlable pages on a large company's website (e.g. Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, etc). I personally like all of the "onebox" results that don't require me to go elsewhere -- search has become much faster for me in that way.

I actually really don't like Amazon's retail site. It's complex and it's not clear why I see so many repeated identical items as separate listings. One a single listing, I can choose alternative sellers than the default. Is that linking to other listings or is still the same listing? Who knows. It hasn't changed or improved in decades.

They literally left a city streets in ruins after abandoning one of their products.

https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-...

Google is not some fly by night startup. But people have learned to treat it like one and not depend on their products.

I remember back in the days you could have three or so different image viewers created by Microsoft installed on your machine (Office had its own for example). Then there was MSN Messenger, Windows Messenger, Skype, Skype for business, Lync.

That being said, I think Google far surpassed Microsoft in creating things that get shut down and have been for the last decade at least while Microsoft has improved on that front.

Pixel - Google sold less than 1 million Pixels last quarter

https://www.androidpolice.com/google-selling-more-pixels-202...

Apple sells more phones than that in 2 days.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/299153/apple-smartphone-...

Android is not really all that profitable and Google still ends up paying Apple $18 billion+ a year to actually reach mobile consumers with money to spend. The $26 Billion in profit number was over 6 years

https://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2016/01/21/oracle-s...

Cloud - GCP isn’t profitable

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252523200/Google-results...

As far as GSuite, it’s not getting much uptake in the enterprise

https://www.saasgenius.com/blog/why-office-365-is-overtaking...

So, hear me out. What do you think Google would need to pay Apple if Android didn't exist, and everyone? Would it be the same amount as in reality, or would it perhaps be way more? Pretty obviously the latter. So that delta + Play store sales are the economic value of Android.

> The $26 Billion in profit number was over 6 years

That you think a product going from literally nothing to $26 billion in cumulative profit in 6 years would be disappointing is just totally detached from reality. To put this in perspective, in that same time period of 2009-2015 (which I assume your "6 years" means) Amazon made a total of $3 billion in profit.

A better criticism would be that the number is unlikely to be correct, since Oracle would have inflated it as much as humanly possible for the legal case. But that's not the argument you made.

Considering that Apple has most of the affluent users in every market, would it be that much more?

Apple makes more in mobile from Google than google makes from Android more than likely.

> That you think a product going from literally nothing to $26 billion in cumulative profit in 6 years would be disappointing is just totally detached from reality. To put this in perspective, in that same time period of 2009-2015 (which I assume your "6 years" means) Amazon made a total of $3 billion in profit.

Amazon was a low margin retail company and was spending billions on infrastructure. Android already had more market share than iOS by then and was already dominant. How much do you think Apple made on the iPhone during that time period? Has Apple or any other BigTech company had to pay a direct competitor for placement?

> A better criticism would be that the number is unlikely to be correct, since Oracle would have inflated it as much as humanly possible for the legal case. But that's not the argument

That number came from Google in court and wasn’t redacted.

Oh, I'm absolutely sure that's the case. But basically every business on earth is less profitable than the iPhone. Are you saying that every other product is a miserable failure due to that?

Note they're totally different businesses. Apple primarily sells premium hardware, Google primarily licenses an OS to other phone manufacturers.

> Amazon was a low margin retail company and was spending billions on infrastructure.

So? Your argument is that Android is some kind of a product failure because it "only" made $26 billion in profit in its first six years. But what you're ignoring is that that is an absurd level of success. It's 8 times all of Amazon in the timeframe. What Amazon product had that kind of a growth curve from zero, ever? I would bet literally nothing.

If you applied this logic consistently, you should be ripping into Amazon's decades-long failure at creating a hit product. But instead you're making excuses about "low margins".

> Has Apple or any other BigTech company had to pay a direct competitor for placement?

Yes, like all the time? E.g. I'm sure that all of Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have bought ads on Google and YouTube. It's not some kind of indication of business failure on their part [0]; they've determined that those ads have a positive ROI.

[0] Though obviously Amazon's search engine did fail before being killed, like so many other Amazon products.

> That number came from Google in court and wasn’t redacted.

