Re:Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
by pardoned_turkey on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @02:42PM
(#38384086)
Focusing on the user is easy when you have little to lose. When you have a trillion-dollar business and 200,000 employees you're responsible for, a large part of your focus is not destroying that. And quite often, it's not easy to reconcile that with what your users might want.
I’m curious to understand your perspective:m as to why a business that focus on the user may expose to risk? Doesn’t meeting user needs equals to making users happy which in turn equals to making more money?
This is true, but I think you're mischaracterizing the required shift, and assuming this requirement is what's causing Google's problems today.
A company does eventually need to make a shift from "fast and experimental" to "responsible and steady". However this shift is entirely orthogonal from "focus on the users" becoming "focus on the bottom line and year over year growth".
Just because they're following the same path as other large tech companies have, doesn't mean this is inevitable. Instead it means they failed to learn the proper lessons. As a sibling comment points out, there was the attitude "but Google is special so that won't happen", when instead it should have been "to keep Google special, we need to work really hard on preventing that from happening".