On the other hand, someone who started in 2015 missed out on the years when Google was mostly considered to be the good guys and given the benefit of the doubt. That’s about when the culture started turning against “big tech” in general (rather than specific companies like Microsoft).
It's been interesting to see the tech and public zeitgeist shift on this.
Lesson: if you're going to be popular for killing a king, be careful how similarly the thing you place on your head starts to look to a crown.
I don't have a great answer here, but one of the things that I think caused public opinion to shift is when people started realizing how truly massive they had gotten. It's possible to avoid Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix, but by 2015 it started to become nearly impossible to avoid Google or their products.
Not sure if that's the reason public opinion shifted, I'd started to get worried about the same time I also dropped my Facebook account, so ~2011. I have successfully managed to avoid Facebook products and tracking, but I had to give up on avoiding Google, it's simply not possible unless one is willing to make extreme sacrifices. So i kinda gave up, it was starting to become digital masochism. There's a very bitter irony in me typing this on a pixel 8,but I've just accepted that there isn't any avoiding Google tracking my online life so I've just stopped caring as much as I used to.
I'm personally more of the opinion that Google has caused enough serious issues for enough people - with famously no way to get the issues resolved - that they themselves seeded or caused the negative public opinion.
Combine that with Google behaviour of clearly doing things in their own interest even when not to their user's benefit (manifest v3 proposal is a good example), and many people are like "screw Google". ;)
The browser itself might be pretty much okay, but the extensions are where the terrible code is.
Clearly there was no other way... /s
Every bad thing has to have some nominal selling point as the way to get everyone to take it.
mv3 sales pitch is to remove the ability for plugins to harm users.
It does do that, but:
1: Only by also removing plugins ability to help users
2: and giving google themselves and anyone else google approves of (entities who pay google or who have other influence like government) the very same ability to work against the user that they took away from anyone else. ie they control the entire browser let alone a plugin. They literally control what you can even see at all. You search and they choose whether something is in the results. You search with not-google and they still control if the dns resolves anything. You use other dns and they still control if the ssl is valid, which it doesn't matter if 11 techies know how to overcome all that, they still controlled what 7 billion people saw, and thus what they were allowed to even think, minus a handful of impervious super geniuses like you and me.
3: There are infinite possible ways to address the supposed problem of harmful plugins, just as there are infinite possible ways to attack any problem. Even if one decides to agree that it was necessary to do something about the problem, it was not necessary to do this about the problem.
There used to be a theory that apparently doesn't exist any more, about the appearance of impropriety. The idea goes that in any situation where someone has power over another, especially over the public at large, like a judge or a politician etc, where everyone has to simply trust that they are acting with integrity, that in fact no they don't have to simply trust. The appearance of impropriety is damning enough all by itself. Since no one can prove what someone was thinking, and the position carries enough responsibility and consequence, then the office holder doesn't get to say "it just looks like I awarded this contract to my brother because he's my brother, that's just a coincidense" That might be true in the absolute term like in physics where technically anything is literally possible. But since there is no way to disprove it, and the bad effects are bad enough, we don't have to prove it. The appearance of impropriety is enough, because anyone holding a position like that also already knows that they have a responsibility to act with integrity and not allow any possible question about that. They already know that they can't just give a contract to a family member. And so doing it anyway and expecting to be able to excuse it, is it's own form of impropriety regardless what quality work the brother will do or what the alternatives were.
Google removing utility from the user and granting it to themselves is way way more than merely "the appearance of impropriety".
It doesn't matter what harms some plugins have done.
More: https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/the-asymmetry-of-nudges
> In reality, Manifest V3 was meant to solve a real problem — and to do so for the right reasons. I know this because about eight years ago, we set out to conduct a survey of the privacy practices of popular browsers extensions. We were appalled by what we uncovered. From antivirus to “privacy” tools, a considerable number of extensions hoovered up data for no discernible reason. Some went as far as sending all the URLs visited by the user — including encrypted traffic — to endpoints served over plain text. Even for well-behaved extensions, their popularity, coupled with excessive permissions, opened the doors for abuse. The compromise of a single consumer account could have given the bad guys access to the digital lives of untold millions of users — exposing their banking, email, and more.
Maybe they could have avoided controversy by grandfathering in a few popular extensions and watching them closely?
Google killed the king, and the king was the desktop. The king was apps. Microsoft seemed omnipotent & in total control, and the rise of the web isn't totally Google's but they sure did a lot and they sure rode that wave.
My personal feeling is that Google lost the ball in the g+ era. Up until then, it felt like Google understood their role was to help others create value, that they had to offer APIs and platforms to let other developers onto the platform, let other people expand the value proposition. G+ was an about face, a totalizing product push, and one that offered nothing to the world. Essentially no API offered. Google wanted to make g+, they wanted to run itz and if you wanted to use it, you needed to use their client and your account with them.
Where-as in the past, with efforts like Buzz, they we're trying to expand the protocols & value of the web as a whole. Once they gave up on platform & tried to be a product company, it was much harder to believe in the futures they were trying to sell.
Early Google initiatives also had a high failure rate. (Buzz, for example.)
My guess is that there are still Googlers trying to improve the web. Young people are idealistic, so why wouldn't they? But nowadays it's unlikely to be successful unless it's relatively uncontroversial infrastructure. (Some examples might be things like certificate transparency and QUIC, which became HTTP/3.)
Higher-profile initiatives to really change things often fail because they raise deep suspicion and resistance. They're certain to be misinterpreted in the worst possible way.
Also, significant changes affect vested interests. Some of those vested interests are internal.
To my recollection, G+ was actually pretty good at launch. It just was killed (or hobbled, for future killing) incredibly early for a network-effects, non-first mover product.