Ok, I'll stand corrected then. But I still have no idea of anyone could argue that's a failure.

Microsoft licenses Windows to other PC manufacturers, the PC market was much smaller than mobile even back then, do you think they only made $26 billion in profit over the time period licensing Windows? In hindsight, “missing mobile” was the best thing that could have happened to Microsoft. If you were a company right now, would you rather be “Android, Inc” or “Windows, Inc”?

> Yes, like all the time? E.g. I'm sure that all of Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have bought ads on Google and YouTube. It's not some kind of indication of business failure on their part [0]; they've determined that those ads have a positive ROI.

Do you think either spends anywhere near the amount?

Windows was at that point a 25 year old business, not one starting from zero. Why in the world would they have the same profit in that time period? Windows absolutely did not make $26 billion in the first 6 years of its life. Does that make Windows a failure?

I have no idea of whether Windows is more profitable than Android right now. You don't either. But both are clearly incredibly successful products.

Again: what product that successful has Amazon ever launched? Just a single example of something that made $26 billion of profit in its first 6 years. Should be easy to find, given Amazon has probably launched thousands of products, many in extremely lucrative high margin areas. And when you fail to name one, maybe consider that your theories on how good Amazon is at creating projects and how bad Google is might not be entirely correct?

> Do you think either spends anywhere near the amount?

Of course not. Why does that matter? Positive ROI is positive ROI.

6 years in the life of Windows , there was nowhere near the number of PCs being sold every year as Android devices.

But I can guarantee you that even from the day that Microsoft license the first version of DOS to IBM that it made more per license sold than Google makes from each Android sold.

> Again: what product that successful has Amazon ever launched?

I see that you refuse to compare Android to its most realistic counterpart - Apple.

The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and even the Apple Watch (Cook said that Apple Watch revenues exceeded iPod revenue a couple of years ago) were all more successful in the first 6 years.

The entire point is that Google hasn’t been able to diversify at all *profitably”.

Uh, what? Of course the iPhone is more profitable than Android, and I have already said so in this discussion. If you think that a product needs to reach iPhone numbers to count as successful, I really don't know what to say.

But I note that you are indeed incapable of naming a single Amazon product that was as successful as Android, while still maintaining that Android was somehow a commercial disappointment, while Amazon is a success story. You really don't see the disconnect?

With the side effect that anyone that cares about their career is in a position on the org chart somehow related to Azure, and the current teams taking care of Windows UI frameworks seem filled with interns and contractors, without any background on Windows tooling history, and our expectations of what they should deliver.

But my comments have basically been around Google not having strong focus and not successfully and profitably entering new markets.

* Gorillas.BAS and Microsoft Flight Simulator aside.

** There's the Dynamics line, which I don't think really counts under 'office' given its complexity.

>But Google should have never been so far behind in Cloud.

I emphatically agree. Google had kick ass infrastructure way before most players and squandered it on internal use only. I think it's one of the biggest blunders in its history and shows the lack of vision in places.

That being said, despite the old wives tale that AWS came about because Amazon decided to sell its excess capacity, AWS was started as a separate initiative with completely different infrastructure when Amazon wanted to enter a separate vertical. It was led by Jassy (not technically from a business development standpoint) - a sales guy who looked at the market and went after a need (I refuse to say by “Working Backwards”). Every initiative that Amazon and AWS has starts with the business case, six pagers, PRFAQ’s etc with product managers and program managers involved. I even had to do a couple to get “funding” to spend time on a couple of features to a popular company sponsored open source solution I wanted to work on.

Being successful in the cloud is all about building relationships, knowing how to meet large organizations where they are, not being stuck on “the one true way”, developing and grooming a network of “partners”, etc. It’s very high touch. Microsoft has been doing that since the 80s and AWS had first mover advantage.

I won’t speak to GCP in particular. But none of the above characteristics is part of Google’s DNA.

(obviously there are still exceptions to this, I have lost count on the number of desktop UI frameworks Microsoft has developed in the last 15 years...)

Then again, look at the revenue mix of the other companies to see how well they were able to move into new markets

- Apple - phones, tablets, watches, computers, accessories, services, and even the AppleTV+ series have been getting rave reviews.

