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.
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'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.