I see this as a variant of the tragedy of the commons: in this case it is the reputation and market share of Google Search.
Each individual at Google is incentivised to feed their own cow… err… career at the expense of the commons: Google’s reputation.
Inevitably this will destroy Google, but this will take many years of accumulated damage to build up to a catastrophic point.
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually
and then suddenly.”Having been burnt too many times with Google products[1] I try not use their offerings on the cloud many decision makers are here who will worry about similar issues.
If Google wants to be serious about Cloud then they need to be serious about long term support.
Microsoft in the win 3 /9x days till even win 7 was exceptionally consistent about ABI support even adding specific behaviors to support a single binary to make sure upgrades just worked. That kind of culture was a key factor that made developers want to develop on their platforms
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[1] just this week having to start work on upcoming firebase dynamic link deprecation.
While google had given a long lead time and announced the sunsetting years ahead , I still don’t have to worry about similar issues on AWS nearly as often.
I think of all the google.products, that's pretty good.
Inbox still hurts though, but not as much as google music
It caused them to make wild mistakes that jeopardized the long term viability of the company like milking their core product well after it had served its time in the market and neglecting, shutting down, or even warehousing everything else (sound familiar?).
It took some really forceful misunderstanding of their marketspace by clueless executives to finally bring Atari down and have it sold off for parts. And that's where Google's fate diverges from the historic lesson, Google won't die because its stuff its sales channels full of more hardware than they can sell (tying up every dollar in the company). Google will die because it's core product, ad placement, is become less valuable, causing the company to optimize trying to capture that main source of revenue -- which is realized in a total lack of strategy to build literally any other business.
For example, if AI/VR/neural implants/something else* completely shake up the computing landscape (and traditional search engines start to fall into irrelevancy), will people trust Google to be the provider for these things? Or will they look at their history of quickly killing products, and choose a competitor who might be in it for the long haul?
* Given some of these fields are already dominated by Google's competitors/other FAANG level companies, that already be a bad sign.
It's entirely possible that those of us who pay attention to this are a vanishing minority compared to the cultural momentum of Google as the default search provider and a dominant provider of email/office SaaS.
But even if dissatisfaction is growing, the institional momentum is just so huge that it's very likely Google simply doesn't have the capacity to sense any brand damage even if it were actually occurring at any significant scale. You'd need to have people whose role included a duty to pay attention to this with systems for measuring it reporting to people who take them seriously. Google's never needed those people. It came into the world with a halo of value, primarily knowing the challenges of demand and growth rather than attrition. Much of its management and professional staff are probably largely drawn from the ranks of those who have known more success than challenge, and they are rewarded in such a way that they not only have little incentive to behave differently they may actually have an atrophied sense of the possibility that different might be important, even if they were aware of cultural momentum shifts and were willing/able to persuade others at Google to change how things are done in an enormously successful place.
Like Bill Gates said, success is a terrible teacher. Why would enough people at Google think Google has crucial lessons to learn?