Apple Arcade even isn’t in any danger of being cancelled.

- Microsoft - Windows, Server software, Azure is a strong second, at least they didn’t cancel XBox and I bet their streaming game service will be around for awhile.

- Amazon (same disclaimer I work at AWS): Amazon retail, AWS, Twitch, advertising, Prime Video, the Alexa devices

- Facebook - FB proper, WhatsApp, Instagram -yes two of those are acquisitions. But how many acquisitions has Google screwed up completely?

And then you have Google.

- YouTube is believed to be barely break even from a profit standpoint

- it was revealed in the Oracle trial how relatively little Android makes in profit . Yes I realize the numbers are old. But what has changed since then? By the time of the trial, Android already had the dominant market share. Google pays Apple a reported $18 billion a year to be the default search engine. That has to be more than Google is making from Android per year.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-...

After all these years, everything that Google has don outside of advertising has been a failure as far as profitability.

Same can be said for Google, right? Google is playing an entirely different game than having paid-for-products but instead funneling products into the money-printing Ads machine.

>But how many acquisitions has Google screwed up completely?

I actually don't know and am very curious, how many? More or less than other similar companies? From my memory it's not many but I could be very wrong. Firebase for example, is alive and strong and rarely gets mentioned.

I don't think every company needs to have the same type of business model. Google became popular because it made really great products that were all free* which increased adoption. Maybe some of them (like say, Search) would have never gotten popular if they had charged for it right away. I'm not convinced there's a single right path.

>it was revealed in the Oracle trial how relatively little Android makes in profit

It makes sense though, right? I don't even know how Android would make money directly (ok, I do know of ways, not sure if that's how it is) but it's a precursor for making money from the Play Store.

Look at the diversity of profitable lines that Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have gone into over the last two decades and compare to the number of failed attempts that Google had at trying to diversify.

I’m sure Oracle was counting Ad revenue coming from Android when calculating profits.

No other company in the world has workloads that match Google's. So there are two options. You can spend a shitload of money making GCP actually work for the ridiculous needs of google3 applications and then actually get everybody to use GCP rather that using borg directly or you can not spend that money building all the infrastructure to do things that borg already does and has zero external customers.

Turns out the latter is attractive.

What Google does now is just not rev the version in any repo paths. This is true of several projects that previously had versions included in the path. Now all versioning is handled separately.

Motorola is interesting, but considering it was less than a year in Google and more focussed on hardware development probably also not fully integrated and one could argue whether Google acquired it only for the patents they kept when selling to Lenovo.

John Hanke in contrast built Maps and related things after being acquired and only after a few years moved to build Niantic, where at least Ingress was developed fully inside Google (but apparently not fully in Google stack, but so that they could transition to Google Cloud)

But yeah, good examples!

They bought it, stripped out the things they wanted to keep, then spun it back out.

What ecosystem is Stadia in? They couldn’t brand it right and veil it through YouTube or Google Play? You’d never shut down YouTube or Google Play, you’d just let that, you know, that “Google Play Live (Stadia)” feature quietly enter maintenance mode.

Apple won’t shut down Apple News. They’d never announce it. It’s just some product that’s interweaved into iOS. If it ain’t a hit, it quietly fades.

Google+, weave that shit in with Gchat. But no, no, it’s … yeah, it’s its own special thing. Special things get their own very special shut down.

I’m not wise like that, but if you want to try stuff to see what sticks, lay low and quietly try things. That way you can quietly cut it short if necessary.

If you enter loud, you exit loud. And if you don’t exit loud, people remember you left quietly and laugh that you entered loud.

Could they actually do that? Or more importantly, could the average user - not someone next door to the datacenter - get that kind of performance?

Internet performance in Europe has improved dramatically over the past year and a half. Average fixed line download speeds have increased by more than half (+51.9 percent), from 68 Megabits per second (Mbps) in March 2020 to 103.3 Mbps in June 2021.

they put themselves in a position where they were stuck acting like a psudo-console-platform thing needing to get developers to support thier platform

Getting the technology done even better means that Chromebooks and Androids (or even the browser) could be heavyweight gaming machines -- and thereby increasing those audiences.

