I don't know how Pichai can change Google's culture without Google having an existential crisis first like IBM in the 90s. I saw these intertwining problems in Google: 1. Employees want promotions at all cost. It's not due to ambition but to comparing ourselves with our peers, thanks to lax promotion policies for years. L6 used to be treated as god, but no more. Employees simply lost it when they saw people who were not necessarily effective get promoted fast. Well, maybe the process is not lax, but identifying the real gems certainly becomes disproportionally harder as the company grows. 2. Management want to expand at all cost. 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. Yes, managers did get cautioned that it is the scope and impact that matters instead of team size, but in practice team size is a proxy measurement for scope and impact. 3. Maybe this is the real root cause: as Google becomes so large, it is simply impossible to gauge the impact and complexity of one's work reliably, resulting in all kinds of gaming and angst in all levels of employees. In the end, gauging impact becomes gauging the perception of impact.

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

In my opinion, the biggest problem Sundar has is that he is too much of a chicken to shake things up, and his underlings know it. They do something dumb, he gets questioned about it, he says the word "thoughtful," everyone at G gets a little bit angry, and then the whole thing blows over. That does not incentivize responsibility among the managers underneath him. Sundar tries to keep peace between managers and departments, but in doing so, he loses control.

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.

This seems like a popular management style at big tech companies. I've seen exactly this kind of behavior at MS too. It's a kind of "pacifist management".

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.

Well said. I rocketed up the chain early in my career for inventing some truly innovative stuff (that's been published in top conferences). Then I fought against stupid shit. I spoke out. I had strong technical opinions. Eventually I was pushed aside and my career has tanked (but rest-and-vest baby...except I'm slowly recovering and still seen as a company intellectual resource). Meanwhile I watch all the mediocre managers keep rising who are "yes, sir" and don't make any enemies. They don't do shit except follow the status quo and build their empires.

This isn't just tech per se, if you look around you in society that's literally how countries are governed.

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.

For anyone reading this deep in the thread: read Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The Dictator's Handbook. A variations of a few simple rules result in virtually all models of government. And none of them involve technical competence.

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

Or watch the CGP grey 'rules for rulers' adaption of it on youtube

I rewatch that video from time to time. It's amazing how accurate that is, despite what academics say.

What do academics say?

This is why democracy is so rad. We can vote out the idiots whenever we feel like it. Of course, we don't always agree on who the idiots are.

Democracy for Realists, 2016

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...

It doesn't have to be a huge tech company this is pretty universal even at mid-sized companies.

This starts all the way at the interview btw. If you go out of your way to do something extra, you’ll be suddenly judged on it even if it wasn’t originally in the scope of the interview, so you’re pushed to be the most average you can get.

It is still their fault. Personal accountability is the only thing that can improve a situation. At all levels.

When has personal accountability really solved any systemic issues we humans have faced?

Personal accountability isn't meant to solve problems. It is meant to prevent them by forcing individuals to put something ahead of their own career advancement. In other words, it aligns incentives in favor of preventing problems rather than in favor of solving them - you can only be the hero who slays a dragon if there is a dragon.

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.

My question still stands, when has that really solved issues if they aren't regulated? Personal accountability without regulations is moot, toothless and I don't recall any instance of it ever solving anything.

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.

Democracies and republics create personal accountability through regulations, since there is no single boss and power tends to come from legislative bodies or the people directly - those people want to provide input. Dictatorships (which companies fundamentally are) do not need regulations and rule-making processes to have personal accountability. Instead, the CEO can determine if you screwed up and fire you (or the dictator can shoot you) if you did. The specter of being fired (or shot) aligns your incentives to "do the right thing" even if the rules are not well-communicated, although you are better at doing the right thing if the dictator tells you what they value and what they want you to do.

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.

So you'd like government regulations?

