Not to mention, Google has spent a decade using their defacto monopoly as leverage and optimizing for ads and clicks, often exploiting their own users in the process. The bar for better was lower than it should have been, and the market is hungry for an alternative. Google has some real challenging times ahead.

I've met a lot of people who work at GOOG, and yet none of them could explain to me how the thing they work on makes any money for GOOG. In fact, most went out of their way to volunteer to me that they only work on R&D/moonshot/non-revenue generating activities.. proudly. Quite a large subset of them showed almost an embarrassment of the single revenue stream (tricking old people to click on Pharma ads instead of genuine search results), and actively distanced themselves from it as some sort of moral shield.

It is amazing to have that many smart people working for that long and not bother to find some other ways to make money. Just complete lack of focus.

memorize leetcode, regurgitate memorize system design, regurgitate.

There are no room for creatives with that process.

Wall Street tech DGAF about that though.

Wall Street, OTOH, is about making money. They might also not fully know how to hire the people they want, but it seemed they valued scrappy more, especially when it leads to real results (which are maybe easier for them to see, when it can be pretty directly quantified in dollars).

(Though the Wall Street recruiter I talked with, back 2 decades ago, when I first wanted to work for Google, did ask about my GPA. So I told them I had a perfect GPA, like most of the other students in that grad program, and that that wouldn't tell them much about someone's potential. Then I told them I didn't really want to work on Wall Street, which had a bad reputation from the preceding decade, though the $400K to start was maybe 10x what I was making at the time. Then Google gave me some asinine brogrammer student nonsense in the interview, before that was a thing, and before wannabe companies mimicked it. So I ended up going to neither company.)

I think there's a reason the average physicist is much brighter than your average Google software engineer, but gets paid about a fifth as much.

SV has a strong tilt towards pretending whatever BS get rich quick scheme of ad / VC supported is saving the world. It's weird watching it from the outside and imagine the other path not taken.

In 20 years we may look back at social media, smartphones, the whole PII data based economy with its recommendation algo rage loops as our generations Big Tobacco.

Oh, they definitely tried, and still try. The problem is the same as many large companies: they want a new trick as lucrative as the old trick, and there aren't any.

But in general you're right.

Most real enterprise still happens on Office, and lots of consumers happy give Apple $100/year for iCloud.

Cloud services - aren't they basically 3rd behind AMZN/MSFT now, by A LOT? They are basically competing for 3rd against IBM/Oracle/etc, and some quarters they are #4.

"Someone, somewhere, might want to do this, so let's put it in" is obviously what's happened with Office for 30 years now.

"Simple things should be simple. Complicated things should be possible."

turns into

"Everything is possible, but nothing is simple."

There seems to be a theme that the user should learn to use the software via experimentation. To me, that too often results in too much clicking, and when finally I do see I take notes, i.e., document some of the software.

Maybe like Zuck they are / were a one trick pony. Perhaps becoming a multi billionaire is not proof that you can invent and monetize something anytime anywhere in any industry on demand.

Apple / Microsoft just take what they are good at to move into adjacent spaces in consumer/office tech. Apple has made some failed forays into corporate while Microsoft has not done terrible well in consumer other than gaming and maintaining their existing Windows base.

I wonder if Apple leaks about stupid stuff we never see like their car and their AR is just to put other less well disciplined firms onto the trail of expensive dead ends.

If you think of automakers and their "concept car" approach in which they present beautiful improbable vehicles they never ship.. Apple seems to LEAK "concept cars" they never ever preview, while Google goes all-in trying to actually ship a "concept car" no one wants, like Google glass.

Apple is the result of judicious application of the word "no". Google looks like a lot of "yes" with weak knees that quickly turn into "no".

I still don't understand what Google's strategy is in almost any space - messaging, social, home automation, audio, AR/VR, other than "yes... actually, no".

> I still don't understand what Google's strategy is in almost any space

Not just you. The "strategy" is "ambitious product manager creates a new 'vision', sells it, gets promoted, then quickly moves on to something else."

I kind of don't agree there. Apple really only officially announces, demos and talks about products they have to sell you right now.

