Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company. I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether Stadia was a success long term.
Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. No serious business or developer is going to trust them. If governments get serious about ad regulation and damage their cash cow, Google is in trouble
The thing that baffles me is that this has been a known issue for a long time, and yet there doesn't seem to be any significant moves to improve this.
Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? That's a genuine question. He doesn't seem to be solving existing issues related to culture and incentives. And the company hasn't landed any big wins recently. I mostly see increased monetization of products from 10-15 years ago. I know I'm only seeing this from the outside looking in though. There must be a reason why one of the world's biggest companies has him at the helm, but it's not obvious to me what that is.
I don't know how Pichai can change Google's culture without Google having an existential crisis first like IBM in the 90s. I saw these intertwining problems in Google: 1. Employees want promotions at all cost. It's not due to ambition but to comparing ourselves with our peers, thanks to lax promotion policies for years. L6 used to be treated as god, but no more. Employees simply lost it when they saw people who were not necessarily effective get promoted fast. Well, maybe the process is not lax, but identifying the real gems certainly becomes disproportionally harder as the company grows. 2. Management want to expand at all cost. The only metric that matters to most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be. Yes, managers did get cautioned that it is the scope and impact that matters instead of team size, but in practice team size is a proxy measurement for scope and impact. 3. Maybe this is the real root cause: as Google becomes so large, it is simply impossible to gauge the impact and complexity of one's work reliably, resulting in all kinds of gaming and angst in all levels of employees. In the end, gauging impact becomes gauging the perception of impact.
In other words, people are culture. When a company grows large, the culture regresses to the mean.
In my opinion, the biggest problem Sundar has is that he is too much of a chicken to shake things up, and his underlings know it. They do something dumb, he gets questioned about it, he says the word "thoughtful," everyone at G gets a little bit angry, and then the whole thing blows over. That does not incentivize responsibility among the managers underneath him. Sundar tries to keep peace between managers and departments, but in doing so, he loses control.
There was an "exit only doors" fiasco a year ago, and the man couldn't say either:
* "yes, VPs get special permissions to access the buildings" or
* "that is a security risk and everyone needs to go in through the same lobbies"
He just said "thoughtful" and the VPs lost their exit-only door access for a while until it blew over.
This was such a small, petty thing that I pretty much lost all respect for Sundar over the fact that he couldn't take a stand on it. He absolutely refuses to provide an opinion about anything to the wider group of Googlers. His underlings know that, and they know they can do stupid shit and work against each other without accountability.
This seems like a popular management style at big tech companies. I've seen exactly this kind of behavior at MS too. It's a kind of "pacifist management".
Just agree with everything and everyone so you're not seen as someone who creates conflict. But then just silently ignore or drop issues you don't want to deal with.
Don't take risks or take responsibility for difficult problems so your reputation is clean of any failures.
Jump on board only the largest and most well supported of company initiatives so you can claim success.
And the thing is, I'm not sure it's the fault of these managers that behave this way. I think it's the result of the promo system adopted by so many tech companies. As long as you have some good things to write about each promo cycle and nobody has anything bad to say about you, you can coast your way up the management chain. And with each promotion comes more money. There is no incentives to take risks as it can only hurt your promo chances and then once you're high enough up the chain, why would you risk the huge comp package? Pichai complained about engineers who "rest and vest" but only because that is exactly the behavior incentivized by the company culture and the absolutely stupid promo process and comp structure.
With leadership like that, it's sure that nothing will ever change.
Well said. I rocketed up the chain early in my career for inventing some truly innovative stuff (that's been published in top conferences). Then I fought against stupid shit. I spoke out. I had strong technical opinions. Eventually I was pushed aside and my career has tanked (but rest-and-vest baby...except I'm slowly recovering and still seen as a company intellectual resource). Meanwhile I watch all the mediocre managers keep rising who are "yes, sir" and don't make any enemies. They don't do shit except follow the status quo and build their empires.
This isn't just tech per se, if you look around you in society that's literally how countries are governed.
Basically a lot of people have promoted weak leaders all the way up to premierships and presidencies and have pushed out anyone that could potentially criticize them. The result is this shitshow we're in right now.
For anyone reading this deep in the thread: read Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The Dictator's Handbook. A variations of a few simple rules result in virtually all models of government. And none of them involve technical competence.
Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels
Page 112-113
Scholars who have quoted Key’s colorful phrase have mostly failed to note that he used it derisively. “The Founding Fathers,” he wrote in the final edition of his influential textbook on party politics, “by the provision for midterm elections, built into the constitutional system a procedure whose strange consequences lack explanation in any theory that personifies the electorate as a rational god of vengeance and of reward.”
In the first edition of the same textbook, Key (1942, 628) offered an even clearer dismissal of the rational interpretation of retrospective voting, noting that voters seem to have rewarded and punished incumbents at the polls for good or bad times
Even before it could be said that the national Government could do much of anything to improve their condition…. Yet if the party control of the national Government had little or nothing to do with their fate, how is this behavior to be explained? Is it to be considered as a rational seeking to better one’s status by the ballot or is it merely blindly striking a blow at a scapegoat? To throw out the “ins” probably had about the same effect on economic conditions as evangelical castigation of Satan has on the moral situation. Perhaps the swing against the “ins” can best be described as a displacement of economic resentment on political objects. By this catharsis discontent was dissipated and the peace kept.
This starts all the way at the interview btw. If you go out of your way to do something extra, you’ll be suddenly judged on it even if it wasn’t originally in the scope of the interview, so you’re pushed to be the most average you can get.
Personal accountability isn't meant to solve problems. It is meant to prevent them by forcing individuals to put something ahead of their own career advancement. In other words, it aligns incentives in favor of preventing problems rather than in favor of solving them - you can only be the hero who slays a dragon if there is a dragon.
The laws around medical malpractice don't fix it when doctors screw up, but they make it a lot less likely for the screw-ups to happen, since those laws force doctors to adopt reasonable standards of care.
My question still stands, when has that really solved issues if they aren't regulated? Personal accountability without regulations is moot, toothless and I don't recall any instance of it ever solving anything.
To me what you are describing is basically regulations. Personal accountability only derives from regulations because there are punishments, in that case it aligns incentives.
Democracies and republics create personal accountability through regulations, since there is no single boss and power tends to come from legislative bodies or the people directly - those people want to provide input. Dictatorships (which companies fundamentally are) do not need regulations and rule-making processes to have personal accountability. Instead, the CEO can determine if you screwed up and fire you (or the dictator can shoot you) if you did. The specter of being fired (or shot) aligns your incentives to "do the right thing" even if the rules are not well-communicated, although you are better at doing the right thing if the dictator tells you what they value and what they want you to do.
Regulations are only one form of personal accountability. Regulations, in theory, create uniformity and transparency. These can be good things. In practice, regulations are often selectively enforced, which leads back to the same situation as in a dictatorship, but with a formalized process of input for the dictator.
I actually disagree with you that malpractice lawsuits are examples of regulation. More often, when something goes wrong and a doctor is involved, there is an argument about whether the doctor was negligent or not. There is no fixed "standard of care" that is written down, only a set of practices that are known throughout the industry. Experts argue about whether negligence occurred or not. There are regulations that the experts can cite in their determination of negligence (some of those rules carry separate penalties too), but you don't need to have broken any rules to commit malpractice. This is a prime example of accountability without regulation.
No manager who leads in demand software engineers will ever be able to change anything unless their reports believe in the vision. The minute things don’t go their way, we can just get another job,
It’s really hard for a CEO who had nothing to do with the current success of the company to have any type of credibility with employees.
Let’s look at the CEOs of the other BigTech companies.
- Apple: Tim Cook had as much to do with the current success of Apple as Jobs did. He worked for Apple from the time it was broke until today.
- Amazon: Jassy (my skip*10 manager) led the AWS division from its “real” founding until he became CEO.
- Facebook - still founder led
- Microsoft - the CEO came in from Azure and had a vision for what the “new MS” should look like - completely different than “Windows Everywhere”
There's some bizarre PR campaign going on to try and brand Sundar as the next Steve Jobs: lots of the photos of him looking thoughtful with steepled hands overlaid with anodyne quotes about technology or AI. It's unclear to me if he's much more than a tech billionaire by luck.
No kind of strategy is ever communicated to employees, just defensive + responsive TGIF responses. Truly bizarre.
Sundar's claim to fame is Google Toolbar for MSIE. It was a big deal at that time. It locked Google search on MSIE and ultimately enable navboost in search quality.
Then he was the product lead on the Chrome team. I don't know if it was him who lobbied Page to create Chrome.
Which means there has to actually be a vision. As far as I can tell, the vision at google is just to keep making boatloads of money off AdWords, and not really care about anything else.
Just think of the dividend they could pay if they admitted they are an advertising company, instead of distracting people with the carousel of "innovation".
Marc Andreesen recently has been talking a lot about the professional managerial class (PMC) and how it's causing the principle actor problem. Everyone is playing it safe and not risking their high pay checks for the off chance of rocking the boat and landing a moon shot. Nobody really makes any hard and decisive moves because there is much to lose and not that much more to win. This was different when we had companies owned by individuals or families.
This was one of the reasons why Nokia died. When the organization grew, everything was taken over by middle management whose safest option in any scenario was “Please do not change anything.”
Yes, but the takeaway isn't that they should start making bold moves, it's that we actually want them to churn out and be surpassed over time. It's the entrenching of them through regulatory capture or predatory behaviour that's bad.
There are still a lot of companies owned by individuals or families. You just don't hear about them because they seldom take the big risks necessary to produce disruptive innovations.
> His underlings know that, and they know they can do stupid shit and work against each other without accountability.
This is what really sunk Eastman Kodak. The popular wisdom about them missing digital isn’t really true. Heck they owned many of the key patents. But everyone was too busy focusing on growing their little fiefdom for the company to use its assets and market position effectively.
