So many engineers but still shut down products every few weeks.
EDIT: Still FURIOUS they shut down Stadia. I hate you Google
You're the first person I have ever seen with this opinion. I want to know, back when this was released, what made you ignore all the people that said that the product would be a failure and that Google would shut it down quickly? I always saw that as the majority opinion.
Obviously I was wrong and have been actively ending my own usage of Google products because I have been burned for the last time.
Ultimately, they couldn't convince enough people to sign up, but that's a whole different story about product strategy.
There's no way in hell it's getting shut down when it's that critical to business operations.
This is just not remotely plausible of a shutdown target. It also dates back to 2006. I'm struggling to think of even five Google products I would name as being less likely to be shut down.
This is unlike, say, Reader, which was canceled with no replacement to this day.
But to give some credit where it's due: reimbursing all Stadia purchases is a very customer friendly way to shut it down
I'm I dumb for assuming that google must use GCP internally? Therefore making it pretty much immune from being shut down. I guess they could go full internal tool with it?
That seems less improbable than even a lot of other cuts. A science experiment that doesn't have a clear path to an assistive driving revenue opportunity much less something transformational? I'd probably make an argument that they have to keep plugging on GCP but could cut Waymo loose without much collateral damage.
I do get that there is a lot of extra complexity that goes from a startup solving a hard technical problems to a pre-IPO company that is solving a bunch of business problems as well as technical challenges. Yes companies gain less efficiency per hire as they grow, and many do grow for growth's sake these days, but it does make sense that some companies need a thousand people to do what a startup thinks they can do with 10.
But it certainly doesn't seem like Google is making great use of doubling headcount. On a product by product basis, at least for me, it feels like most Google products are worse than they were pre-pandemic.
If they had shown revenue growth highly correlated with headcount I would see strong evidence that my view is wrong, but the facts don't seem to point that way.
When you hire large number of engineers, you need to hire engineers to support those engineers. Then you need to hire people to support the engineers that are supporting the engineers and so on...
Basically as companies revenues grow, every cost center gets to put in a request to grow headcount. If you don't your colleagues will and you'll be looked down upon. then you take on shiny new non-essential projects and find ways to justify it. Launch it get promoted and leave. The next person comes in- decides it is crap- shuts it down and starts their own new project to reinvent the same thing . Org politics.
I dunno, MSFT products seem to have only gotten worse since 1995 - and their profits are doing just fine.
The quality of a product and its ability to make money seem to almost be inversely proportional.
In Google's case - what matters is - they're doubling headcount (largest expense) and revenue has barely budged.
It'd be nice if the products got better - but all they should really care about is if they're making more money.
What about the alienation of staff and users considered part of 'legacy' demographics?
whereas revenue went 65,118,000,000 to 69,092,000,000. Somewhat less of an increase.
You'd assume R&D is mostly fully loaded costs of engineers, but I suppose someone who really knows the financials could tell us for sure.
If it's capitalized, then it's not R&D, which is all expensed.
Operating costs ballooned $7.9bn, nearly 18%. That's nuts.