Answer my question first and I can answer yours after :)

No manager who leads in demand software engineers will ever be able to change anything unless their reports believe in the vision. The minute things don’t go their way, we can just get another job,

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”

There's some bizarre PR campaign going on to try and brand Sundar as the next Steve Jobs: lots of the photos of him looking thoughtful with steepled hands overlaid with anodyne quotes about technology or AI. It's unclear to me if he's much more than a tech billionaire by luck.

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

That's funny. Yes, for me this bizarre PR campaign shows up as promoted content when I scroll through my Google news feed.

Sundar's claim to fame is Google Toolbar for MSIE. It was a big deal at that time. It locked Google search on MSIE and ultimately enable navboost in search quality.

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

>believe in the vision

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.

Just think of the dividend they could pay if they admitted they are an advertising company, instead of distracting people with the carousel of "innovation".

> making boatloads of money off AdWords

You forgot "and spending it on annual chat apps"

Marc Andreesen recently has been talking a lot about the professional managerial class (PMC) and how it's causing the principle actor problem. 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. Nobody really makes any hard and decisive moves because there is much to lose and not that much more to win. This was different when we had companies owned by individuals or families.

This was one of the reasons why Nokia died. When the organization grew, everything was taken over by middle management whose safest option in any scenario was “Please do not change anything.”

Yes, but the takeaway isn't that they should start making bold moves, it's that we actually want them to churn out and be surpassed over time. It's the entrenching of them through regulatory capture or predatory behaviour that's bad.

There are still a lot of companies owned by individuals or families. You just don't hear about them because they seldom take the big risks necessary to produce disruptive innovations.

Mark @Meta seems to be making bold moves.

Doesn't that pretty much prove the point of the comment you are replying to?

> 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.

> His underlings know that, and they know they can do stupid shit and work against each other without accountability.

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.

Why would VPs be interested in using different building entrances?

The buildings were designed for much more open access prior to security policy changes that made most of the useful paths exit only.

Oh man, is that something that changed in the last few years? One thing I always liked about the Mountain View campus is that every door, no matter how minor, had a badge reader on it, so you could always take the most direct path between two possible points.

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.)

I think it was a kneejerk to the YouTube shooter.

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.)

Ah, I forgot about that incident.

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!)

There are floors in One Market that are the same and equally nonsensical. The kicker is that Google stocks them with tampons and toothbrushes and all that, even though they're communal, which makes the locking even more silly.

They don't need to be bigger than you either. If someone just pushes you out of the way, and are really a bad actor, they could have a box cutter on them or just be more prepared to confront another person. Are you going to directly confront a person that has you surprised? No.

Sounds like they need to make reporting dead simple. Put an alarm button on every badge reader. Hit the button. Pre-recorded “intruder who did not badge present. Everyone present please wait for security.” Then locks second internal door. Or even better just automate counting bodies vs badging on every entrance/exit. Lots of nfc/face recognition type technology to tell who is who.

There's an internal social network?

Like, what do people post on it?

There's an internal google plus instance whose culture is kind of like a mix of Facebook and Twitter, and an internal meme site. Occasionally, some real work (setting up collaborations with colleagues) happens on the social network.

So... Google Plus is actually one of the company's longest-lived services? The irony.

> There's an internal google plus instance whose culture is kind of like a mix of Facebook and Twitter

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

>Facebook and Twitter

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 can be a massive time sink too. Have seen the debates on there about everything (politics, finances and other random stuff) eat hours out of coworkers days.

I remember when Sundar became CEO the first thing he did was hole himself up in 2000 Amphitheatre Pkwy and block access to all Google staff not in that building. The next thing he did was get bullied by the board and their CFO, but I digress.

In all seriousness, it did seem like Ruth Porat (the CFO) was the real brains of the operation. Sundar is the fall guy.

At some offices, the exit only doors are in significantly more convenient locations.

The lobbies get very crowded around 9 and 5, and so do the elevators near them.

Can't have the executives possibly smelling the rabble.

All executives exit effectively immediately!