I recall one year the CEO announced he was reducing headcount by some number and the next year it had actually gone up.
Oh man, is that something that changed in the last few years? One thing I always liked about the Mountain View campus is that every door, no matter how minor, had a badge reader on it, so you could always take the most direct path between two possible points.
At the same time, there were a lot of stories on the internal social network about people walking in behind them, so I kind of get why the policy might have been changed. I would have been one of the people mad about it!
(I posted one of these following-me-in stories once; I unlocked the door and someone pushed me out of the way to go into the office ahead of me, and I didn't see their badge. I tracked down security, they reviewed the tapes, and it turned out to be a legitimate coworker. I shared the story with the angle "this is what you should do if someone follows you in", but I got panned for not doing enough to protect my coworkers. I probably didn't post this, but my takeaway was "if your security depends on me being able to beat someone up that is larger than me, you're already dead". One of the few times the internal social media hive mind turned against me, and it was really really weird.)
There are also now rules about how many badge readers need to be between public and private areas. This turns into a mess in historic buildings that have technically-public stairwells littered throughout. (The Munich campus is particularly bad for this.)
In the NYC office, when I was there, we definitely had to badge in from a lot of stairwells. Also, the bathrooms that weren't completely contained in Google spaces had number pad locks on them.
(I was very annoyed when I worked on a floor that didn't have any dedicated Google-only bathrooms; I asked to have the locks removed just out of principle and was told that "people will wander in from the street and set up camp in there." You had to badge into the building though, so I wondered how true that actually was. I wish for once in my life someone would just tell me the truth instead of making something up to get me to go away. "We don't feel like paying someone to disconnect them, and other tenants in the building will complain if we do." That's totally fair!)
There are floors in One Market that are the same and equally nonsensical. The kicker is that Google stocks them with tampons and toothbrushes and all that, even though they're communal, which makes the locking even more silly.
They don't need to be bigger than you either. If someone just pushes you out of the way, and are really a bad actor, they could have a box cutter on them or just be more prepared to confront another person. Are you going to directly confront a person that has you surprised? No.
Sounds like they need to make reporting dead simple. Put an alarm button on every badge reader. Hit the button. Pre-recorded “intruder who did not badge present. Everyone present please wait for security.” Then locks second internal door. Or even better just automate counting bodies vs badging on every entrance/exit. Lots of nfc/face recognition type technology to tell who is who.
There's an internal google plus instance whose culture is kind of like a mix of Facebook and Twitter, and an internal meme site. Occasionally, some real work (setting up collaborations with colleagues) happens on the social network.
That's gotta get axed or Google will stagnate even more than it already is.
Then again, I'm not sure what can come in and usurp its place as a "global-leader-company". Maaaaybe Tesla if every single little thing goes right for them (and that's a stretch)?
Or perhaps, the way things are going lately, a defense company... I hope not.
It can be a massive time sink too. Have seen the debates on there about everything (politics, finances and other random stuff) eat hours out of coworkers days.
I remember when Sundar became CEO the first thing he did was hole himself up in 2000 Amphitheatre Pkwy and block access to all Google staff not in that building. The next thing he did was get bullied by the board and their CFO, but I digress.
It's kind of an internal meme: he says "we have to be thoughtful about this" or "we have to approach this thoughtfully." Almost every tough question from inside Google is met with an answer that contains the word "thoughtful."
It seems to mean "there is no easy win for me in this situation, so I am passing the buck to (presumably) a committee of other people who will think about it instead, or perhaps a power-hungry VP who has a vested interest in making it happen."
> In my opinion, the biggest problem Sundar has is that he is too much of a chicken to shake things up, and his underlings know it.
What?? Sundar is the CEO. All the buck stops with him. Why are you pretending as if he doesn't have agency? The problem here is his actions and/or lack thereof, not people under him doing stupid things and he's somehow the victim. He gets paid the big bucks to lead.
That is what the person is saying. I'm not sure what you are questioning here. Sundar has agency and authority and he refuses to use it. This enables his underlings to have free reign.
It doesnt look like the promotion-hungry culture that's the problem. Or engineering.
It looks like Google not giving a zit about users is the problem. Deprecating stuff on people's faces. Backwards incompatible updates. They treat everyone as if everyone works at Google - like everyone works in a large organization with ample funding so that they can take time to go through deprecation and backwards-incompatibility hooks.
Grand majority of the public doesnt have any of that. So when something is deprecated on their face out of the blue, its a great 'f you' to them. Their businesses, their very own personas.
So they aren't taking risks building things by relying on Google.
I think this is a spot on assessment. Google has always been a 'nerds trying to build a cool technology' company. Yes, one of it is search which is infinitely useful for users. But other than that, they have been in their shells nerding out things. Accidentally some of the technologies become useful and popular. But there is no grounds up thought about 'how can we make it useful for customers', in relative comparison to products from companies like Amazon and Slack.
Most user loved or impact making products like YouTube and Android have been acquisitions. I tried setting up Google Analytics for a business and touched it after many years. And the sheer complexity of the documentation and puzzling talk of UA to GA4 migration left me with a sour taste. I instantly switched to setting up plausible.io instead.
Notwithstanding the popularity of their tech ecosystem (because they are coming from Google), it is often painful to use. For all the flak Meta gets, the developer oriented technologies released by them: Thrift, PyTorch are fun to use as compared to Protobuf, Tensorflow.
But as someone who loves small companies taking on giants, it is heartening sign. Hopefully with ineffective leadership and employees focused on activism instead of actually building things, in next five years, un-bundling of Google will happen. Vertically focused players will bleed them by thousand cuts.
> Google has always been a 'nerds trying to build a cool technology' company
That, also it feels like it replicates the college environments like MIT, where projects get funded by the university, large enterprises or the state (especially defense), so when a project gets 'deprecated' its generally due to the project funders wanting it. Since these are the end users, there is absolutely no problem in it - the end user wants it deprecated anyway. As far as I know, Google was born literally from such a state-funded project in MIT. This likely makes Google environment somewhat like a postdoc extension of that environment.
But this attitude is totally destructive when facing end users: Small businesses, individuals, artists, freelancers, NGOs, municipialities - practically ENTIRE rest of the world do not have the large funding and time that Google has inside and outside Google.
They can't risk their businesses getting broken every other year, less every 6 months, because some people at Google thing that v2 is something is 'better' even if its incompatible with v1 of the earlier product, breaking everyone's sites, apps, whatever and expecting them to spend the money and time they don't have to jump through those upgrade hooks.
Worst, are 'deprecations'. They are literal 'f*k you's to end users. Even if some service is deprecated with 3 months' of warning, the small business or individual won't have the time or energy to salvage everything and move it to somewhere else. It will cost a lot to them, and it will affect their income and livelihoods.
So people just avoid Google. Build on or use the most reliable organization that does not literally sh*t on their users whenever they feel like it.
> I tried setting up Google Analytics for a business and touched it after many years. And the sheer complexity of the documentation and puzzling talk of UA to GA4 migration left me with a sour taste.
Good example. How complicated analytics have become shows just how little Google understands its users and how little it is able to accommodate them. Yes, there is 'great engineering' behind a lot of the stuff, but the complexit, ugprade hoops, backwards-incompatible updates and outright deprecations literally kill any benefit.
In the case of analytics, all that complication is not really worth wasting time (and therefore money) for upgrading. The products came to a point of looking like phd thesis projects more than anything intended for the end users - you have to spend considerable time even as a technical person to learn the system to be able to even use it at an entry level.
I also have analytics on all my sites. I will probably replace it with something else when the upgrade time comes. No way in hell I want to go through another upgrade hoop in 2-3 years and spend all that precious effort and time for doing that.
> looks like Google not giving a zit about users is the problem
I think this has always been the case for Google. It just so happens that sometimes what Google chooses to do happens to align with what's good for users. But when it doesn't align, a bit like a sociopath, Google doesn't appear to be concerned for the impact on users.
Obviously this applies to the whole automated moderation/banning situation that's been a moderate risk for years.
All corporations are sociopaths, Google is only different in that they think their success is because of their lack of care about users instead of in spite of it.
Sociopaths are good at manipulating people into believing favorable things about them until too late. Google is just... different.
> The only metric that most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be.
I suspect this is pretty universal at large companies. And especially managers seeking to make their way up the hierarchy are always looking to grow the size of their teams.
Team size seems to have become the new "corner office" in terms of managers self measurement. When the iPhone was still super secret, having a locked hallway was Apple's "corner office". A manager was on track to get their Tesla Roadster if they could get their team working on iOS and get their hallways locked behind an extra set of badge readers. This continued for a few years after the iPhone's release as the Mac and iOS software teams were still not fully integrated.
Team size is an easily quantifiable metric of a managers influence/budget etc. It's also something that's almost never confidential as opposed to other business metrics. "Impact" and "scope" are hard to measure and can be debated about.
Very true! When the first Apple Park designs were shown, I was wondering how those grand, sweeping hallways could be reconciled with our quotidian experience of more and more lockdown areas popping up daily…
In practice, I get the impression that the move to Apple Park stopped and maybe somewhat reversed that trend. Areas can be, and mostly are, locked down by sector and floor, but rarely finer grained than that. And maybe that was a subtle design goal to begin with.
Yeah I think Apple Park's design only worked (such as it does) because iOS and macOS software orgs had merged long before moving in. In Infinite Loop they closed off hallways as lockdown areas and generally cut up the buildings, that would never have worked at Apple Park. Geez I remember being able to bring guests to my office in Infinite Loop.
Eh, most people want to work for Google for the cash these days it's reflected in their hiring where they don't even know where they want to place people half the time
> The only metric that matters to most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be
> Employees want promotions at all cost. It's not due to ambition but to comparing ourselves with our peers, thanks to lax promotion policies for years
This is how I feel about promos at my company and it's ~1/10th the size of Google. It feels like something that occurs at all tech companies. When times are good promos get handed out like candy.