As those audiences grow (and they're already big), having better hardware streamlined into Stadia means they immediately have insane distribution power. If you consider mobile gaming dominance in Asia, and the ability to release triple-A games immediately to a billion devices worldwide, that creates huge leverage over iOS.

Then as you said, GCP. I think someone with an idea and roadmap was there, but FAANG incentive programs don't reward people focused on the long game.

on the whole I feel like they were to focused on potential vs. offering something desirable right away

Or companies pull back on Internet advertising.

The unknown unknown is the creation of a new advertising method. I doubt that any newspaper in 1990 thought that this thing called the Internet was going to all but destroy their ad business within twenty years.

Google's ad product, however, is truly horrendous and exists only because it's perceived as "too big to fail".

It's possible that purchasing a Google ad still provides higher ROI than alternative options, but I'd certainly not bet on that remaining true in 5-10 years. Google's empire is built on a foundation of sand and the fact that the company seems incapable of launching new, lasting, innovative products should have its leaders and investors quaking in their boots.

Anyways, Google I think has been trying to maintain a semblance of its early culture of innovation so as to attract talent/applicants, to not cause too much internal turmoil, and to make investors think it is still an "innovation" company. Also, because growth comes with bloat and bureaucracy, so may as well have that bloat come up with new products.

Google will never be fixed internally to be its former self or a company centered on innovation because that's just not how monopolies work... Maybe once they capsize (which hopefully they do because monopolies are toxic and anti-competitive), they can once again become an innovator, like with Apple's early capsizing which led to them bringing Steve Jobs back.

The thing with x amount of products failing is true. Doesn't matter if you're an indie hacker or Google. It's been shown by giant after giant releasing products and them failing. Doesn't matter what industry they're in either. That's why so many corporations just buy new products lines. They get a product that is in demand.

That's why it made sense for Adobe to buy Figma. Building a competitor would have been probably rather expensive and risky. Where instead they just buy it and have the product and the market share.

why Amazon has been buying products like Ring and the robot hover. They're in demand and Amazon just needs to put some cash behind it and it's going to generate tons more cash.

If you're wanting to build the next big thing, you've got to try building lots of things until one catches off.

MS shut down products all the time.

And Apple? They are very good at hiding their failures.

(said about twitter, but fits here)

apparently the product manager was Phill Harrison. He's been active in games for a few decades, so I'm not sure if this is just a pivoting move to focus the product or his exit strategy. Time will tell.

Same story in every company I've worked in. It's like the time horizon only goes as far as the next quarter.

I suspect that starting a new project inside google is comfortable enough that the thirst to grow and show a profit is muted. Also, I bet, the politics between departments makes it hard to do what's need to succeed.

Google should consider extracting companies into their own entities rather than closing them. Or creating an incubator where they keep a big percentage of the company and let the companies grow or die as the market dictates.

Google's primary job should be to provide resources to scale up business models that are working like they did with YouTube.

Sure, they launched Stadia and then went somewhere else before it failed. So the strategy works at least in the first transition. But wouldn't this become a barrier to further growth, when people can see that they have been leading failed projects?

definitely no innovation in that side of the business

No no, please don't restructure, wreck the company, that's fine.

Or more realistically, the worst offenders are not going anywhere and Google is going to be okay (Search, Maps, Play, Ads, Analytics, Fonts, Chrome, YouTube, ReCAPTCHA…).

Stadia, I don't care either way.

Harrison is still the lead of Stadia.

I never go there for search and I can’t think of another tool of theirs I use…

--

Same on gmail early invite... and totally same on *IF* i trust protonmail... which is HQ Swiss... and if you know anything about swiss history, they are not to be trusted. (this may piss ppl off, but its true) -- however, I do trust (currently) protonmail.

but yes, we need to avoid being naive to "technically arrogant"

Google shutting down consumer products hurts Google Cloud in many developer's minds. Doesn't help that Google Cloud itself just as frivolously deprecates products or APIs that people build their businesses on. And customer support is equally terrible across the company

Killing consumer products, and quite possibly launching products that flop in the first place, or their failure to make their consumer products appealing over time, really rubs off on Google Cloud though, you have to keep repeating to yourself that Google rarely kills its Enterprise offerings

Edit: not to say anything about Workspace, you can be essentially shut down for nothing. But there's a wider problem of major email providers behaving like a cartel in basically only accepting email from one another.

several other examples as well, but the worst thing they do is very frequent breaking API changes which force companies to do maintenance work to adjust to Google

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

But all of that has been masked by the fact that he's been aggressively pushing the ad team to keep increasing the revenue each quarter - and he's been "successful" in that.