"Thoughtful" - what does he mean by that? That he's thinking about it?

It's kind of an internal meme: he says "we have to be thoughtful about this" or "we have to approach this thoughtfully." Almost every tough question from inside Google is met with an answer that contains the word "thoughtful."

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."

Ah so. I had a colleague who would say "I suspect I shall have to think about this."

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

> In my opinion, the biggest problem Sundar has is that he is too much of a chicken to shake things up, and his underlings know it.

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.

That is what the person is saying. I'm not sure what you are questioning here. Sundar has agency and authority and he refuses to use it. This enables his underlings to have free reign.

Ah, then I misinterpreted the post I was replying to and we are in agreement.

It doesnt look like the promotion-hungry culture that's the problem. Or engineering.

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.

I think this is a spot on assessment. Google has always been a 'nerds trying to build a cool technology' company. Yes, one of it is search which is infinitely useful for users. But other than that, they have been in their shells nerding out things. Accidentally some of the technologies become useful and popular. But there is no grounds up thought about 'how can we make it useful for customers', in relative comparison to products from companies like Amazon and Slack.

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.

Google Analytics was also an acquisition. Look up Urchin Software.

> Google has always been a 'nerds trying to build a cool technology' company

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.

> looks like Google not giving a zit about users is the problem

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.

All corporations are sociopaths, Google is only different in that they think their success is because of their lack of care about users instead of in spite of it.

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

> The only metric that 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.

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.

Team size seems to have become the new "corner office" in terms of managers self measurement. When the iPhone was still super secret, having a locked hallway was Apple's "corner office". A manager was on track to get their Tesla Roadster if they could get their team working on iOS and get their hallways locked behind an extra set of badge readers. This continued for a few years after the iPhone's release as the Mac and iOS software teams were still not fully integrated.

Team size is an easily quantifiable metric of a managers influence/budget etc. It's also something that's almost never confidential as opposed to other business metrics. "Impact" and "scope" are hard to measure and can be debated about.

Very true! When the first Apple Park designs were shown, I was wondering how those grand, sweeping hallways could be reconciled with our quotidian experience of more and more lockdown areas popping up daily…

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.

Yeah I think Apple Park's design only worked (such as it does) because iOS and macOS software orgs had merged long before moving in. In Infinite Loop they closed off hallways as lockdown areas and generally cut up the buildings, that would never have worked at Apple Park. Geez I remember being able to bring guests to my office in Infinite Loop.

  > 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

sounds like... bullshit jobs? [0]

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

Eh, most people want to work for Google for the cash these days it's reflected in their hiring where they don't even know where they want to place people half the time

> Employees want promotions at all cost. It's not due to ambition but to comparing ourselves with our peers, thanks to lax promotion policies for years

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.

1/10th the size of google (who has 140k employees) is still a massive company.

> Management want to expand at all cost. 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.

Good old Parkinson’s law strikes again.

> The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be.

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

It shouldn't baffle you. Google ads make so much money with no real competitors that there is no motivation to innovate anything else. Blizzard has the same problem. World of Warcraft makes so much money that it kills everything else. Valve makes so much money being the only real PC gaming platform that they stopped making games.

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.

> Valve makes so much money being the only real PC gaming platform that they stopped making games.

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.

Both are nice, but very niche.

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.

VR absolutely niche, but Steam Deck has delivered on its promise far more than I expected, and this seems to be being reflected in impressive sales.

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.

It's unclear whether Valve is playing the long game or simply hedging their bets. My recollection is that their investment in Linux was expressly stated to be a hedge against a future where Microsoft put Windows in a walled garden, like iOS.

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.

I'd argue this to be a pretty dated take on Valve's strategy, personally. Gabe stated it was a hedge over 10 years ago, in response to the risk of Windows 8 moving to mandatory Microsoft Store:

> 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...

Yes, I should have been clearer. I meant that their Linux investment started out as a hedge, but over time they were able to pivot it to something else.