> Management want to expand at all cost. The only metric that matters to most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be.
It shouldn't baffle you. Google ads make so much money with no real competitors that there is no motivation to innovate anything else. Blizzard has the same problem. World of Warcraft makes so much money that it kills everything else. Valve makes so much money being the only real PC gaming platform that they stopped making games.
These companies become victims of their own successes and eventually become hollow money machines that are preyed upon by professional executives. The culture dies and all the good people leave except a small cadre of highly paid early employees who have worked on core services for decades.
Google's problems are so pervasive and famous because they don't care. Why fix hiring? That requires effort and time for a questionable payoff. Why fix promotions? Same problem. Why fix customer service? That's just a cost. Why enforce stable APIs that are well documented for cloud services? Not my problem. At the end of the day, a small core of people will keep ads going and everyone else will decorate their resumes for their next jobs.
> Valve makes so much money being the only real PC gaming platform that they stopped making games.
The Steam Deck is an incredible device. And Alyx is one of the truly great games made for VR (which they pioneered generally). It might not be much but I'm not writing off Valve entirely.
VR absolutely niche, but Steam Deck has delivered on its promise far more than I expected, and this seems to be being reflected in impressive sales.
I'd happily place a bet today on there being a family of Steam Deck devices forming a material part of the PC games industry in 5 years or earlier. Much of the implementation such as the store experience is already leagues ahead of the garbage Nintendo get away with on the Switch.
When they inevitably release a second one with an OLED display and more performance and battery life, its going to be massively compelling. Sure we can all point to failures like the Steam Boxes, but from those failures came Proton which has been directly responsible for the Deck concept working so successfully.
It's unclear whether Valve is playing the long game or simply hedging their bets. My recollection is that their investment in Linux was expressly stated to be a hedge against a future where Microsoft put Windows in a walled garden, like iOS.
On the other hand, I know that a bunch of people are unhappy that the Steam Controller has been discontinued. Secondhand prices are through the roof.
I'd argue this to be a pretty dated take on Valve's strategy, personally. Gabe stated it was a hedge over 10 years ago, in response to the risk of Windows 8 moving to mandatory Microsoft Store:
Obviously none of that came to pass, we are two more Windows releases on and much has changed since. It is serendipitous the tech built is so great for delivering a portable experience - I think Valve's actions and words demonstrate it to be far more committed to the Deck than prior efforts, I don't see this as hedging bets. And why wouldn't they? At this stage they appear to have a hit product on their hands.
In 2022, Microsoft and Valve have strategic partnerships too, which certainly wasn't the case in 2012:
Yes, I should have been clearer. I meant that their Linux investment started out as a hedge, but over time they were able to pivot it to something else.
I'm not sure what the impetus was for the Steam Deck. I could see it as a hedge against anticipated future, dwindling laptop sales. I could also see it as an attempt to expand into the same space that the Switch occupies. After all, with the exodus of Sony from portable gaming, Nintendo's only competition is cell phones.
The impetus is it’s an obvious vehicle to sell more games via Steam? I don’t think it is any more complex than this.
AMD finally delivered a chip that can make the dream of desktop-ish performance in a handheld work. That simply wasn’t all that possible until very recently.
It depends on who is buying the Steam Deck. If it's people who don't already have a PC, then sure, Valve is broadening their market. But if it's people who already have a gaming PC, then it probably won't lead to a lot of additional software sales.
After having a Steam Deck for a bit I really really hope either Valve or some other decent controller company like 8bitdo makes a controller with the same style of setup. The dual haptic trackpads+paddle buttons combined with the customizability is incredible. To me it is easily the biggest leap in controller tech since the analog stick with the N64.
I've never used the original Steam Controller and I still think the dual analog stick setup is better for some games but having the trackpads is good for many others.
The Atari 2600 had a digital joystick. The Atari 5200 was completely analog. If you tear the controller down, there's a complex mechanism that links the stick to two rotational potentiometers. It's similar in outcome to modern analog thumbsticks, but the mechanism is completely different (and is MUCH bigger).
The 5200 joystick didn't self-center, though. The only centering force was from the rubber boot. This ended up being advantageous in a game like missile command, but is widely seen as the Achilles heel of the controller.
I might have overstated that. Looking at eBay "sold" prices, they seem to go for anywhere from 30 USD (controller only, no accessories) to over 100 USD (used, but in box with accessories) or 200 USD (sealed in box). But even then, there's a lot of price variation - there are sealed controllers for as low as 130 USD.
The VR niche has grown significantly recently with the Quest 2 selling 15 million units. Just today, what I would consider the most promising game/platform in VR released, which is BoneLab. The state of the art VR experience wise in my opinion was Boneworks, and that was only on PCVR, so I'm excited to see where we are headed with VR. It has been a slow-growing niche but it's still fighting on.
I strongly disagree. First, to adress the grandparent comment, Valve is a private company that is still lead by its founders, so the sentiment does not apply to them.
First, Half-Life Alyx, from the technical standpoint, is a more complex project than a regular AAA fps due to the sheer amount of innovation that was required to make it work. They also developed their own VR set alongside it.
Second, measuring a company's capabilities by how popular their products are is not fair, imo. Activision, Ubisoft and the like have been churning out "blockbusters" for years at this point, essentially packaging the same game under a new title. Are they really more capable than Valve, which has released an innovative product in a completely new field?
Third, the reason Valve does not release HL3 (and this is me speculating) is not because they are unable to "pull it off" - technically, they are, they just did it with Alyx. The real issue is that the amount of hype generated behind the title is so immense almost anything they make would be underwhelming. Their decision to venture into VR complicated matters even further. VR, still being niche, would essentially make the game inaccessible to most of the fans. With valve having developed their own set, it would have looked like an intentional rip-off.
> as they’re not the company that can pull that off anymore.
No company could ever pull off Half Life 3. This game is hyped to death before it's even announced and everyone would come in with sky-high expectations. To make matters worse, everyone would expect that game to be something different and it would be impossible to make even just half of the players happy. There's no point in creating a Half Life 3, it's a guaranteed disappointment.
I wouldn't mind this, honestly. a game can be solid even on an old engine. just look at how long the Monster Hunter series had been on their old engine before overhauling with World.
I agree it's becoming sort of pointless to make HL3. As a fan, I'm perfectly happpy with keeping HL3 as only an asymptote and getting episode1, 2, Alyx and hopefully more.
They are still pulling off big projects and pivoting well though though steam proton/steamdeck which pivoted from the initial failures of the steambox push
they may not really be in the AAA game business as much but I'm not sure that's a bad thing
Yeah, I was saying niche because the Steamdeck experience isn't as plug and play as other consoles.
For example if you want to play Batman Arkham Asylum, you need to go into desktop mode, download a different Proton version then go back to the console mode, switch the used Proton version and then you can play. There's a whole bunch of other games where you have to tweak settings, maybe use the CLI to tweak things. And then add on top of that of managing settings to get optimal FPS and battery life.
That's a lot to throw at kids or non-technical people. It's quite a different experience than a Switch where you just download it and it works at optimal for the device resolution/fps.
Killed their podcasts too, which were good even if they were inveterate hipsters who played the video games you’d imagine Portland hipsters to play[0] and couldn’t pronounce Japanese names.
[0] Earthbound inspired platformers about how it’s okay to feel sad sometimes
It's an opinion comment on the internet, not a dissertation, but I base it on talking with one person who worked at valve hardware for a time and public information from the ex campo santo people's blogs and things. I could be very wrong and would love to hear from them, but I have a strong "what could have been" for 'valley of the gods.'.
Valve's issue is pretty much just a lack of serious competition against Steam. They do occasionally put out something new, just at their own pace. They aren't in any rush since their core business is virtually unassailable at this point.
They have less to fear about "professional executives" worming their way in because Valve is not a publicly traded company, unlike the other examples you mentioned. It's private, Gabe Newell calls the shots at the end of the day. There's no real avenue for people to buy their way onto a board of directors and exert influence on the company from on high, or oust its historic leadership. Valve's pretty well protected from that. But it can't protect itself from sloth induced by a lack of competition.
Realistically how does this end though? Unless technology is created to immortalize Gabe in a machine, at some point he presumably will want to sell or die.
Does it just become a bozo filled public-company at that point, chasing quarterly numbers? I think it's the biggest risk to Valve, speaking as a customer who loves their products/services today.
I would not at all be surprised to see it end in a Microsoft acquisition or joint venture of some kind, given their current appetites.
I’m not ruling that out - naming a successor is much the same as selling - ownership still transfers to an entity which at this time is unknown. There’s all manner of odd ball alternative ownership structures in existence that can be considered, but each of them would be still a transfer of ownership.
Passing to “people you really trust” is not an ideal foundation for an entity which has the potential to exist for many decades.
I mean, if Valve was just a deli or a corner store sure. It is very likely one of the most profitable-per-employee companies in the history of the world, and probably in the running for one of the most valuable privately-held companies in the world too. We also know Gabe adores making money, so... I think it to be very unlikely it just gets passed to a kid, but who knows.
Being private, we also don't really know how much of Valve Gabe actually owns - there may be other sizeable stakeholders with a say too.
People only put up with GCP because AWS is owned by Amazon, a notoriously ruthless company. AWS is better from the perspectives of API stability, customer support, and third party support, aka the primary things cloud customers care about. Now that Microsoft has Azure, they are going to crush GCP into the ground and there is nothing Google can do to stop it even though Google invented most modern cloud technology.
Why should anybody at Azure care more than anybody at Google? Both are comfortable.
People at companies like this are only provoked to action by what affects company revenue, whether increasing it or preventing loss. And hardly anything can be demonstrated to have direct effect on revenue. (Certainly, unhappy users don't, as Microsoft was first to discover.)
