Re:Software Engineering at Google
by water-your-self on Monday August 14, 2023 @10:54AM
(#37121741)
Why should scaling matter? I thought google tried to solve problems regardless of scale? Or maybe youre commending google for its ability to more effectively commodify datacenter labour in the past decade?
Re:Software Engineering at Google
by londons_explore on Monday August 14, 2023 @11:25AM
(#37122128)
'free' ad supported products usually have engineering costs greater than compute costs, even up to billions of users.
Compute scales with the userbase. Engineering scales with the product featureset. That means a small userbase in general cannot support much engineering and therefore cannot have much complexity/features if it wants to be profitable.
That in turn puts big companies at a massive advantage. And in fact we see that - the vast majority of my time using the web is spent on big products (google, youtube, reddit, twitter), and only a small fraction on small sites (perhaps HN being the one exception here). Those big products won the battle for my attention.
I don't think we can expect businesses to solve problems without any business upside. I don't hold that against any company. That means needing some amount of scale in order to justify the work and opportunity cost.
I would argue that taking a product from 100m to 1bn users is a whole new level of success, and that has been done multiple times in the last decade.