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.

The impetus is it’s an obvious vehicle to sell more games via Steam? I don’t think it is any more complex than this.

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.

It depends on who is buying the Steam Deck. If it's people who don't already have a PC, then sure, Valve is broadening their market. But if it's people who already have a gaming PC, then it probably won't lead to a lot of additional software sales.

After having a Steam Deck for a bit I really really hope either Valve or some other decent controller company like 8bitdo makes a controller with the same style of setup. The dual haptic trackpads+paddle buttons combined with the customizability is incredible. To me it is easily the biggest leap in controller tech since the analog stick with the N64.

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.

It should be noted that Sega released their analog controller for the Saturn before Nintendo released theirs.

And Atari released theirs back in 1982.

was that controller really analog though?

The Atari 2600 had a digital joystick. The Atari 5200 was completely analog. If you tear the controller down, there's a complex mechanism that links the stick to two rotational potentiometers. It's similar in outcome to modern analog thumbsticks, but the mechanism is completely different (and is MUCH bigger).

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.

>Secondhand prices are through the roof.

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

I might have overstated that. Looking at eBay "sold" prices, they seem to go for anywhere from 30 USD (controller only, no accessories) to over 100 USD (used, but in box with accessories) or 200 USD (sealed in box). But even then, there's a lot of price variation - there are sealed controllers for as low as 130 USD.

The VR niche has grown significantly recently with the Quest 2 selling 15 million units. Just today, what I would consider the most promising game/platform in VR released, which is BoneLab. The state of the art VR experience wise in my opinion was Boneworks, and that was only on PCVR, so I'm excited to see where we are headed with VR. It has been a slow-growing niche but it's still fighting on.

I strongly disagree. First, to adress the grandparent comment, Valve is a private company that is still lead by its founders, so the sentiment does not apply to them.

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.

> as they’re not the company that can pull that off anymore.

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 could just take the old game engine as-is, give it a new plot and art, and I would beg them to take my money.

And this is how you end with "Jaws 19: This Time It's REALLY REALLY Personal".

I wouldn't mind this, honestly. a game can be solid even on an old engine. just look at how long the Monster Hunter series had been on their old engine before overhauling with World.

This is the opposite of what Valve has always been doing, with one exception being Counter Strike.

I agree it's becoming sort of pointless to make HL3. As a fan, I'm perfectly happpy with keeping HL3 as only an asymptote and getting episode1, 2, Alyx and hopefully more.

Not if they figure out how to interact with the signals in my brain stem it won't be!

Always leave the audience wanting more.

They are still pulling off big projects and pivoting well though though steam proton/steamdeck which pivoted from the initial failures of the steambox push

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

Nitpick: niche, sure, but the deck isn't very niche. The mobile gaming market is a established market open to all sorts of gamers.

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

Yeah, I was saying niche because the Steamdeck experience isn't as plug and play as other consoles.

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.

Alyx was the result of an acquisition (campo santo) and it killed their work a non-franchise game "Valley of the Gods" after "firewatch".

Killed their podcasts too, which were good even if they were inveterate hipsters who played the video games you’d imagine Portland hipsters to play[0] and couldn’t pronounce Japanese names.

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

Citation needed. Wikipedia at least says that they were acquired while Alyx was in development and that they just joined the overall dev team.

It's an opinion comment on the internet, not a dissertation, but I base it on talking with one person who worked at valve hardware for a time and public information from the ex campo santo people's blogs and things. I could be very wrong and would love to hear from them, but I have a strong "what could have been" for 'valley of the gods.'.

Thanks for explaining. You made a claim outside of your personal experience, so expect to be asked to back it up. I’m not sure why you’re surprised.

St(r)eam.

Valve's issue is pretty much just a lack of serious competition against Steam. They do occasionally put out something new, just at their own pace. They aren't in any rush since their core business is virtually unassailable at this point.

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.