Haha what a joke. First, Azure is around as long as GCP. As someone in tech I can tell you that GCP and AWS are used everywhere and no one is talking about Azure. I think their fast growth as reported in their earnings is due to their office cloud services and not "core" cloud services.
... you do realize that goes for 99% of people posting here? In my biased experience in consulting for ~4 years, the distribution is more like 80/10/10 for AWS/GCP/Azure.
I’m not, it’s the other problem after the promo issue. Google is an engineering only company, if you aren’t an engineer you’re second class. So engineers see a cool problem like live migration and solve that. But they do an awful job at building a product customers want(product managers), and supporting(customer support, marketing) that.
If you look at stadia, they built the cool streaming platform, but failed to actually sell it.
Peter Drucker is so wise for urging companies to "kill your cash cow". The unfortunate constraint is that it requires extraordinary leaders and amazing luck to execute such killing successfully.
>Blizzard has the same problem. World of Warcraft makes so much money that it kills everything else.
$15 x 6 million players is good money but it's peanuts to something like Google. I wouldn't be surprised if Google spent that much just on Stadia itself in some years.
I'm pretty sure there are teams out there that could have developed a successful product for that money, if you don't include the infrastructure costs.
>Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are?
The same goal as most other Fortune 500 companies CEO, to earn as much money as possible for themselves while they are at it.
It is funny I was extremely sceptical but I remember all the hype around Sundar Pichai becoming CEO and how it would improve Google. Repeating something similar to what Satya Nadella did to Microsoft. And it wasn't media / VC or submarine PR article hype, it was real hype on HN, by Silicon Valley fellows. And Google wasn't considered "evil" back then, even though nothing much has changed, only the perception of the public.
> nothing much has changed, only the perception of the public.
I would say things have changed: directly in google services, they are worse everyday (ads in youtube, useless search engine etc.) and also indirect: they forced their black box in all sites' SEO and also adsales on so many sites that they are slowly ruining the internet for everyone else too.
At this point I feel like it's that Search has gotten significantly worse. I've had pages of results that are completely AI-generated text, with my search query just rephrased as a sentence. As an employee, it's disappointing.
What's worse is that it actively tries to rewrite your query by dropping keywords (esp. ironic when it does it to the single most important thing in said query) and substituting "synonyms" which aren't, presumably so that the output would have more results.
I find having to quote things more and more, to the point where all or almost all keywords are quoted. Lately, somehow, even that produces results that don't actually include everything that was quoted.
When you put every keyword in quotes it still incorrectly stems them, and it still ignores some keywords completely.
I also wonder why almost no web forums I use are coming up in results at all, despite their robots.txt allowing indexing. Feels like Google is becoming a bit like East Germany...
As a loyal Google user from 1999-2021 that has now fully decoupled from all of it's services, it's a deeply tragic loss.
If Google is so large and so arrogant that they can't even take feedback from internal employees then it's probably game over for them. They certainly aren't listening to developers and power users on forums.
Sundar Pichai is like (the Hamilton version of) Aaron Burr. He rose to the top by not making noise and survived to be last man standing as the most inoffensive nonthreatening choice.
You'll find plenty of people who support every side of every issue here. You'll also find plenty of people who call out the people who support $BAD_SIDE of an issue as "classic HN" and "Silicon Valley folly". In this case, as in others, it's all in your head.
The person you're responding to doesn't mean "the company making as much money as possible". They mean "Sundar is earning as much money for himself (into his own bank account) as possible". And for that, it doesn't matter if the company is working in concert etc. when Google can coast on ad revenue for many years.
1. Get stock grants
2. Sell it as soon as it vests
3. Apres moi le deluge.
The actual big goals appear to be to get GCP out of third place and to do something nebulously magic with AI. Both of these have made progress, but not in a way that actually makes the company money. Other than that I agree with you, there doesn't seem to be any sort of coherent product vision other than "ads in search/youtube" and "keep building the handful of actually popular products we've had for ages."
It is definitely hard as hell to develop another business the size of ads alongside it, but it really doesn't seem like there's a clear idea here.
Right, they're trapped in a terrible position where it's sucking the company dry of its profits while also being necessary to continue or they will lose all credibility with enterprise and developers forever. That said, they could shut down Verily and save some $1B/year.
Cloud's losses ($1.8B in H1) are about 4% of the operating income of the money-making parts ($46B in the same timeframe). Sure, a billion here and a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money. But it's hardly "sucking the company dry of its profits".
So you're suggesting that the accounting is fradululent, and nobody figured it out except you? Not the auditors with actual access to the raw data. Not the hedge funds who could have made a pretty penny by shorting the stock and then releasing this information. Not even any whistleblowers who would presumably be eligible for an award.
The thing that is bizarre to me is that Google has absolute shitloads of money. 120B+ in the bank. Megabillions in profit each quarter. Like, they could buy Nintendo for less than half of their cash on hand.
I understand that the market demands infinite growth but internally it feels like horseshit to see the ridiculous numbers and also get told that basically nothing is high priority enough to get funded.
Nothing is high priority enough to get funded because they have a firehose of money coming out of ads, compared to which nothing looks like a good enough opportunity.
Exactly. The IRR in investing more into ad platforms for Google is still higher than any other project so they keep investing in it and increasing their ad revenue. Alongside Meta, they have a duopoly (monopoly?) on that market for now so they are just milking it for all its worth.
You don't just build stuff for the sake of it. It has to be a better investment than what you currently have, and Google doesn't have anything better than doubling and tripling down on ads.
Azure became interesting when it got better integrated into the Windows/AD/Office worlds. You're not having to manually integrate so much anymore.
The way for GCP to compete is to give customers (presumably high level customers) some real deep integration into Search/Gmail/YouTube/Ads/Drive/Maps, including data. That would not only be a killer differentiating feature, it would signal to everyone that Google is serious and won't shut this down on you like they did all those other services.
They probably won't do that, but I'm not sure why they really want to run GCP if not. If they're not going to give customers something only Google can give them, I don't see them capturing much more of the market.
Don't forget about shoving Shorts into faces of their paying Youtube Premium users without a toggle to permanently disable it. That will definitely outcompete TikTok any day now!
If they made it possible to cast Shorts like other videos, I might actually use them. I've tapped a Short several times because it looked funny, but it wanted to start playing on my phone instead of the TV. I watch TikTok alone on my phone and YouTube with my wife on my TV, so Shorts just doesn't fit into that routine.
It's mindboggling that you can't cast Google Shorts to a Google Chromecast. My hypothesis is that because Chromecast casting is so buggy and unresponsive (compared to Bluetooth), swiping from one Short to another would be such a frustrating experience that they dare not enable it.
When the original came out ir was practically magic to be able to have the TV on while hanging out with roommates or friends, and all be able to contribute to the entertainment for the night right from your phone...then it didn't improve in any meaningful way, and regressed in others over the following 8+ years.
When he broke my TV I was in the store looking for a new one. I had one condition -- there had to be a sane way to write with the remote. None of the TVs had any sane way but used arrows and enter or some cursor marker for the on screen keyboard.
Dunno why none used a T9 type of letter entering system. All remotes but one had number pads. It is really inconvenient to use "Smart" TVs.
I used to maintain the Chromecast app of a decently sized streaming company for years, and oh boy. I damn near lost my sanity working on that thing. The app was broken repeatedly by silent firmware/OS updates pushed from Google, and trying to regression test updates across devices and versions was as close to hell as I've ever been.
On top of that, if you have a Pixel, the only thing it can cast to out of the box is Chromecast. Miracast (which e.g. Roku supports) - nope. Hell, they don't even do video-out over USB-C.
And I remember that it was different back in early Nexus days - they had Miracast, but deliberately ripped it out.
Also they are testing 5 preroll ads now. Idk why as a premium customer I do not have the option to filter out shorts. It is really frustrating. Also I just want youtube with no ads I do not care about youtube music that is bundled with it.
And even then I wouldn't place a bet on Waymo producing anything interesting from a revenue perspective for the next couple decades+. And, while I'm sure Google is doing other interesting things with AI--especially from an internal operations perspective--it's not like Google Home is doing anything earthbreaking or that Google search etc. is--from a consumer functionality point of view--particularly differentiated from other major players. And plenty of AI research is happening outside of Google.
I don’t understand why engineers in this forum argue against own interest. Too much efficiency is bad for workers, you want successful companies like Google and Apple invest in projects which might have a high chance of failure. At a minimum it will give people jobs and builds expertise.
Investing in Stadia is 100 times better than Google using that money to buy back stocks and making day traders rich.
This is a false dichotomy. I think most would prefer a third path where Google invests in projects it actually believes in and commits to for longer than the lifespan of a fruit fly.
Projects contantly being half-assed and rug pulled aren't good for users or the developers being bounced around between them.
Yeah, exactly. If you care about keeping people employed, what better way than to keep alive products and services that aren't the top in their field, but rather #3, #4, or #5? Even if the Google offering isn't super popular, as long as it's good enough, it'll have users, and it'll help keep users interested in other Google offerings and the Google ecosystem as a whole.
The way it is now, I have to be very cautious investing my time or money (even just time really) in any Google service because I'm worried it might be canceled at any time if it isn't Search, Gmail, or Maps. Will my Google Photos albums suddenly disappear one day because they decided it's not the #1 in its field? (Luckily, I don't use Photos as my main photo storage, only a way to share with others.)
Stadia wasn’t something that excites engineers in the first place. It only looks genius if you’ve not had prior experiences and assessment of issues with remote gaming.
I literally know someone who went to work on the Stadia team 2 years before it was announced because working on it was essentially his dream job. It doesn't have to be "genius" to be interesting to work on with the scale and backing of Google behind it.
