This is completely wrong. Their style was deliberate indifference about aesthetics, but their products (maps, search and gmail in particular) were absolute masterpieces of product design when first launched.
Edit to add: even Chrome itself was like this.
Gmail was not actually a particularly elegant product design, it offered an escape from spam and manually managing your mailbox storage. Back then, if you used a free email experience, you were bombarded with banner ads, had 100MB of storage, and 99% of that was eaten by the spam sent directly to your inbox. Features are not product design.
Chrome might be a good exception, though. I still get the sense that it was primarily driven by inspired engineers. The reason for Chrome's success is probably not it's innovative design (it was it's performance), but it certainly was an incredible advance.
Mapquest would beg to differ. To me, the interface was the killer feature for Maps. The data and trip planning functionality existed already on the web (as my print outs of driving routes in the late 90s can attest to). But being able to just scroll around a new city was amazing. Every other site required clicking through every North or West button with a round trip to the server.
It wasn’t until later that the satellite data and street view data became the next killer feature.
Well, let's hit up Yahoo! Maps to find the dopest route
I prefer MapQuest; (that's a good one, too)
Google Maps is the best; (true that;) double true!
So yeah, there was a third competitor-
https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2005/12/27/saturday-night-...
It popularized instant search, tagging and threading to such a degree you have clearly forgotten how elegant it was!
Product design is what something does, how it is structured and how it behaves to user interaction, _and_ how it appears, not just one of them. GMail was almost to email what the iPhone was to smartphones.
This is product design.
SUPERCUT Every "And loving it" in Get Smart (1965-1970)
If I remember my thoughts back when Gmail was launched I was clearly awestruck. Gmail showed what was possible to do if one had fast internet connection. All those little interactions enabled through ajax! I think it was the first time, atleast for me, a product was as good as a desktop app w.r.t interactions and usability.
For comparison, with Yahoo mail one had to hit compose button and wait for a few seconds for compose window to open up. With Gmail it was extremely nifty and nearly instantaneous because I think it was done clientside and Ajax.
[1] https://www.labnol.org/software/chrome-with-adobe-reader/201...
Chrome was dramatically faster than anything else (thanks to v8 which was a total revolution for js engines) and each tab crashed separately, with far better security than other browsers of the time. On Windows (and initially it was only on Windows) this was a big deal and so it displaced a huge proportion of the tech aware userbase very fast, permeating out from there.
The billboards were a thing but not what drove initial adoption to critical mass.
It was remarkable how quickly Chrome spread among the employees. Nothing to do with advertising -- just that it was so much faster and the whole app never crashed.
Whenever you heard someone cursing because their browser had crashed and they lost their tabs and immediate work, someone in the next cubicle would go, "why aren't you using Chrome?"
It really was that simple. It was all word of mouth.
They were then screamed at for being insufficiently "complacent" when they tried to fix those issues by changing the extension model.
All the while, the shift in the company began to dull the sharp edge that was their core competency: engineering driven products.
Calling attention to this specifically, because do we want a single 'Google' to have foothold on every ground? Innovation needs a healthy dose of competition, after all.
Wow. Incredibly that there are people who think this. So only an engineer with no product team input can build products with a soul? Really?
Furthermore, even if that were true, companies (especially ones like Google) look for project and product managers that have CS degrees or other STEM degrees.
Personally, my frustration with project/product managers often comes from (ironically) underspecified requirements and highly unrealistic deadlines. Neither of those I consider a failing of their education or skills, but a failing of the company's reward structures.
> Under the engineering first strategy, Google became the juggernaut it is today, with products like Gmail, Maps, Street View and of course Search.
Just by definition search predated any culture or strategy at Google since its launch came before any hiring or incorporation. Certainly it was refined and maintained well for years but I’d argue this is an exception to the culture as refining and maintaining things well are not regarded as Google’s strong suit. Search dominates revenue in a big way so they had to do that for search and made it happen.
And a second bit of pushback - Maps, Gmail and Street View were certainly best in category from a user standpoint but my impression is they are a rounding error when it comes to revenue (actual businesses success) compared with search. Maybe this has changed. But assuming it hasn’t, a common critique of engineering led orgs is that they tend to stop at technical sweetness and fail to fully follow through on delivering great businesses and all that entails (revenue, support, incremental evolution, maintenance). That shoe seems to fit.