But all of that is killing the company both directly (too many damn ads in Google products these days), as well as indirectly (not having a good vision for all of the other products, destroying the "don't be evil culture" that make Google great and beloved, and so on).

Of course by the time this is obvious to Google's board, Pichai will already be a billionaire himself if he isn't already, so who cares what happens afterward, right?

"When you inevitably do shut down in a couple of months could you please just release Bluetooth drivers for the controller first? It's a good controller and I'd like to be able to use it." - https://twitter.com/josh_ross/status/1553465786634604544

> It's not hard to predict the Google future. Yet another rebranding of whatever chat product will come soon enough also.

I don't even want to call it pairing because the way you pair the controller to your game session is to enter in a 5 button combination that is displayed on your TV.

Stadia shutting down means they're out of a job or moving internally to another project.

A driver being released from an abandoned project comes with no warranty

If you say, both to the public and to the team, that you might shut down but you're not sure yet, that's as good as shutting down. And if there are rumors about shutting down, because it's close to happening, then you may have to address it. And you may believe that the only chance you have of not shutting down is to tell everyone that you aren't shutting down.

From my experiences, most people are doing what they think is right. We should take more time understanding why people think what they are doing is right, even when we may perceive the action as immoral or wrong.

Morals matter even when they are inconvenient.

One of their discussion was on how much commitment was crucial in the game dev world. Devs on all sides (platform, libraries, actual game) would put their skin in the game and gamble time and money but also personal energy to make something successful, and there was an expectation that all participant would stick together even as the future gets bleaker (what comes to my mind is Nintendo supporting and pushing the Wii U for a while, even as it was a clear failure, or Sony keeping the Vita alive as much as they could)

Your reputation as a platform maker gets a serious hit if you're ready to quit the minute your forecast gets dark, and game devs never really forget this kind of things, unlike other more opportunistic ecosystems.

I kinda hope the Stadia team could move on outside of Google to a more fitting company..

So this does make a lot of sense. Huge time commitment for deliverables + ultra specialist roles and expertise = the important industry people have long memories.

Well… it was a little rude to make a prediction like that, but it was based on research and past history. It was just way too big a risk.

I wonder if it’s a bit self fulfilling at this point: timid users lead to poor adoption which leads to cancellations which leads to timid users?

https://twitter.com/sfbtom/status/1575558078367690752?s=21&t...

https://twitter.com/burgerbecky/status/1575585277594066945?s...

If you look at the discussions about the shutdown rumor, hardly believed PR. I was on the defensive side and my argument was that spreading this rumor was basically a free point.

> When you inevitably do shut down in a couple of months could you please just release Bluetooth drivers for the controller first? It's a good controller and I'd like to be able to use it.

In other words, people didn't believe them from the get go. Whether it was an outright lie, or a George Constanza-esque "It's not a lie if YOU believe it" message, is pretty irrelevant. Everyone knew or should have known it was BS.

I actually think it's an intentional behavior designed to show investors that they are being studious relative to economic conditions (aka, covering their asses to avoid shareholder suits).

Nobody I knew there was willing to understand how all of Wall Street was making fun of them and the valuation attempt.

So yea, the meme-machine will just dismiss it as 'lol it will be cancelled in a year because google'.

But Stadia might be 1 of 1 ..maybe 2 or 3 pay services they've ever cancelled.

I'm going to bet most of the Stadia team found out at the same time as, or shortly before, everyone else.

However someone at Google let that tweet go out with no intention of fulfilling that promise, that most definitely does constitute lying.