And I know somebody who had been a 15 year Google employee who could choose to work any team decided to make it his new priority. This is somebody who could have worked on any platforms project they wanted. They left Google a couple years after it launched, I imagine probably at seeing their hard work go nowhere.
Not the same sort of scale. The technology part of it scaled fine, probably because Google invested the money and dev hours into making sure it did. The product itself didn't scale for a host of other reasons, but none of them had to do with the reasons it might be interesting to develop around it.
There's certain problem spaces that are just different if you have different amounts of money and dedication behind them. Working for AWS is likely much different than working for Linode, even aside from the culture of each company. Longer runways, better access to cutting-edge tech, a pre-existing global-scale infrastructure pattern... Even working on a failed project can be an interesting experience sometimes.
I wonder if even Google suffers from the premature scaling architecture astronaut problem? Perhaps if they’d spent more of their resources getting to 1000 and 10,000 games, before doing the engineering to support a billion users, they may have actually needed that scalability (and might have become at least a small cash cow alongside the surveillance capitalism asserting golden goose)?
> Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are?
I'd say he's trying not to be remembered as the "Steve Ballmer" of Google. You know - that second-run CEO who drove the company into the ground while keeping the wall street numbers looking good. Cuz that's exactly where he's heading right now.
I think he knows he needs to fundamentally change the culture of the company. He's been making public statements as such. He knows it's a problem that Googlers have been treated as unicorn snowflakes with free massages and all the gourmet food they can complain about, with zero accountability for getting anything done. And despite this obvious rot, most of the world (like everybody here who dreams of a google job) still reveres Google as an idyllic place to work. Which makes it all the harder for the company to admit to itself that anything is wrong.
Cultural change is really hard. And it's not at all clear that he's got what it takes to do it successfully. Googlers are so pampered that any attempt to push them out of their comfort zone is going to get serious pushback. I say this as a former googler. There was a hilarious post on HN not long ago which I can't find where a googler said something to the effect of "no way in hell my manager is gonna make me work."
The entire company is built around solving HARD problems, not USEFUL problems. Obviously they've pulled off a lot of truly amazing things, but that difference is pretty important when your company's entire revenue stream is still coming from key insights made in the late 1990s. To me it's clear they need to change their promotion criteria, which solidifies this and drives so much of people's energy and bad patterns. But the arrogance built into the culture of "solving the world's hardest problems" means that any changes there are likely to insult the fragile egos of all those snowflakes and cause them to go on strike or make the good ones just leave.
He structured it as Alphabet. As in 26 different companies.
Google can't VC new projects with a 50 billion to play with in excess/above line revenue to fund them a year?
How does google not have self driving car revenue? They should have highway driving (as in trucks on superhighways) solved 10 years ago and been rolling in money.
How does google not have a competitive IaaS offering? How does google not have THREE competitive IaaS offerings? Buy one or two, and have them compete against each other internally and externally.
Why doesn't google have a competitive Desktop OS based on some combination of Linux / Android / Chrome and Macbook pro level hardware?
Their AI products are all dystopian.
ChatsChatsChatsChatsChatsChats.
Why didn't they buy Java/Sun. Stupid. Why don't they buy Keybase? Actually don't then the servers will be shut down.
Silicon Valley is too woke? Start new branches.
What is the biggest recent success of Google? Chrome. Why not repeat that a dozen times over? Take important Open Source software, and make it good, and don't make it utterly dystopian until 10 years later. Linux Desktop? Open Office? WINE? Steam clone on Linux?
You know, why not have a hardware division that can deliver? For IoT, Google Glasses, an actual decent phone, self driving sensors.
Couldn't agree more. The problem in Google started as soon as it went public. Then "Don't be evil" went through the window and it's all a short-sighted vision driven by making as much money as possible for investors and pay dividends.
> Googlers have been treated as unicorn snowflakes with free massages and all the gourmet food they can complain about, with zero accountability for getting anything done
As a user, and customer of some Google services, I don't care about that. They should give a pink unicorn to each Googler if they want to. These are not relevant to me, as the user.
What I care about is the stuff that I am using not getting deprecated on my face because some mba thinks that it is not making enough gobs of cash and they should shut it down and do something else that will make more gobs of cash.
Cherishing and building up user trust. That's what is missing from Google. And that's not the engineers' fault.
300k/yr with amazing perks for sitting on your ass. Lots of people think that's the best thing evar. Unless you care about, say, building novel things people actually use. Then it's a dystopian nightmare.
I mean if Google's goal is to maintain it's monopolistic lead in the search/ad space, that means gobbling up as many of the really talented devs as possible to keep them out of the hands of would-be competitors. Really talented devs want to work on new and exciting shit, so google continuously mints projects and kills them off when they are no longer shiny and new. Seems to me things are working as intended.
Lol no no, I think Tyrion drinks a lot more than Sundar... and Sundar certainly doesn't seem like the womanizing type either. But hey, I didn't know him personally so who knows.
imo, your eye is on the wrong ball. Google died when it's founders moved their attention to Alphabet. Google has moved from a bespoke kitchen to the catering kitchen that keeps the lights on for Alphabet while they build a strategy.
But how much "alphabet" is there still left, other than Google and YouTube? In hindsight it almost seems as if alphabet was deliberately set up as a pasture for the various doomed "moonshots" to die more quietly, with less impact on the main brand.
What moonshot--at least that is known about--is possibly transformative at Alphabet/Google scale? Waymo seems increasingly unlikely both in terms of time-scale and differentiation in a crowded field. And what else is there?
Waymo is very far ahead of the competition. It may be hard to compare given all the fly-by-night competitors but it has had many more years in development and the result is more dependable.
It's really hard to diversify away from a major cash cow product. Everyone else's success gets compared to the cash machine. Ask for another 30 engineers to work on a product with only 100 MM profit, why aren't you more successful?
People get wise to this dynamic and just start selling dreams. Everyone can buy into the dream of the next Billion dollar product, it's harder to get buy-in to just grind out a measly 50% YoY growth.
The fact that it can't keep doing it forever, and its investors expect that if Google is going to keep expanding its headcount and keep spending tons of money that it will produce results.
Nobody would mind if Google just printed money with ads. That is what the trade desk basically does (TTD), and it's a comparatively very small company. Google could be the most profitable company per employee in history if it wanted to, and it wouldn't lose anything from its core money-making functions. Instead, Google wanted to build a grand technology empire.
If you're going to act like a rockstar, when the lights come on, you better be dancing up on the stage. The lights are turning on right now, and I don't think anyone sees anyone dancing.
His goal was to expand Google into china [1], then he folded on that due to employee pushback. Similarly with all the other mini dramas (working with the military, "AI principles").
He may not even be wrong, the biggest risk to google is some regulator getting unhappy so playing it safe makes sense.
Here's my opinion on the role of CEOs these days, for companies that are decently strong and have stable growth.
I think CEOs are there to simply not screw anything up.
In other words, they were picked so that there wasn't someone else there who would screw up more.
They are supposed to be quiet, run of the mill, go with the flow kinds of people. This is the implicit requirement. The explicit one is, "just keep the overall revenue growth stable".
There is no requirement about "solving existing issues" because that's not part of "the bottom line" or even to land any "big wins" because growth is already "good enough" and it's better to maintain it, than risk it and lose everything.
Why this profile for CEOs?
These days, everything is amplified and the smallest mistake can mean big trouble. Top leaders are already magnets for attention due to their role, and if they start to make noise about anything even minor, it will be bad attention.
If the business is already good, "let's not screw anything up".
That's what I'm thinking. I feel that this applies to Pichai, Cook, Nadella and others like them [1]
The danger could be that the companies may become complacent and get disrupted eventually. But perhaps that is something they watch out for (maybe another part of the JD) – and they buy out any competitors that get too haughty, as needed.
[1] Zuckerberg is an outlier because look, he's still a founder CEO unlike the others, and that's because, no matter what you think of him (or even if he's a robot ;) ), he has a terrific track record in decision making. So he's there and allowed to make decisions, even high risk ones, such as the whole Metaverse invention or the stuff about culling headcount "who shouldn't be here". Though he's also doing those decisions due to privacy regulations which seems to affect the stable growth mentioned above.
Nonsense. Apple and Microsoft are both objectively thriving under their respective current CEOs, who have both made some tough calls and been responsible for important new products, and both now have sufficient road behind them that we can believe in their ability to call shots for the long term to at least some degree. These companies are not just treading water.
I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone outside Facebook has much respect for Zuck in terms of decisionmaking for products or anything else in particular. This may look different to a Facebook employee, of course.
Zuck's track record of acquisitions is genuinely impressive though. Buying both WhatsApp and Instagram was widely panned at the time, but in retrospect both were great moves, and Facebook also deserves credit for letting/making both prosper.
It seems likely here that since revenue numbers keep going up, they don't really realize that there is a problem. Why rock the boat and change anything with the culture when you can just keep collecting your bonuses?
This is the way Google works, it's their operating model. Big fanfare when they launch things so the muggles continue to believe that 'Google' is still relevant, and then quiet shuttering when the product either doesn't add to their ad revenue, their overarching interest, or it was never even meant to be a success in the first place.
There is no failure here, it's working exactly the way they planned it to.
Google sells attention. Anything else it does is flim flam to support that.
The law of large numbers. Nothing other than the core ad products makes a difference to Google. The next biggest "successes" are just things that build a moat around the core ad product.
What's embarrassing is that they keep trying other random things.
Give the money back to the shareholders and let them invest in new founders. Small team success is great for the world but impossible to care about at a Google scale.
The goal of a CEO is to bring value to shareholders. There's a lot of wiggle room as long as you're doing that. I doubt Stadia was more then a proving ground for a lot of related product verticals, and Stadia's legacy will continue to drive value to those.
If you cant understand the incentives to a thing, the incentives were never for you in the first place.