When it was a disparate group of products... incentives were generally aligned with the users of those products.
When they began to look at themselves as a platform company (Google search-on-everything, Android, Chrome), that fundamentally broke and they started making sound-platform-business but user-hostile decisions.
So I guess the moral of that story is that platforms will make you rich, but you have to be very careful to enunciate your value priorities clearly to users. (E.g. Apple: "privacy"; Google: "openness"?)
During the lifetime of Google: mobile has dethroned PC, video streaming has dethroned TV, SaaS over pay-once software, online advertising over physical, etc. Google has been a force in all of these (and more) - though not alone of course.
The answer is easy - Microsoft. They didn't directly take on MS's business, but in the general understanding of what was the big tech company, the one that gobbled up the best engineers, the one that startups were afraid would decide to compete with them - that was Microsoft in the late 1980s and 1990s, and it started shifting to Google.
And even though they didn't directly compete with them on being everyone's OS, they indirectly competed with them by turning the browser itself into, effectively, the OS everyone uses. They killed IE with Chrome, they made which OS you use far less relevant, they took over Mobile OS (shared with Apple, of course), and they are now competing on Cloud.
There is no question that what Google was from 2005ish to 2020ish, Microsoft was before that. You can even read pg articles about this exact thing.
The culture turned on Google around the same time Google lost their innocence and dropped the "Don't be evil" clause (note the dropping of that clause was not the cause, just one of the symptoms).
I suspect that even today you'd have a hard time finding a random person on the street who even knows that Oracle is a company and not a character from The Matrix or ancient Greek mythology. And if you tell them they bought Sun they'll think you mean the newspaper, if you talk about Java they'll either think you mean the island or are talking about a brand of coffee.
When did that happen? It's still there.
[1] https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
But as that article notes, they didn't drop the phrase. It's there now. It's always been there. There was never a time when they dropped it.
I look at it as somewhat inevitable considering the path the company has taken, but it is certainly different. We are cranking out money and that’s fine, but it is a change.
That's not to disparage the latter. making things work at scale is hard engineering. But when people praise the glory days, it may be a preference for working on new ideas in small projects.
The way I like to look at it is that small things take a while, but big things happen remarkably quickly. For example, rolling out a "hello world" service might take a few days, but having that service serve 1M QPS is pretty much free (in terms of effort). At my previous place a new service might have taken an hour to set up a deployment for, but having it serve 1M QPS would have required overhauling several aspects of our infrastructure over months.
Could you elaborate on what these are for a non-googler? Ironically enough, Google isn't very helpful.
P2020 + Rollouts: This is for intent-driven deployment, where deployment configuration for jobs, networks, pubsub topics, and other resources are declaratively checked into source, and the Annealing system automatically finds diffs against production state and resolves those diffs (aka a rollout).
Automated job sizing: load-trend driven automated capacity planning. Separate from autopilot, which is a more time-sensitive autoscaler. This will actually make configuration changes based on trends in traffic, and request quota for you automatically (with your approval).
BCID: this is for verifiable binaries and configs in prod, where it requires two parties to make source changes, two parties to make config changes, two parties to approve non-automated production changes, and only verified check-in binaries and configs can run in prod, not stuff you build on your desktop machine.
That sounds amazing.
Unified rollouts, unified versioning, universal dashboards, security compliance, standardized quota management, standard alert configs. It's opinionated, but I can drop into any team and hit the ground running. I don't want to learn your custom dashboards doing the exact same thing with different names.
The issue with PoD is that it's a great concept and implementation that's tight on resources, and doesn't have much of a plan to expand beyond its current paradigm. The P2020 team deserves way more recognition for all the work they have done.
> Deployments were infrequent, unreliable, and sometimes even done from a dev's machine.
Deployments were weekly and done from a dev machine because that way someone was watching it and could intervene in case of unexpected problems. Some teams didn't do that and tried to automate rollouts completely. I could always tell which products weren't doing enough manual work because I'd encounter obviously broken features live in production, do a bit of digging and discover end user complaints had been piling up in the support forums for months. But nobody was reading them, and the metrics didn't show any problem, and changes flowed into prod so the team just ... didn't realize their product wasn't working. There's no substitute for trying stuff out for yourself. I encounter clearly broken software that never seems to get fixed way too often these days and I'm sure it's partly because the teams in question don't use their own product much and don't even realize anything is wrong.
Additionally, rolling out from a dev machine brings so many risks – security, reproducibility, human error, and so on.
I'm glad this is not the way things work anymore, and for the most part things are more reliable as a result.
It doesn't sound like what's done now is a whole lot different tbh.
history's biggest yakshave...? not surprising for a programmer-run company
I'm sure it still matters to bring down the power and server bills. But one can't help feel like they could be doing much more
Engineering from >10 years ago seems like it was a wild west. Some truly stunning pieces of technology, strung together with duct tape. Everything had its own configuration language, workflow engine, monitoring solution, etc. Deployments were infrequent, unreliable, and sometimes even done from a dev's machine. I don't want to disparage engineers who worked there during that time, the systems were amazing, but everything around the edge seemed pretty disparate, and I suspect gave rise to the "promo project" style development meme.
Nowadays we've got Boq/Pod, the P2020 suite, Rollouts, the automated job sizing technologies, even BCID. None of these are perfect by any means, but the convergence is a really good thing. I switched team, PA, and discipline 6 months ago, and it was dead easy to get up and running because I already knew the majority of the tech, and most of that tech is pretty mature and capable.
Maybe Google has become more like other tech companies (although I doubt they have this level of convergence), but I think people glorify the old days at Google and miss that a lot of bad engineering was done. Just one example, but I suspect Google has some of the best internal security of any software company on the planet, and that's a very good thing, but it most certainly didn't have that back in the day.