Google killing products left and right is bad enough, this amount of lying is just unbearable. Google's lack of object permanence is probably the reason people didn't sign up for Stadia in the first place.

And that upper management (VP/director/etc.) probably finally made the decision to shut it down just a couple of weeks ago or even less.

So while ironic... it's highly unlikely Google was lying, as multiple people here are suggesting. Nobody knows for sure that a product/team will be shut down until it actually is. Not even upper management knows until they see the newest numbers.

Having had some experience at large companies, many teams' whole existence is on the line every ~3 months as the product manager presents updates to the VP and associates, and then waits a week to find out later if the team a) gets new employees / higher budget, b) gets no new employees and no increased budget, or c) gets cancelled so start looking for an internal transfer.

Just another data point on why people rightfully think PR posts like this are BS.

With that said, the way they're handling this shutdown gives me LESS hesitancy re: consumer entertainment purchases. Granting full, automatic refunds is the vest way this can be handled, period.

Now, developer services are another story... Winding down a service that I rely on (rather than just being entertained by) would cause me more work, on their schedule.

But still, I have slightly more trust that they'll handle similar things well in the future.

I got to play Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia when that was the best and most reliable way to play that game. Now I'm getting a full refund. I should have bought more games!

Also, there's this tidbit:

> Harrison says Google sees opportunities to apply Stadia’s technology to other parts of Google, like YouTube, Google Play, and its AR efforts, and the company also plans to “make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed,” he wrote.

I assumed they'd do a pivot towards offering it as a service for game publishers to build on, something like GCS just for game streaming. I wonder when we'll see an announcement for that.

>I mean we could wait till September 24 too

Not bad missed the estimate by 5 days.

Google doesn't support new products enough to become huge and don't seem to have a cohesive plan to support a range of products in the long term.

I'm probably someone who could have benefited from Stadia but I feel like they never marketed to me in a way that even got me to try it. And the fear that this was just another experiment by Google didn't have me seeking it out on my own especially for the up front costs.

For YouTube I think it would be something like it will slowly turn into CNGooGSNBC and be heavily editorialized where you need to work with an AI assisted nebulous entity for weeks before you can upload content.

Of the two I'd bet on gmail being the dead man walking. They should full circle it and announce on an April 1st

There are 2 classes of product that I don't see them shutting down.

1. Those that make lots of money, e.g. search, youtube, maps. Unless that changes of course.

2. Those that are heavily used internally at Google, e.g. gmail, docs, calendar. They are always going to want those as internal tools. I guess they could make them internal only, but how much more work is it to maintain the public version too given it already exists?

This call was followed by a contentious Q&A where the Stadia boss was confronted about his email from just the week before which suggested anything but a wholesale shutdown of the studios. Harrison expressed his regret over the misleading statements made in his previous email, according to four sources with knowledge of the call. When asked what changed from the week prior, Harrison admitted nothing had and told those on the call, “We knew.”

https://kotaku.com/stadia-leadership-praised-development-stu...

But with team dynamics getting thrown in I think that narrative sounds noble and glamorous but has little to nothing to do with reality. Instead it's an equal part "I can save this" and "we aren't gonna save this but we need people to stay to help with an orderly shutdown", and the Mushroom Treatment (keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit).

That is a clear violation of informed consent. Even if it might lead to better short-term outcomes, over the long-term it leads to degrading trust in doctors. Same with this case. It gives all of us (internal employees, outside devs, businesses, customers) even more reasons to never believe any promise that comes out of the mouth of an Alphabet executive.

What you shouldn’t do is enumerate all of the potential side effects in vivid detail. That’s the WebMD curse. But if someone wants you to look at your work you should look at your work, not blow them off on the phone. That’s just more arrogant asshole behavior, which contributes to White Coat Syndrome.

What are we going to call WCS for mega corps with short attention spans? Because I think we need one.

In their circles it’s called “controlling the message”, “not causing panic”, “simplifying” etc. They often simply do not believe it’s lying

You shouldn't. At best, they are fellow travelers. At worst, they aren't accountable to you, and their incentive structure usually does not drive them to behave ethically towards you.