The majority of Google's income is still ads. Stadia and all others are pennies in comparison. These are little pet projects for insane millionaires, not products that solve real problems. That's what happens when you get too big, you lose focus of what's important.
>Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are?
Fighting a growing wave of calls from all political sides to regulate Alphabet and Google in the US, and paying an endless stack of compliance fines to the EU who already regulate Google and Alphabet.
I was at Google 2014-2018. It appeared that Larry & Sergey didn't understand incentives, despite otherwise being very smart guys. They just didn't seem to get it. At all. There were lots of smart, motivated people but the incentive structure was completely set up to reward launching products and moving on. Some of the Stadia folks were insanely good at playing the promo game.
There was talk about the need to "land" rather than just launch but it never got baked into the promo process (or if it did, it certainly didn't appear that way to people below VP level...). My understanding is it's still that way.
I was at Google 2009-2014 and again from 2020-present. Larry and Sergey absolutely understand incentives - one of the things that stood out about early Google (pre-2005) was just how well they understood incentives, and they were able to build basically an unassailable $250B/year business based on it.
It wasn't just Larry & Sergey either - early Google was filled with people like Craig Silverstein, Amit Patel, Paul Buchheit, Eric Veach, Matt Cutts, Peter Norvig, Hal Varian, et al who all thought deeply about just what the human consequences of a given social policy would be. Things like Google's promo & interview system were very well-designed for a company of 2000 people.
IMHO, the problem is that all of those folks ended up richer than you could imagine, which gave them the option of not putting up with the people that came after them. When the company grows from 2000 to 20,000 (which is what it was when I joined in 2009), 90+% of the people were not when it was 2000, i.e. you are outvoted 9 to 1 by ordinary people who don't think very much about incentives. If you're filthy rich, it's much easier to just jet off to some private island and let the tricky problem of incentives become somebody else's problem than it is to stick around and explain to tens of thousands of people why systems are the way they and modify them to fit the company's new reality.
I guess this could explain it. I struggle a little with this explanation though, Larry appeared engaged in 2014. The problem is big and obvious. I guess there isn't an obvious solution though, so maybe they just kept kicking the can down the road?
Anyway, good insight, appreciate it. They both always seemed like smart dudes with a blindspot. Maybe it wasn't such after all.
Larry's blindspot IMHO is that when he isn't connected to the same experiences that normal people have, his intuition is terrible (and conversely, when he is connected to the same experiences that normal people have, his intuition is awesome, which is why he was able to spot so many of the product cycles of the 00s). He was a terrible CEO, probably for this reason: he made company-wide decisions based on the experiences of the L-team. I remember mocking how the very first dictum when he became CEO was "Meetings should have a single decider and end 5 minutes early", which was probably important at the exec level but was so far removed from the problems that actually faced software engineers at Google in 2011. When you're CEO the information you get is very carefully curated by your lieutenants to produce outcomes desirable to them. Larry was either oblivious to this dynamic or powerless to change it
I guess that's interesting. Does the promotion process seem different? Ie different in the sense that you are finding yourself incentivized differently from before?
I never really cared much about promo and I haven't yet gone for promo with this new system so I can't really say. I think as far as incentives go in general nothing really has changed much, but what has changed is the amount of time we (ICs) waste on doing perf instead of doing actual work. From a manager's point of view it might be different, but for us it's more "forward" facing, we focus on what we'd like to achieve over the year and as we move forward we adjust our expectations and do regular check-ins to see if we're still on track or we need to adjust things. It feels more dynamic, but it's only been a few months so who knows.
Yup, both the mechanics and incentive structure have changed. Nobody knows the outcome yet, but the intentions were to align personal incentives with business goals. Seems promising thus far.
It does seem to be that way from the outside: tons of products launched, acquired,and then nothing happens, as they either rot or get killed after a few years.
Agreed with this take. It's frustrating to see people in this thread pinning this on Sundar. I certainly think he could've done better as CEO, but the incentive structure and culture around products was baked in from Larry & Sergey's time.
I was around during the pivot to "landings" - which didn't actually make many practical differences. For the most part people simply redefined "landing" to "releasing a product"... which was also the definition of "launching" :)
This. I'm surprised how often people try to copy Google practices because Google can't be wrong.
My bet is that Google is one of the worst places to learn anything, be it product, management or programming. You will only learn how to solve problems the Google way, and that is only applicable at Google.
It's like learning to govern from Xi Jinping. Sure, there probably are some interesting experiences to observe. But few will claim that let's say Norway will be better off implementing China's political system.
Looking at feedback loops means being honest with yourself and accepting you don't know everything. And for most people that's hard to admit. Surely if you got into Google you know almost everything. You just need a little bit of money to execute.
Only if you very narrowly define real engineering.
Google, collectively, may be among the best (I'm not hazarding an opinion) at solving technical problems.
I, however, expect good engineers to help with product vision, understanding and addressing customer pain points, and amongst the senior engineers especially, be effective at communication and helping manage upwards to achieve those ends. Somewhere, Google engineers are dropping the ball there, or are so detached from those problems that their abilities in those skills are untested.
Yeah, that's fair. I'm just trying to discern between building a distributed database system with 5 9's and writing a crud app I guess. I agree "real" isn't the right term for that difference, I don't know what is.
Nah, it's not. Consultants pump out CRUD apps with 4th rate engineers left and right.
About 10 people on planet earth could have come up with Spanner.
I'm just talking about engineering. I'm not talking about building products which get market acceptance, which is a lot more than engineering, and might be your point.
> About 10 people on planet earth could have come up with Spanner.
I'm not convinced. I've worked in many industries and many company sizes and I've met smart people everywhere. I think a lot of devs who are busy pumping out CRUD could create these kind of systems if they were in a situation that called for them (hell, it gives you a chance to actually use all that stuff from your CS degree), just as I know for sure that a lot of devs who are busy pumping out CRUD are more than capable of creating a programming language. The bottleneck isn't technical ability, it's being in an environment that will actually pay you to work on that stuff.
Some people convince themselves that Lebron isn't that good, that the guy at the high school across town was almost as good. Or that they can hit a 90 mph fast ball. Or that they could take Mike Tyson. There are all these funny stories of guys wanting to fight Mike, race Michael Johnson etc. They really just can't see how far they are away from the really freakishly talented folks.
Folks like Jeff Dean at Google are really out there. He built a number of systems that very few people were capable of. But you have to be at a certain level to even see it.
some of the most valuable companies on earth are "just CRUD apps", which was the point of the comment above. Knowing what to build is important, which google fails at in most cases. Google has incredible engineers working on stupid projects
> Running marathon is way harder than running 100m. Most people are not even capable of doing marathons.
> But that doesn't mean that winning 100m is easier than winning a marathon. Might even be the opposite, because of harsh competition.
If we go much, much farther into this analogy, it tells us that for any given agent, one of these races is always going to be much easier than the other one.
If you want to be competitive in marathons at a world level, you need to be East African. If you want to be competitive in 100m sprints, you need to be West African. Which race is easier? That depends who you are.
> "I, however, expect good engineers to help with product vision, understanding and addressing customer pain points, and amongst the senior engineers especially, be effective at communication and helping manage upwards to achieve those ends."
Not necessarily. FAANGs have an army of product/project/program managers, market researchers, and other analysts and experts to handle product vision, etc. for the engineering team. That's the big advantage of being a megacorporation: they can afford the overhead of having their employees be narrowly focused specialists.
(It's also why one sometimes see people who leave FAANGs stumble when they join a startup; they're used to having all that infrastructure supporting them and have to adjust to an environment where it isn't there.)
Yes necessarily, as I'm defining my expectations. If Google has made it so engineering doesn't participate at all in product direction, that means they're not letting their engineers work optimally in accordance with my expectations (whatever those are worth); the 'untested' case I mentioned before. Which, as you note, is why in other companies those individuals may not be as able to shine, since they're being measured against a number of other skills that form the holistic whole of "solving business problems", rather than just the subset of "solving technical problems".
And yet those minds managed to build the most hated frontend framework. Not just bad or mediocre. The most hated one.
Now, I'm not denying they are super smart. But you need a mix of book smart and street smart to be successful. Google seems to only focus on books. They are incredible at solving problems. But they suck at picking which problems to solve.
A front-end framework isn't exactly the kind of thing the engineers I'm talking about work on... there are 10's of thousands of engineers at Google. A good number of them aren't building systems per se. But if you want to learn how to build systems, some folks in there are crazy good.
Might be a bit anecdotal, but I actually hired ex-Googlers for two different startups in the past. I would be hesitant to do it again.
They can indeed be good at building complex systems.
But when we needed simple systems, they would still build complex systems.
When we needed to ship product, they would still build complex systems.
Twice I had the experience where an ex-Googler would promise to rewrite a piece of software from scratch because it had a bad architecture, only to quit/get fired few months later (obviously the big rewrite was not finished by then).
As a Xoogler, Google is an "engineering-first" company and in practice doesn't consider "product/program management" to be part of engineering. Ironically, the origin of formal methods used in program management come from operations research and engineering management -- they are part of engineering, but not seen that way at Google.
Engineering leadership is not judged for their acumen in these areas, as they are separate job ladders, and thus to no surprise there is little cultivation of this knowledge or skill.
Before ~ 2007, Google didn't believe in project managers. There were actually no project managers roles (even though some people were probably doing considerable amounts of project management) and the expectation was that engineers would know enough to structure efforts and timelines.
That evolved into a situation where program managers (mostly - programs have a sense of scale right??) exist in most orgs and are critical to keep things aligned. There were (are still?) even internal conferences just for program managers.
And when you refer to pm-Ing in this way I’m reminded of the guy in San Francisco that did all the management for a huge eve online guild and he didn’t play the game he managed all their affects in a spreadsheet and whatever they were using to chat…. And he was making a boatload of human money a month…
Which metrics would you use to compare one infrastructure to another? Or one eng practice to another.