Realistically how does this end though? Unless technology is created to immortalize Gabe in a machine, at some point he presumably will want to sell or die.

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.

> 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.

> Unless technology is created to immortalize Gabe in a machine

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

>Unless technology is created to immortalize Gabe in a machine.

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

Can't Gabe name a successor among the people he really trusts? Not all companies have to go public and become cash cows for investors.

I’m not ruling that out - naming a successor is much the same as selling - ownership still transfers to an entity which at this time is unknown. There’s all manner of odd ball alternative ownership structures in existence that can be considered, but each of them would be still a transfer of ownership.

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

He has sons. He will pass the company to them. They will decide how it is run. Let's hope he's been a good father.

I mean, if Valve was just a deli or a corner store sure. It is very likely one of the most profitable-per-employee companies in the history of the world, and probably in the running for one of the most valuable privately-held companies in the world too. We also know Gabe adores making money, so... I think it to be very unlikely it just gets passed to a kid, but who knows.

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.

Someone with actual experience at Valve would be better suited for the role.

My impression is that Google actively tries to hedge. They are aware of the fragility of the ads business.

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 only put up with GCP because AWS is owned by Amazon, a notoriously ruthless company. AWS is better from the perspectives of API stability, customer support, and third party support, aka the primary things cloud customers care about. Now that Microsoft has Azure, they are going to crush GCP into the ground and there is nothing Google can do to stop it even though Google invented most modern cloud technology.

Azure has been around for > 10 years. If they’re planning on crushing GCP then they’re taking their sweet time about it.

Sure, but they have only really been on the radar of traditional IT teams for the last 3 or so years.

Why should anybody at Azure care more than anybody at Google? Both are comfortable.

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.)

Haha what a joke. First, Azure is around as long as GCP. As someone in tech I can tell you that GCP and AWS are used everywhere and no one is talking about Azure. I think their fast growth as reported in their earnings is due to their office cloud services and not "core" cloud services.

> As someone in tech ...

... 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.

Yet anecdotally I see an _awful_ lot of Azure use in traditional corporate IT teams looking to move away from onprem...

Their cloud is better, or at least I like their interface better, but how do you know they won't just shut it off? Azure or Amazon are safer choices.

they won't, it makes a lot of money, it's b2b, etc.

gcp has a lot of business continuity guarantees.

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

I’m not, it’s the other problem after the promo issue. Google is an engineering only company, if you aren’t an engineer you’re second class. So engineers see a cool problem like live migration and solve that. But they do an awful job at building a product customers want(product managers), and supporting(customer support, marketing) that.

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

Wasn't stadia absolutely dreadful at release with lags, bugs, stutter and shutdowns?

Peter Drucker is so wise for urging companies to "kill your cash cow". The unfortunate constraint is that it requires extraordinary leaders and amazing luck to execute such killing successfully.

>Blizzard has the same problem. World of Warcraft makes so much money that it kills everything else.

$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.

I was formerly at Google on a team tangentially related to Stadia. A VP told us it was at least a billion dollar investment.

They could have paid me a million dollars to tell them it was a bad idea and saved the other 999 million. Oh well.

I'm pretty sure there are teams out there that could have developed a successful product for that money, if you don't include the infrastructure costs.

>... World of Warcraft makes so much money that it kills everything else

This fact reminds me of the resource curse.

>become hollow money machines that are preyed upon by professional executives

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

>Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are?

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.

Sundar Pichai is like (the Hamilton version of) Aaron Burr. He rose to the top by not making noise and survived to be last man standing as the most inoffensive nonthreatening choice.

> 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.

At this point I feel like it's that Search has gotten significantly worse. I've had pages of results that are completely AI-generated text, with my search query just rephrased as a sentence. As an employee, it's disappointing.

What's worse is that it actively tries to rewrite your query by dropping keywords (esp. ironic when it does it to the single most important thing in said query) and substituting "synonyms" which aren't, presumably so that the output would have more results.