About the only vaporware I can remember from them in the last decade was that stupid dual charging puck thing they just quietly walked back from.

The only released & quietly abandoned product in recent memory would be the iPod Hi-Fi dock boombox thing.

So when Apple announces something I'm 99% confident it will make it will be released within days/weeks. And when it is released, I'm 95% confident the product line will exist in 5 years.

Google, for me, those numbers are like 70% & 20%. Which is why I rarely waste my time to look at anything new from them. Odds are its either not something I need, or if I need it.. won't be long for this world, so why bother.

I think they clearly feed rumors to journalists about stuff that is further back in the development pipeline, to the point that the conspirational minded might think its to throw off competitor from the right course..

ChatGPT/AI is overhyped, just like full self driving was five years ago. It can do stuff, write articles, code etc. until people realize that what it spits out is useful stuff mixed with made up gibberish.

Obviously GSuite does far more than iCloud, and yet..

So far the code I've seen is the same level of word salad as its text writing. I gave it some really easy ones that it responded back with 1-liners that would produce runtime errors, let alone actually produce correct result. I find it interesting since its really just synethesizing new content from existing content it has trained on, yet it produced simple one-liners that were wrong.

Lorem ipsum.

Bell Labs produced a lot of interesting stuff with their monopoly profits. Apple R&D seems to come up with lots of interesting new product lines.

GOOG bought Nest and managed to become an also-ran in home automation.

GOOG other bets might produce something with Waymo, but when.. all this autonomous car stuff is continuously 5 more years, every year. That's about the closest they've come so far, no?

Not doing this has the potential for Google to miss the next technology trend, potentially crashing Google completely.

That being said, I completely agree with you on a different note. "Professional" spectator sports in schools and higher education. In my opinion, it should be completely banned. Every single such initiative distracts from a school's or university's core mission. It does not matter if each dollar they spent on it makes back ninety cents or two dollars. It is still a distraction that everyone has to do because everyone else is doing it.

I think Walter is right that spin-off is the right strategy, and (not very well known) Xerox actually did do that with a lot of PARC innovations. Just not with computers.

[1] https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight

What remains is shopping, but Amazon and even Instagram are better at that.

Lastly, Google has no audience for creating awareness like fb / ig / tt

So they have a monopoly product that is something like a 2 sided market (advertisers & search users) where both sides hate using it..

I don't know how many Google searches I did yesterday, but it feels like a lot.

It does has problems with certain queries beyond a certain depth, which I also get frustrated with, but I can go from having forgotten calculus to integrating by parts with the help of Google.

You literally can't go to page 2 anymore

It ignores what you ask and answers what it think/wants you see.

Previously you controlled search now you are lucky if a site is even in the index.

I mean, personally I think this is very likely true. My feeling is that it's the web itself which has gotten demonstrably worse. Diagnosing the reasons for that is a more interesting problem.

The only score that matters is the one in real life, in the game you choose to play. If it gets harder, you need to get better.

I think it’s a little tricky separating the two since Google has so much influence over the web. A lot of the parts of the web which have gotten worse were due to decisions they made to do things like cut ad revenue for normal organic content, declining to punish or even rewarding blackhat SEO, pushing AMP, shuttering Reader, etc. That sold a lot of ads at the time and people said it was needed to counter Facebook but it’s left them more vulnerable now.

Google's unwillingness to show any results older than Taylor Swift' last breakup song made me switch to DuckDuckGo.

It was a bit rough at first, but in time Duck turned out to be just as good as Google, and sometimes better for the sorts of thing I search for.

Then, about four or five months ago, something happened to Duck, and it's gotten significantly worse. Short lists of results. More results that are off-topic than on. In the last couple of weeks, for me it's as bad as Google was before.

I'll stick with Duck because it's not trying to harvest every morsel of my life to make a quick buck. But I wonder if anyone else has noticed a very quick and very significant change in quality with their DuckDuckGo results?

Anecdotally it seems they do more fuzzy match and adhere less to exact matches even when keywords or phrases are quoted.

It's been frustrating to see specificity of results decline.

Reddit is chipping away the Q&A search, but time will tell if it has a similar downfall to quora/yahoo-answers.