For example I heard multiple times that in a lot of projects at Google shipping something can take months (and I'm not even talking about search/ads). Compared to let's say Github, that deploys multiple times a day.
Deploying multiple times a day doesn’t necessarily mean “slow to ship”. That’s just how fast your commits make it out. Actually shipping software is almost always not CI bottlenecked but slowed because of social problems.
People have this idea that Google hasn't ever done anything successful beside search.
Google experiments constantly and shuts down bad experiments.
Experiments that probably aren't going anywhere for a long time:
1. Gmail
2. Maps (acquisition, but did not have a web interface and was not remotely popular prior)
3. Android (literally bought before the first launched devices)
4. Play Store
5. Cloud
6. Google Pay / Wallet
Most of these businesses are larger than most public companies in the world...
Google will likely continue to experiment. People should think of Google's new products as startups - because that's exactly how Google thinks of them.
Enterprises don't want to rely on some startup like Snowflake when their 1-2 years old.
Google does a very good job of distancing the Google and Android brands from things like Stadia.
All of us on here know Google owned Stadia. We're also all smart enough to know that we can keep using Gmail & YouTube without worrying about Google shutting them down.
Since Google Wallet launched in 2011, they added a physical card, replaced that card with Android Pay, dropped NFC and limited it to Android Pay, merged Google Wallet and Android Pay into Google Pay, launched Tez in India and then rebranded that to Google Pay (which was an entirely different app than the first Google Pay), then rebranded the first Google Pay as Google Wallet, while people in India still use their Google Pay app.
I think. I still can't make sense of it.
Imagine being a store/vendor and trying to make sense of which app your POS supports while just trying to run your business, what an absolute nightmare.
I can provide a little bit of insight into the Google Pay shenanigans, though I didn’t work there or interact with anyone there.
The initial Google Wallet launch irked the card networks because they presented their own proxy card rather than a card that clearly advertised the card issuer and the network. (Oh boy do they care a lot about branding…)
I assume they dropped NFC initially because it was done with the first generation tech that was very insecure and simply transmitted card numbers in the clear. Today’s contactless tech is all EMV based, and also needs to depend on a Secure Enclave chip to be blessed by PCI; that might explain why they cut off support for a number of devices. This happened around the time Apple Pay came into the scene.
The rebranding and all that though, well, that’s Google.
Or a customer trying to figure out what the payment app of the week is.
Almost everyone I knew used Google Wallet, which was pretty nice, until they shut down the cards at which time it became utterly useless since you could only use it in the Play store. That's one reason I've never used Android Pay or Google Pay or whatever it is now. Too unreliable.
A lot of us switched to Simple for awhile, but then that went defunct too.
So now we're all back to "Are you on Venmo or Paypal or Square Cash now?" whenever we want to transfer money. And sometimes just paper checks, because ancient as that is, it's still the most reliable (as long as both people have bank accounts). Most of us now have regular credit cards for payment, which are also more reliable than any app.
> People have this idea that Google hasn't ever done anything successful beside search.
That is a total strawman. I think most people know Google has done other successful products, especially Gmail and Android.
> Enterprises don't want to rely on some startup like Snowflake when their 1-2 years old.
Actually, I think the opposite may be true. A startup like Snowflake has one business, and they are all focused on that business. They will go through hell and highwater to make that business successful. I think the biggest risk with a company like Snowflake is not folks worried that they'll fold, but worried that they'll get acquired and their "goodness" sucked out (see Figma).
With Google, though, basically nearly everything besides ads is an afterthought. Nobody trusts them anymore to keep things around. Which has the ironic effect of making some of their "experiments" invalid, because if all potential customers know it's an experiment that may get killed at the whim of whomever got promoted, they'll be less likely to try it in the first place.
I'm not a Google hater. I'm a big fan of GCP, and also a big fan of Firebase. I do get nervous, though, when I see some simple, straightforward problems that languish for literally years because apparently they're not "sexy" enough to fix. Case in point, Firebase Auth (an Auth as a Service platform) still only supports SMS as a second factor for login, despite the fact that Google itself recommends against using SMS as a second factor. People have been complaining about this for literally years, yet it's crickets from Google/Firebase teams.
Elementary component of the Android business, but well: also 2008
> 5. Cloud
2008 (also)
> 6. Google Pay / Wallet
A requirement for Play Store, but relaunch as general payment solution: 2011
Now the current year is 2022. And yes, they did improvements here and there and in cloud launched more services, but anything big new, with a chance of survival?
Amazing that anyone uses Google Drive with the horrendous user interface. Honestly File Manager in Windows 3.11 is easier to use. You can actually find out how big a directory is in File Manager!
It's been around for 7 years now with over 1B users and is directly monetized by storage space. I'm a big Apple ecosystem person and even I use Google Photos instead of iCloud so I would bet on it, yes.
Disclaimer: I work at Google. Opinions are my own, etc etc. I have 0 to do with the Photos team.
Google Photos is an amazing product, it has an amazing offering and works extremely well. It's also extremely popular and integral to the Android ecosystem. I'd absolutely bet of it not being shutdown in the next 5 years, yes.
> People have this idea that Google hasn't ever done anything successful beside search.
I don't even think that search is very successful. Pagerank was successful, and was also pretty quickly made obsolete. They still own search because their competitors died as they replaced the verb "search" with their brand, and then created a browser to funnel people into search. Search is only important because of ads. And buying Youtube after failing with Google Video, in order to show more ads. So it all boils down to buying Doubleclick, building a browser, and buying a popular video site for me. Android is certainly key in this too, but its key was somewhat in funneling people into Google's ads, but mostly preventing Apple or some FOSS upstart from getting between users and Google's ads.
Google was successful at being a significantly better search engine for a very short time. It took the money it made and bought the largest ad company. Then it vertically integrated the entire industry from OS to final purchase (with varying degrees of success) to funnel people into its ads.
The only skill that Google has is taking advantage of and creating monopoly positions, not technology.
edit: Oddly, I think that their greatest success might have been to covertly corrupt Firefox. Without that, Chrome might have ended up a largely USA-locked thing like the iPhone is. Although releasing a brutally locked down and closed mobile OS masquerading as an FOSS upstart is a close second.
Acquisitions happen all the time and later get turned down when they don't flourish. Many stories get posted often with negative sentiment right here on HN.
With a completely underdeveloped ad business, unclear if it would ever produce any significant revenue. YouTube was purchased for 1b, they cleared 28b in revenue last year alone.
In that sense Google is the Anti-Microsoft. Microsoft makes the scrappiest products but as long as they are not total failures MS is committed to them in a way that is borderline ridiculous. Google makes good products but seems to have the attention span of three year old toddler.
> Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company.
People build monopolies for the perceived benefits but this is the price you must always pay. You're no longer competing in a marketplace of customers, as you've flagged, your managers are now just competing in a marketplace of capital expenditure.
You can’t blame this on Google’s size. Neither Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, or Amazon (Disclaimer: I work at AWS) have this problem.
Google has never struggled as a company. Amazon barely survived the dot com bust, Apple almost went bankrupt and even Microsoft had to pivot or become the next IBM after Balmer and missing out on mobile.
Facebook being still founder led and having the advantage of knowing how fleeting social media networks have been in the past, keeps Zuckerburg paranoid.
Google’s ad revenue is covering up a lot of project/program mismanagement.
> Facebook being still founder led and having the advantage of knowing how fleeting social media networks have been in the past, keeps Zuckerburg paranoid.
Them going all in on the 'metaverse' is basically 'microsoft missing mobile'-tier. I'm interested in it and even still I haven't seen a single impressive thing yet. It seems like a worse product than VR second-life. They're trying to sell an MMO to people who don't play games.
The internet is already a 'metaverse', and I think the role of our digital lives will continue to expand with increasing proliferation of consumer electronics, barring a major world war or natural cataclysm. But Meta is just trying to force a paradigm shift and EVERYONE sees right through it.
It's less size and more lack of competition. As dominant as the companies you listed are, none of them completely capture a market to the degree that Google does with search and ads.
Having a golden goose that has very little risk of going away can definitely be a curse.
Google’s “market” isn’t search, it’s “selling ads” and capturing attention (mostly YouTube). Google is under assault in ad selling by Facebook who knows more about you and Amazon (same disclaimer I work at AWS) who knows your buying habits.
You also can’t block Amazon and Facebook ads.
On the YouTube side, you have TikTok that is becoming more competitive for attention and maybe Twitch (???)
Amazon makes most of its profits from AWS. It’s also making plenty of money these days from advertising.
Who gives Google money and what do they give Google money for?
When I was working for B2B companies, our “customers” were the IT department and the companies. Our customers weren’t the end users. We tried our best to make the software easy for the end users. But we marketed to the CxOs and made sure they were happy.
In the case of Amazon Retail. They (we) have to convince the customer to give us money in exchange for goods and services.
>In the case of Amazon Retail. They (we) have to convince the customer to give us money in exchange for goods and services.
Right, and Google needs to convince users to love the products and continue using them, so that ads can be shown, and maybe even despite ads being shown.
I have noticed a strong sentiment against paying for products even here on HN where the average user probably makes quite a bit of money. People would rather block ads than pay for YouTube Premium, for example. It shows me that ads are actually a pretty good business model because if "wealthy" people won't pay for products, less wealthy people definitely won't.
Maybe we're seeing different things but I do not mind it at all. It is exactly what I would expect for such a broad query. In fact, I was prepared to see way worse things.
It sucking less than all other alternatives is a pretty good reason to like it. There is a lot of vested interest in good search engines and the fact that no competitors, even from behemoths like Microsoft, have been able to do any better shows that it's a hard problem to solve.