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.

When you put every keyword in quotes it still incorrectly stems them, and it still ignores some keywords completely.

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...

As a loyal Google user from 1999-2021 that has now fully decoupled from all of it's services, it's a deeply tragic loss.

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.

The search engine is significantly worse than it was even a few years ago.

You'll find plenty of people who support every side of every issue here. You'll also find plenty of people who call out the people who support $BAD_SIDE of an issue as "classic HN" and "Silicon Valley folly". In this case, as in others, it's all in your head.

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

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

The person you're responding to doesn't mean "the company making as much money as possible". They mean "Sundar is earning as much money for himself (into his own bank account) as possible". And for that, it doesn't matter if the company is working in concert etc. when Google can coast on ad revenue for many years.

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

The actual big goals appear to be to get GCP out of third place and to do something nebulously magic with AI. Both of these have made progress, but not in a way that actually makes the company money. Other than that I agree with you, there doesn't seem to be any sort of coherent product vision other than "ads in search/youtube" and "keep building the handful of actually popular products we've had for ages."

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.

"GCP is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great servers to the platform."

Unlike Stadia, I do actually think that killing GCP would destroy the company. So I don't expect the same end outcome.

Right, they're trapped in a terrible position where it's sucking the company dry of its profits while also being necessary to continue or they will lose all credibility with enterprise and developers forever. That said, they could shut down Verily and save some $1B/year.

Cloud's losses ($1.8B in H1) are about 4% of the operating income of the money-making parts ($46B in the same timeframe). Sure, a billion here and a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money. But it's hardly "sucking the company dry of its profits".

Much of cloud's real costs are hidden in other parts of the budget, such as global infrastructure expansion.

So you're suggesting that the accounting is fradululent, and nobody figured it out except you? Not the auditors with actual access to the raw data. Not the hedge funds who could have made a pretty penny by shorting the stock and then releasing this information. Not even any whistleblowers who would presumably be eligible for an award.

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

The thing that is bizarre to me is that Google has absolute shitloads of money. 120B+ in the bank. Megabillions in profit each quarter. Like, they could buy Nintendo for less than half of their cash on hand.

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.

Nothing is high priority enough to get funded because they have a firehose of money coming out of ads, compared to which nothing looks like a good enough opportunity.

Exactly. The IRR in investing more into ad platforms for Google is still higher than any other project so they keep investing in it and increasing their ad revenue. Alongside Meta, they have a duopoly (monopoly?) on that market for now so they are just milking it for all its worth.

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.

291 titles. Not great, not terrible.

Azure became interesting when it got better integrated into the Windows/AD/Office worlds. You're not having to manually integrate so much anymore.

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.

Don't forget about shoving Shorts into faces of their paying Youtube Premium users without a toggle to permanently disable it. That will definitely outcompete TikTok any day now!

If they made it possible to cast Shorts like other videos, I might actually use them. I've tapped a Short several times because it looked funny, but it wanted to start playing on my phone instead of the TV. I watch TikTok alone on my phone and YouTube with my wife on my TV, so Shorts just doesn't fit into that routine.

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.

My 2yo smashed my Oh So Smart TV with the remote and I got a spare dumb TV and plugged in Chromecast into it since everything is streams nowadays.

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.

When the original came out ir was practically magic to be able to have the TV on while hanging out with roommates or friends, and all be able to contribute to the entertainment for the night right from your phone...then it didn't improve in any meaningful way, and regressed in others over the following 8+ years.

Really sad with the state of things.

When he broke my TV I was in the store looking for a new one. I had one condition -- there had to be a sane way to write with the remote. None of the TVs had any sane way but used arrows and enter or some cursor marker for the on screen keyboard.

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.

Get a Bluetooth keyboard.

I used to maintain the Chromecast app of a decently sized streaming company for years, and oh boy. I damn near lost my sanity working on that thing. The app was broken repeatedly by silent firmware/OS updates pushed from Google, and trying to regression test updates across devices and versions was as close to hell as I've ever been.