I’ve seen TikTok lead in educational search, cooking, gardening etc. TikTok could potentially overtake YouTube all together over next 5-10years.

Google maps isn’t as far ahead as it once was. Apple caught up.

Then you got Microsoft whos teams and office suite whicj caught up and surpassed google’s office products (for what enterprise buyers care on)

Leaving what. GCP as their only disruptive marketshare product area? And GCP while high margin isn’t nearly as high margin as their ads businesses. For GCP to be profitable they need to severely cut wages for cost center roles. A PgM in GCP shouldn’t be making 300k when AWS and Azure spend just 200k on the same role.

Finally you’ve got the money pit of waymo, X, and the bets. All of them have neither a real path to profitability nor compelling return on investment.

Id say the investors are right. Google is the new IBM, return profits to shareholders so they can invest them in more fruitful endeavors.

The past couple of years Google maps has gotten more glitchy, given worse directions, and most recently started showing extreme lag. Maps in CarPlay started falling behind real-time. First by a few seconds, then by minutes. Wasn’t sure if it was the car head unit, phone, reception or what.

Out of desperation I tried Apple Maps. Not only did it work flawlessly, but its driving prompts are greatly superior to Google maps.

I could go on about YouTube having broken bulk-publishing of videos (this for my son’s football and basketball games chopped up into indivuap videos).

It’s all horrible now.

Not just that, but it's directly monetizable because if the user journey starts with a Google Maps search query, e.g. "lunch near me", those first few results are worth real money.

Apple Maps will get better at reviews as more people switch over.

And just like above said, google is optimizing for ad revenue not user experience. This opens the door for a competitor to swoop in and offer better results.

Thought some people might want that.

Have the user interface and pure/applied math worked out and documented and code designed, written, and running.

As for what googlers told you, keep in mind that they are pretty loyal - they have that Lamda chatbot as if an employee perk, and only one of them leaked a sample.

$25B is also less than what Amazon now makes on ads, which should especially given Google pause. Consider that Amazon started as simply an online retailer and has successfully spun up other business lines that now account for 50% of revenue across online fulfillment / 3rd party services, physical stores, subscription services, ads, cloud, etc. 4 of these are bigger than "google other".

Sure, big absolute number, but trivial as a percent of a FAANG scale company revenue.

Apple & Amazon have no one product category making up more than 50% of revenue. Meaning they can take some serious pain on any product category and it not be fatal. This also means that they have staff distributed across a wide variety of product lines.

Google has 7x the staff they did in 2009. This seems like a precarious position to be in during this part of the cycle. I can imagine them coming under serious scrutiny to allocate resources appropriately if say, only 20% of staff are responsible for 90% of revenue. If you can't grow the top line, you can certainly grow the bottom line..

If we're comparing Amazon and Google you almost have to compare AWS to Google search since AWS is driving a huge part of their profits.

Google did more than search: gmail, youtube, docs, cloud and that’s just stuff on top of my mind.

Cloud they have somehow managed to slip so badly as to be competing for 3rd against IBM & Oracle.

Docs/gmail is rounding error because its feature poor and not monetized well.

If I want to invest in an X or Y, then I will do that. In fact I am well diversified into hundreds of other companies anyway. But I don't want my ad distribution investment clouded or diluted with cars, AI, balloons, or anything else.

Let a business be good at one thing (possibly closely adjacent things), and live as long as that's a valuable contribution to society, then close the doors.

It's the execs that want to diversify into other areas, because this is what keeps them in the game longer. If the business they are currently running winds down, that may not be good for them.

I think Google's founders offered their take years ago...no one listened then.

The web is chock full of incorrect stuff, both unintentional and deliberately deceptive.

It's more like "First one on the list? Well, that one's right -- unless it disagrees with my personal biases, then maybe I'll look for another one."

In short, I see a need for us all to inherently distrust anything single thing we read -- everything needs to be verified and checked out across multiple (hopefully diverse) sources of information before it can be considered "truth" in any sense. I do develop trust in certain sources over time, but meta-sources like an AI or a search engine don't get this treatment because their scope is too broad. As an example, I tend to trust folks like Fabien Sanglard[0], Eric Goldman[1], and Adam Langley[2].