Let me explain this a little more in concrete terms: are you passionate about what you do? Do you have pride in your work and want to create great, valuable (to users of course, but also profitable) software? You will probably dislike working at Google.
First, if you’re an engineer, you’re basically not going to be empowered to make important product-level decisions on anything people care about until you’re a well-established L6 or L7. Even then, you’re more of a voice in the room with the Product Managers and Directors/VPs (you might have 5 directors+ VPs who also are on your product) and business stakeholders for the little chunk you’re actually responsible for. Google is extremely hierarchical, not just in terms or a deep org chart but in empowerment, for a variety of reasons I won’t get into. Nobody will listen to you or care until you’re at this point, your ideas and suggestion will be treated like a child at the Thanksgiving kid’s table asking for a glass of wine.
Ok, so become a product manager. Well then you have to deal with the fact that you are amazingly constrained by things outside of your control, like the headcount and capacity of engineering teams who have to handle a bunch of internal migration bullshit, want to refactor or rewrite something for no business reason except because it’s easy coasting material, and handle requests from a dozen other PMs. You have to deal with a ton of bureaucracy and process bullshit just to get your product ideas turned into reality. You have no idea what’s easy and what’s hard because engineering at Google is different than at other companies (the “impossible” is just hard, but the “easy” is also hard). You’re not empowered to step in and code and design even if you can and want to. You are gonna spend a lot of time writing SQL and docs nobody cares about and still need to make it to a high “level” to matter.
Well what happens if you do get to that high level? Then you’re in charge of a million and one things and mostly doing performance management. You don’t have time to care about a product - you are the gatekeeper of it and can have strong opinions, but you simply do not have time to be passionate about it, because you have too many responsibilities and are too far removed from the actual work/product/users. You still have a deep management chain above you to contend with, you play political games for HC and need short term wins to secure it, you’re probably in a different stage of your life where your passion project is either career (not product) and/or family.
It’s still a great place to learn, the pay and benefits are still good, you still probably get to work on something cool. But your ambitions and passion will be crushed unless you can endure a decade+ of being a ~nobody. If you truly want to build something amazing you’ll have to go elsewhere.
Much of what you wrote here seems familiar with those who work for LARGE orgs or companies. The individual simply cannot have much influence when your org is > 10000 people.
I suspect the thing unique to Google is how (or so I hear) the technology stack is more or less a monolith, always designed to scale, and you can't (or are discouraged to) start "small" projects, so you're basically stuck with the huge orgs and don't have a choice to run/join a relatively small and isolated operation where you have more control.
Unfortunately, the approach doesn't work for all product categories. Product design, usability, simplicity, and sheer style were not the forte of the Google of old. As a result they saw themselves fall behind Facebook in social, failed to stop the tsunami that was iPhone, could not compete with Amazon in e-commerce, and ceded heavy ground to it in home automation.
But Google still wanted these things and more, as all exceptionalist mega corps do. So they did the unthinkable. They handed the decision making back to the same product and business overlords that they had once shunned.
As someone who has one foot in engineering and one foot in product design, I know how important product experts are in producing well loved, intuitive, and incredibly successful experiences at scale. However, you can feel it in the experience as a user when the product team is given the keys to the kingdom and left unchallenged. The product becomes soulless and vapid. It loses it's charm and abandons it's loyal customers when the wind shifts even slightly.
I'm not placing the blame solely on Google's product apparatus, quite the opposite. It's clear that it's engineering apparatus has become so careless, so content with the status quo and the cushy paycheck and perks, that they don't push back anymore. Whenever you use a Google product as a software engineer and you wonder how it's possible that its blatantly obvious failures made it one day in the dev process of a company that apparently prides itself on hiring only the best engineering talent, know that it's not that these people aren't smart, it's that they do not care.
It seems likely that Google incentivizes it's engineers not to care. The engineers get the crazy salaries and all the perks, they don't get to decide things. If you want to decide things, get promoted into product. You don't want to do product? You actually enjoy writing code? Then don't complain when your opinions and concerns are deferred. You could have switched to the business side, made less money, and hated your job.
Google used to be an amazing engineering company because it promoted an atmosphere where engineers wanted to care about what they were doing. They have been unable to sustain that dynamic as they tried to make the company good at things that were not engineering, and as a result, the engineers just don't care enough to save it anymore and you can feel it every time you use a Google product.