On top of that, if you have a Pixel, the only thing it can cast to out of the box is Chromecast. Miracast (which e.g. Roku supports) - nope. Hell, they don't even do video-out over USB-C.

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

It seems like within the last two weeks they changed how Shorts and Chromecast works, where I'm at least able to cast the video.

Also they are testing 5 preroll ads now. Idk why as a premium customer I do not have the option to filter out shorts. It is really frustrating. Also I just want youtube with no ads I do not care about youtube music that is bundled with it.

I'm still annoyed at the "hover to play" that I have to disable seemingly every few days.

>something nebulously magic with AI

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.

I don’t understand why engineers in this forum argue against own interest. Too much efficiency is bad for workers, you want successful companies like Google and Apple invest in projects which might have a high chance of failure. At a minimum it will give people jobs and builds expertise.

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

This is a false dichotomy. I think most would prefer a third path where Google invests in projects it actually believes in and commits to for longer than the lifespan of a fruit fly.

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

Yeah, exactly. If you care about keeping people employed, what better way than to keep alive products and services that aren't the top in their field, but rather #3, #4, or #5? Even if the Google offering isn't super popular, as long as it's good enough, it'll have users, and it'll help keep users interested in other Google offerings and the Google ecosystem as a whole.

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.)

Stadia was a bad idea, it had very little adoption, and Google was right to kill it.

I know for me I'd be very demoralized and not stay at a company very long if everything I built kept getting shut down.

Yeah, it must be soul destroying to constantly build stuff that gets discarded without even giving it a serious chance.

Stadia wasn’t something that excites engineers in the first place. It only looks genius if you’ve not had prior experiences and assessment of issues with remote gaming.

I literally know someone who went to work on the Stadia team 2 years before it was announced because working on it was essentially his dream job. It doesn't have to be "genius" to be interesting to work on with the scale and backing of Google behind it.

And I know somebody who had been a 15 year Google employee who could choose to work any team decided to make it his new priority. This is somebody who could have worked on any platforms project they wanted. They left Google a couple years after it launched, I imagine probably at seeing their hard work go nowhere.

"scale and backing?"

The just ended it because it didn't scale.

Not the same sort of scale. The technology part of it scaled fine, probably because Google invested the money and dev hours into making sure it did. The product itself didn't scale for a host of other reasons, but none of them had to do with the reasons it might be interesting to develop around it.

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 wonder if even Google suffers from the premature scaling architecture astronaut problem? Perhaps if they’d spent more of their resources getting to 1000 and 10,000 games, before doing the engineering to support a billion users, they may have actually needed that scalability (and might have become at least a small cash cow alongside the surveillance capitalism asserting golden goose)?

I used it for a little bit, for gaming on my phone. I was genuinely astonished at how responsive it was.

> Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are?

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.

He structured it as Alphabet. As in 26 different companies.

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.

Couldn't agree more. The problem in Google started as soon as it went public. Then "Don't be evil" went through the window and it's all a short-sighted vision driven by making as much money as possible for investors and pay dividends.

This post feels like it's been written by GPT-3. I'm reading a lot of keywords and hot takes and not much analysis.

> 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

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.

> like everybody here who dreams of a google job

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

300k/yr with amazing perks for sitting on your ass. Lots of people think that's the best thing evar. Unless you care about, say, building novel things people actually use. Then it's a dystopian nightmare.

I mean if Google's goal is to maintain it's monopolistic lead in the search/ad space, that means gobbling up as many of the really talented devs as possible to keep them out of the hands of would-be competitors. Really talented devs want to work on new and exciting shit, so google continuously mints projects and kills them off when they are no longer shiny and new. Seems to me things are working as intended.

His goal is to keep the peace. And he's good at it. It's a little bit "game of thrones" in there.