Example: over on the Morrowind subreddit a few years ago, an artist had been painting landscapes of the game "Morrowind" (oil on canvas, IIRC), and when he went to print them as posters to sell to fans, the site he wanted to print them on warned him that printing his own paintings of vistas from Morrowind was copyright infringement (it's not). He came to the Morrowind subreddit for help because he'd been actively misled.

Sites like plagiarism.org[3] confidently say false things:

> But can words and ideas really be stolen?

> According to U.S. law, the answer is yes. The expression of original ideas is considered intellectual property and is protected by copyright laws, just like original inventions. Almost all forms of expression fall under copyright protection as long as they are recorded in some way (such as a book or a computer file).

This is confidently incorrect in a couple of different ways. It might seem like incompetence (and may be), but it's worth noting that plagiarism.org is actually run by TurnItIn, which profits from people not really understanding how copyright works.

Similar example (I tend to look into copyright, trademark, and patent issues a lot): I got into a discussion with another HNer about IP law, and they cited an article written by an actual lawyer[4] on a site called "The National Law Review" that's simply wrong about IP law to defend their position. It's tragic, because we've built this sort of cargo cult around "citation, please?" but then all-too-often don't keep our critical thinking skills engaged as we evaluate the source.

This is true all over. I've read HN daily for more than 10 years. Not only does every comment need scrutiny (even if stated confidently), but most stories linked on the front page do as well. It's not just blog posts or opinion pieces; some scientific studies that are posted get torn apart in the comments, to enough of a degree that, after cross-checking, I tend to think the study itself is deeply flawed.

And there are numerous stories about how Google's Quick Answers confidently give the wrong answer, as highlighted in 2017 by the WSJ[5].

I'm not saying accuracy doesn't matter, but I feel the "ChatGPT is confidently wrong" needs more context or comparative analysis around it before it becomes a compelling argument, since "confidently wrong" applies to search engines and humans as well. I haven't seen any in-depth studies on this, but would love to.

[0]: https://fabiensanglard.net/

[1]: https://blog.ericgoldman.org/

[2]: https://www.imperialviolet.org/

[3]: https://www.plagiarism.org/article/what-is-plagiarism

[4]: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/enforce-your-intellectu...

[5]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-featured-answers-aim-to...

The problem with "citation, please" is it only works if the person you are engaging with is acting in good faith.

If I type in "Can intellectual property rights expire if not litigated?" That web site (national law review) doesn't appear in the top 10 results. So I'd question where did they get that link?

Not so long ago I got in a debate with someone here whether muscle exercises can lead to long term increases in testosterone levels.

The person I debated with provided a link to an abstract of a study that didn't look quite right. There was no link to the actual study.

Instead of engaging with them I confirmed that, within a minute or two, I was able to locate a high quality, free to read, medical literature review on the topic.

Maybe my ability to type keywords into a search engine is superior, but instead I came to the conclusion the other poster was half assedly looking for search results to "win the argument" rather than engaging due to intellectual curiosity.

Remember how people use to criticize the newspapers? They'd say they read an article on a subject they new something about and were shocked at how bad it was. Then they'd conclude that the rest of the news was just as bad. What wasn't acknowledged was the utility of having imperfect information.

One of the early popular examples was asking ChatGPT what the downsides are of generics in TypeScript, and it cited that they're not compatible with some browsers/runtimes. It's entirely believable, but entirely wrong, and actually quite hard to confirm either way with internet searches. It's the sort of thing people would readily believe and pass around, though.

Similarly, when I was trying to concatenate video in ffmpeg, it produced convincing-seeming command lines, almost none of which worked properly, but almost all of which used actual ffmpeg command line parameters with appropriate-seeming formats and names. I wasted significant time on debugging those before realising quite how wrong ChatGPT was.

That's an interesting take, and one I haven't heard before. My main squeamishness with bad journalism, and even worse, with chat gpt, is not truth-content, but rather sourcing.

If you know the source, you can account for its biases, or, your reader can do so. As such, well-sourced quotes of complete nonsense tend towards adding to the sum total of truth in the world, because it was true that somebody said it, and their perspective is part of what's interesting in whatever event you're discussing.