Execs aren't paid to lead, they are paid to deliver business value. Ethical leadership is often incidental or counterproductive to it.

In this case, the execs were paid to do everything possible to promote and grow the product. And that's what they did.

"Working as Intended"

I thought it was fairly rude and also I thought the execs were simply using careful language. After attending a bunch more TGIFs, I finally realized that nearly every exec had a very specific way of presenting things that sort of made their work sound perfect, even if it was shit. You can see an example in "An Update On Google Reader" or "Advancing our Amazing Bet on Google Fiber", or even this one.

Source: https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1574790973443522566

If you read between the lines, those kind of announcements can usually be a good indicator of the appropriate “time to adapt”, whether that be to prepare for a layoff or to start buying IP on a survivable platform.

The sooner you learn this, the more information you can get from this sort of release. It doesn't mean you can perfectly decode it, it just means you can get more information. And the amount of time that "more information" outright contradicts the nominal content of the statement... it's not terribly uncommon. It's certainly the normal case that the decoded content heavily shades the nominal content.

Of course asking people teaching "critical thinking" to arm the students with a toolset that can be turned against the teachers is a pretty tall ask. I've had teachers who could take that level of heat, and props to them, but I've certainly had teachers that simply couldn't.

More broadly, this applies to any hierarchical authority system. The amount of agitprop is proportional to the number of levels between you and the person speaking, and the amount of truthful and not misleading information is inversely proportional.

The corpo doth protest too much. If they have to say it, it has to be a lie.

From what I saw, the Stadia team was working hard on product improvements and adding new games still. So a careful parsing of the sentence is that the Stadia team was still working towards the goals of expanding the service, as the shutdown decision wasn't made yet or told to the team yet.

It got out that one of my favorite restaurants was going to lose their lease for new construction, and didn't have plans to relocate. I moved shortly thereafter and never checked up on them. What actually happened is that the construction project got delayed over a year, and the restaurant stayed, but anyone who didn't live in the immediate vicinity didn't hear about that. Any time I told someone it was still open, the response was happy, but complete surprise.

They opened a kind of a cafe with just a fraction of their menu closer to my house, but the location wasn't great (It's worth paying someone to sit around a potential location for hours on multiple days to see what foot traffic is like. If you're across a high traffic street from a high foot traffic area that doesn't mean you'll see foot traffic) and I'm sure by then the rumor of their demise had affected revenue. So bad location and the food wasn't quite as good as at the old location. Probably staff turnover.

That slow avalanche took three years to shutter the company, and they probably would have been fine if they'd managed to stay out of the local paper.

Being caught saying “don’t worry” just damages their brand more. What they really need is to declare some things as sacred cows. But you can’t do that after you’ve already lied using the same phrasing.

It does sound like they're trying to do better, but it was a long time coming and this still isn't good behavior.

The exec communication with the devs is unfortunate, but a separate matter.

I encourage you to consider looking for work at a company which respects you; you’re worth it.

But there's a corporate twist here, in that the person saying might have believed it to be true, because some executive also believed it to be true, even though if you take Google as a whole, it was always uncertain.

So I think I'd call this "corporate bullshit", where Google as an entity has low regard for the truth as presented by PR mouthpieces, and is thus a dedicated bullshitter.

What service is better than Stadia at actually running games in the cloud?

Anyone who didn't think Stadia was going to shut down at least a year ago was either kind of inexperienced or being paid not to realize the obvious.

If they can't find peace with everybody calling them a professional liar, they should quit their job and find an honest line of work.

Blatant lies are destroying nations.

Unfortunately Google didn’t even have the courtesy to tell all of the developers about it, and some just got the news that their games set to launch in the next few days were, on stadia at least, already dead.

At this point, unless it’s ads, you’re looking at the world through rose tinted lenses if think there isn’t at least a chance Google is about to kill almost of its products.

After seeing so many big companies promise things and only screw those over along the course of last couple of decades, this is of no surprise to me

But this wasn't really a surprise since this information was given to me from the future [0] and I said exactly was was going to happen and predicted it a year before [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27039202

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278255

This was exactly 2 months ago (July 29th).

https://archive.ph/W3F3g