You you’re saying he’s Tyrion Lannister? That sorta checks out…

Lol no no, I think Tyrion drinks a lot more than Sundar... and Sundar certainly doesn't seem like the womanizing type either. But hey, I didn't know him personally so who knows.

Maybe closer to Varys..?

imo, your eye is on the wrong ball. Google died when it's founders moved their attention to Alphabet. Google has moved from a bespoke kitchen to the catering kitchen that keeps the lights on for Alphabet while they build a strategy.

But how much "alphabet" is there still left, other than Google and YouTube? In hindsight it almost seems as if alphabet was deliberately set up as a pasture for the various doomed "moonshots" to die more quietly, with less impact on the main brand.

What moonshot--at least that is known about--is possibly transformative at Alphabet/Google scale? Waymo seems increasingly unlikely both in terms of time-scale and differentiation in a crowded field. And what else is there?

Waymo is very far ahead of the competition. It may be hard to compare given all the fly-by-night competitors but it has had many more years in development and the result is more dependable.

Loon could have made them the ISP for the developing world.

The founders retired in all but name only almost 10 years ago.

It's really hard to diversify away from a major cash cow product. Everyone else's success gets compared to the cash machine. Ask for another 30 engineers to work on a product with only 100 MM profit, why aren't you more successful?

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.

> Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are?

His primary job is to keep the FTC at bay.

His goal was to expand Google into china [1], then he folded on that due to employee pushback. Similarly with all the other mini dramas (working with the military, "AI principles").

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...

On the other hand, Google still just prints money with ads. Everything else is just a talent retention program.

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

The fact that it can't keep doing it forever, and its investors expect that if Google is going to keep expanding its headcount and keep spending tons of money that it will produce results.

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.

Here's my opinion on the role of CEOs these days, for companies that are decently strong and have stable growth.

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.

Nonsense. Apple and Microsoft are both objectively thriving under their respective current CEOs, who have both made some tough calls and been responsible for important new products, and both now have sufficient road behind them that we can believe in their ability to call shots for the long term to at least some degree. These companies are not just treading water.

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.

Zuck's track record of acquisitions is genuinely impressive though. Buying both WhatsApp and Instagram was widely panned at the time, but in retrospect both were great moves, and Facebook also deserves credit for letting/making both prosper.

Zuck is still there because he didn’t give up control. These companies weren’t wrested from their founders grasp, they were sold

"More wood, fewer arrows" has destroyed the longevity of Google as a company for anything beyond search/ads

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

Just terrible strategic thinking.

I’m not sure what bets they should have better shielded. Probably social generally but that seems so counter their DNA.

It seems likely here that since revenue numbers keep going up, they don't really realize that there is a problem. Why rock the boat and change anything with the culture when you can just keep collecting your bonuses?

This is the way Google works, it's their operating model. Big fanfare when they launch things so the muggles continue to believe that 'Google' is still relevant, and then quiet shuttering when the product either doesn't add to their ad revenue, their overarching interest, or it was never even meant to be a success in the first place.

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.

The law of large numbers. Nothing other than the core ad products makes a difference to Google. The next biggest "successes" are just things that build a moat around the core ad product.

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.

The goal of a CEO is to bring value to shareholders. There's a lot of wiggle room as long as you're doing that. I doubt Stadia was more then a proving ground for a lot of related product verticals, and Stadia's legacy will continue to drive value to those.

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

> He doesn't seem to be solving existing issues related to culture and incentives.

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

The majority of Google's income is still ads. Stadia and all others are pennies in comparison. These are little pet projects for insane millionaires, not products that solve real problems. That's what happens when you get too big, you lose focus of what's important.

Has there been a lack of direction, mission and purpose since Eric Schmidt stepped down as CEO?

>Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are?

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.

It's not only fighting them, but also forming them: The "right" regulation can become an entry barrier for competitors.

> Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? That's a genuine question

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.

When was there last big win?

Android and Chrome... so it looks like around 2008-2009?