If you scrub the data of its sources (like journalists do routinely, and chatgpt does by necessity) important information is lost.

Any bias is everyone’s bias. Not saying it doesn’t happy at all today . But wow, scary

We will look at these things as devine correctness, and eventually forget their human construction entirely.

As long as ChatGPT assists me more than it harms me it is quite powerful simply due to the number of different things it can assist me with, and the raw scalability.

It’s a common challenge and similar to why Amazon was so successful at disrupting retail. Retailers could have competed, but not without huge hits to profitability which shareholders would never get behind.

Actually the numbers are quite impressive[0]:

"The global G suite business software market is expected to grow from US$ 2,224.76 million in 2021 to US$ 3,903.72 million by 2028; it is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 8.4% during 2021-2028. G suite provides professional services with productivity tools to stay connected and organized to meet the clients' needs.4 Apr 2022"

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/worldwide-g-suite-business-so...

But that doesn't change the reality that ad revenue related to search is the lion's share of Google's revenue. That makes them exceptionally vulnerable for a company of their size and breadth. And in that vulnerable area, anecdotally at least, the search quality feels as if it has regressed over the years.

Google was once the gateway to the web. Now they are the gatekeepers of the web.

Maybe I'm just nostalgic. Maybe things were never as good as I imagined they were. Maybe my expectations are unfair. But the Google of my memory was innovative. It delighted. That feels far removed from the Google of today.

You're not. It was so much better up until 2018. Now it only indexing spam blogs And ai generated contents? Search quality is so bad today that duckduckgo is performing actually better in many cases, especially software development related queries

the fact that this is a thing just makes me sad

It's a crowded competitive market. The content has always been the easiest part.

It happens in sports, too - a new coach is hired, and they get kicked out after a year, because the team didn't show much progress. But often it just time to work on fundamentals, build something new under the hood, maybe introduce changes in training/org structure/hiring, and only once it's done the progress can be visible. But fans/investors/owners always want it NOW.

What are examples of large companies that said "if we want to be on top in 10 years, we have to undergo a transformation, and stop thinking of short-term gains"? Meta is the only example that comes to my mind (though I believe their strategy won't really work, so not the best example).

Maybe I'm overly cynical, but don't they hold > 50% of voting shares? It may just be C-suite CYA action: by ensuring Brin & Page's buy-in on counter-ChatGPT strategy this early, who would blame the current CEO if it doesn't pan out? It won't be "Sundar Pichai's plan" that's at fault

20% Time is a myth and always was. Yes, occasionally someone would talk about "their 20% time" but it was rare, and usually just meant "spending a few hours on something else." Admittedly, once in a while someone really did spend 20% of their time on something else, and management was not allowed to complain.

Once, in about 2006-07, I was at a table with about 8 software engineers and asked for a show of hands, "How many have a 20% project?" There was one hand.

What it WAS useful for was checking out a project you might want to transfer to.

When I was in my 20s all my friends (young single kid less, so plenty of free time) would often TALK about wanting to do a project but few ever did.

I wouldn’t be surprised if for most people the marginal sense of accomplishment and meaning is just higher by working on their day job (which is already cush) than trying to hack a random idea together.

There was actually a 20% marketplace page, where projects seeking 20%-ers would advertise. It wasn't necessary to have an idea yourself.

Also a lot of genuinely interesting projects had managers with no idea how they could use a 20%-er. Especially if they didn't really believe the person was reliable.

Being evil has a lot of overhead where you have to invest significant time into researching grey areas to exploit and then crafting your product or service not step over the line. Then it falls apart when you get to Europe and they are happy to call you on being evil and fine you billions of euros for doing evil things.

Google should go back to not being evil, that worked a lot better for them, and just focus on making cutting edge products.

It would also be great if they answered the phone on occasion, and did more to listen to their users. Community support is an obvious cop-out, and nobody wants be dismissed without warning or explanation when it involves something they care about.

[0] Assuming your definition of "evil" includes "don't answer support calls to save a buck".

I'm not sure 20%-time is a better strategy. At least it was not proven yet. For starters, which successful products were initially Google employees' 20% projects? Google Search was certainly not. Google Search Ads was not per the book In the Plex. The product went through multiple iterations, and a math whiz from u of waterloo conceived the idea of using second-price auction system. Google Maps was not, per the book Never Lost Again. It was developed by the Lars project initially at Where 2. GSuite was not. It was from the startup Writely. Google Adsense was not. I was from DoubleClick. Google Chrome was not. It was a strategic product that multiple people drove, including the current Google CEO. Google's self-driving car was not. Page personally drove the project by working with leaders like Thrun.

On the other hand, breakthroughs like ChatGPT can't be from a 20% project. It requires full-time dedication of multiple world-class researchers and engineers to develop a series of models, to set up a massive infrastructure for training and data processing, to implement an efficient process for human input, and to invest many millions of dollars to buy GPU time and crawler time.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/4/20994361/google-alphabet-...

It’s not that at all.

Given that Larry + Sergey still control Google (>50% shareholder votes), seem prudent to meet with who controls the company to debrief them on current events & action plan.

As owners, they can provide cover for management to put more discretionary funding into combating this threat.

I think Sundar has yet to prove himself as a great CEO, but this is good leadership.

To have this "surprise" freak-out catch them off guard? To bring in the old leadership so publicly?

His leadership has put Google's single biggest revenue stream in the cross hairs of competitors, and Sundar should have seen it coming. He's done nothing to secure Google's future or broaden the company's revenue sources.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that Google has been unable to move the needle on cloud. This despite the fact that Google had the best in the business once upon a time.

There's no innovation out of this company - only vanity projects, product cancellations, and in-fighting. Google's sparkle is decades in the rear view mirror. I'd describe them as the Walmart of computing, but even Walmart is formidable. Google is paper thin.

Microsoft's Nadella, by contrast, is a phenom. Developers (Github, VSCode), Cloud, and B2B (Office, LinkedIn) are kicking ass. I don't even think about their consumer-facing stuff much anymore, because the rest of their offerings are so good. Their choice to invest in OpenAI is really paying off too.

Google is fat. Fat, lethargic, and dumb. It's not somewhere worth working at until they axe the incumbent leadership. Their stock option-based comp is going to take a rough tumble, especially if they don't show a willingness to reverse course immediately.

Microsoft is going to eat Google's lunch.

Said to Tom Hagen when firing him.

First, the woke crowd deeply embedded all over Google will burn the whole place down if there is anything controversial that comes out of the AI. They have spent years slowly degrading YouTube and Google to prevent anything from showing up under an extremely broad definition of misinformation or anything that could be considered derogatory of any sensitive group. AI is like a Chernobyl of potential microaggressions and misinformation. Evidence of this fear of their own AI is that the deepmind guys said they wanted to even stop releasing research papers because they were worried about what bad people would do with AI research.

Second, the innovators dilemma. How are they going to monetize AI and get people to click on ads?

They need Larry, currently hiding out in Fiji, and Sergei, playing around in retirement, to come back and do the work of changing the culture to actually allow these two disruptive changes.

Google is afraid that ads driven business models might get dislodged for "give me a service and I will pay you money for that" model. That will be a nail in the coffin. Imagine someone brings a marginally better conversational search engine with a low enough subscription price that some people migrate to use it rather than ad infested, SEO driven web results.

Also, with benefit of hindsight, Microsoft seems to be planning to attack Google from the flanks.. competition on a different business model than a better ad driven engine.

Sundar isn't exceptionally promising is spot on. We have so many cases of small business people being locked out of their accounts etc. They seemed to have preferred being a cool engineering company, not a B2B product company that other businesses can trust.

It is probably incorrect question to ask, but do some Google employees anonymously feel that lot of culture wars waged within company (Damore episode, the fights of ethics AI team with leadership) have caused the company to loose focus? I'm not disregarding moralities of the positions, just thinking if it was the case that many senior executives have to spend time firefighting company image in media due to these episodes.

Sergey and Larry have the majority vote so if you want to significantly change the business strategy you need to get their sign-off. It's just a business as usual.