I think a lot of people are naturally resistive to change and are stuck in the past when the web was simple and 10 links was all it took. Nowadays, the web is so complex that it's nearly impossible to tell what you want to see off a broad query. In my experience, it guesses very well and the complaints about Search having gotten worse are really complaints about the Internet as a whole having gotten worse. What used to be dedicated websites are now uncrawlable pages on a large company's website (e.g. Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, etc). I personally like all of the "onebox" results that don't require me to go elsewhere -- search has become much faster for me in that way.
I actually really don't like Amazon's retail site. It's complex and it's not clear why I see so many repeated identical items as separate listings. One a single listing, I can choose alternative sellers than the default. Is that linking to other listings or is still the same listing? Who knows. It hasn't changed or improved in decades.
Microsoft choked their lead in the console market to Sony despite being much larger with bigger pockets. PlayStation 4 and now 5 both outsell Xbox 3:1 or so despite Xbox 360 having outsold PlayStation 3 and had loyal customers. They also choked with Mixer, losing to Google (YouTube), Amazon (Twitch), and Facebook (Gaming). Windows Mobile was a complete failure. It is not a "Google problem". Google (and Apple and Facebook) hate is just trendy on HN.
Microsoft has plenty of failures, but they don't hype-and-then-dump them to quite the same extent that Google does. Look at how long they supported the Zune for, for example.
I don't know, that seems subjective. Marketing is part of every successful product so "hyping" is a key part of a product's lifecycle. Sometimes products don't catch on and they have to be killed. It's not any different than the plethora of startups that promise to revolutionize industries and fail to make a single buck. Supporting a zombie product isn't noble in my opinion. Those resources could go to trying something else when it's clear that there won't be any market penetration.
I remember back in the days you could have three or so different image viewers created by Microsoft installed on your machine (Office had its own for example). Then there was MSN Messenger, Windows Messenger, Skype, Skype for business, Lync.
That being said, I think Google far surpassed Microsoft in creating things that get shut down and have been for the last decade at least while Microsoft has improved on that front.
What things has Microsoft tried that have been outside of their four or so verticals that have been around for ages (Windows, Office, Cloud, Gaming)? Google alone has nearly 1:1 mappings: Android/Chrome OS, Workspace (Docs, Gmail, Calendar, etc), Cloud, YouTube Gaming and Stadia just died), on top of all the other products with >1B users like Drive, Photos, Play Store, etc. Microsoft even failed with Windows Mobile whereas Google has the Pixel line.
Microsoft went from “Windows Everywhere” and selling boxed software to cloud, cross platform development, Office365 subscriptions and Office working everywhere, embracing open source to the point where even SQL Server runs on Linux, Azure and gaming,
Pixel - Google sold less than 1 million Pixels last quarter
Android is not really all that profitable and Google still ends up paying Apple $18 billion+ a year to actually reach mobile consumers with money to spend. The $26 Billion in profit number was over 6 years
> Android is not really all that profitable and Google still ends up paying Apple $18 billion+ a year to actually reach mobile consumers with money to spend.
So, hear me out. What do you think Google would need to pay Apple if Android didn't exist, and everyone? Would it be the same amount as in reality, or would it perhaps be way more? Pretty obviously the latter. So that delta + Play store sales are the economic value of Android.
> The $26 Billion in profit number was over 6 years
That you think a product going from literally nothing to $26 billion in cumulative profit in 6 years would be disappointing is just totally detached from reality. To put this in perspective, in that same time period of 2009-2015 (which I assume your "6 years" means) Amazon made a total of $3 billion in profit.
A better criticism would be that the number is unlikely to be correct, since Oracle would have inflated it as much as humanly possible for the legal case. But that's not the argument you made.
> So, hear me out. What do you think Google would need to pay Apple if Android didn't exist, and everyone? Would it be the same amount as in reality, or would it perhaps be way more?
Considering that Apple has most of the affluent users in every market, would it be that much more?
Apple makes more in mobile from Google than google makes from Android more than likely.
> That you think a product going from literally nothing to $26 billion in cumulative profit in 6 years would be disappointing is just totally detached from reality. To put this in perspective, in that same time period of 2009-2015 (which I assume your "6 years" means) Amazon made a total of $3 billion in profit.
Amazon was a low margin retail company and was spending billions on infrastructure. Android already had more market share than iOS by then and was already dominant. How much do you think Apple made on the iPhone during that time period? Has Apple or any other BigTech company had to pay a direct competitor for placement?
> A better criticism would be that the number is unlikely to be correct, since Oracle would have inflated it as much as humanly possible for the legal case. But that's not the argument
That number came from Google in court and wasn’t redacted.
> Apple makes more in mobile from Google than google makes from Android more than likely.
Oh, I'm absolutely sure that's the case. But basically every business on earth is less profitable than the iPhone. Are you saying that every other product is a miserable failure due to that?
Note they're totally different businesses. Apple primarily sells premium hardware, Google primarily licenses an OS to other phone manufacturers.
> Amazon was a low margin retail company and was spending billions on infrastructure.
So? Your argument is that Android is some kind of a product failure because it "only" made $26 billion in profit in its first six years. But what you're ignoring is that that is an absurd level of success. It's 8 times all of Amazon in the timeframe. What Amazon product had that kind of a growth curve from zero, ever? I would bet literally nothing.
If you applied this logic consistently, you should be ripping into Amazon's decades-long failure at creating a hit product. But instead you're making excuses about "low margins".
> Has Apple or any other BigTech company had to pay a direct competitor for placement?
Yes, like all the time? E.g. I'm sure that all of Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have bought ads on Google and YouTube. It's not some kind of indication of business failure on their part [0]; they've determined that those ads have a positive ROI.
[0] Though obviously Amazon's search engine did fail before being killed, like so many other Amazon products.
> That number came from Google in court and wasn’t redacted.
Ok, I'll stand corrected then. But I still have no idea of anyone could argue that's a failure.
> Note they're totally different businesses. Apple primarily sells premium hardware, Google primarily licenses an OS to other phone manufacturers.
Microsoft licenses Windows to other PC manufacturers, the PC market was much smaller than mobile even back then, do you think they only made $26 billion in profit over the time period licensing Windows? In hindsight, “missing mobile” was the best thing that could have happened to Microsoft. If you were a company right now, would you rather be “Android, Inc” or “Windows, Inc”?
> Yes, like all the time? E.g. I'm sure that all of Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have bought ads on Google and YouTube. It's not some kind of indication of business failure on their part [0]; they've determined that those ads have a positive ROI.
Do you think either spends anywhere near the amount?
> do you think they only made $26 billion in profit over the time period licensing Windows
Windows was at that point a 25 year old business, not one starting from zero. Why in the world would they have the same profit in that time period? Windows absolutely did not make $26 billion in the first 6 years of its life. Does that make Windows a failure?
I have no idea of whether Windows is more profitable than Android right now. You don't either. But both are clearly incredibly successful products.
Again: what product that successful has Amazon ever launched? Just a single example of something that made $26 billion of profit in its first 6 years. Should be easy to find, given Amazon has probably launched thousands of products, many in extremely lucrative high margin areas. And when you fail to name one, maybe consider that your theories on how good Amazon is at creating projects and how bad Google is might not be entirely correct?
> Do you think either spends anywhere near the amount?
Of course not. Why does that matter? Positive ROI is positive ROI.
> Windows was at that point a 25 year old business, not one starting from zero. Why in the world would they have the same profit in that time period? Windows absolutely did not make $26 billion in the first 6 years of its life. Does that make Windows a failure?
6 years in the life of Windows , there was nowhere near the number of PCs being sold every year as Android devices.
But I can guarantee you that even from the day that Microsoft license the first version of DOS to IBM that it made more per license sold than Google makes from each Android sold.
> Again: what product that successful has Amazon ever launched?
I see that you refuse to compare Android to its most realistic counterpart - Apple.
The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and even the Apple Watch (Cook said that Apple Watch revenues exceeded iPod revenue a couple of years ago) were all more successful in the first 6 years.
The entire point is that Google hasn’t been able to diversify at all *profitably”.
> I see that you refuse to compare Android to its most realistic counterpart - Apple.
Uh, what? Of course the iPhone is more profitable than Android, and I have already said so in this discussion. If you think that a product needs to reach iPhone numbers to count as successful, I really don't know what to say.
But I note that you are indeed incapable of naming a single Amazon product that was as successful as Android, while still maintaining that Android was somehow a commercial disappointment, while Amazon is a success story. You really don't see the disconnect?
> Microsoft went from “Windows Everywhere” and selling boxed software to cloud, cross platform development, Office365 subscriptions and Office working everywhere, embracing open source to the point where even SQL Server runs on Linux, Azure and gaming,
With the side effect that anyone that cares about their career is in a position on the org chart somehow related to Azure, and the current teams taking care of Windows UI frameworks seem filled with interns and contractors, without any background on Windows tooling history, and our expectations of what they should deliver.
I don't dispute that but this particular conversation was about who creates more and who shutters more and I don't think Microsoft is a good counterexample to Google. It has created some things, it has shuttered some things, but mostly things have stayed the same, same as Google. Apple is probably the one that has created the most lasting things and continues to release new lines of products and services. Nearly everything that has launched has had lasting iterations (except the original HomePod which is a tragedy).
Microsoft's Gaming and Cloud 'verticals' have not 'been around for ages' (or maybe I'm just older). They're a relatively new* creation of Microsoft which actually do well. Now, we could say Gaming is as old as Google, so that's a wash. But Google should never have been so far behind in Cloud. It should be their native arena! It's a huge loss, I suspect thanks to internal politics.
* Gorillas.BAS and Microsoft Flight Simulator aside.
** There's the Dynamics line, which I don't think really counts under 'office' given its complexity.
Xbox launched in 2001. I would call that "ages" personally. Cloud is newer I agree.
>But Google should have never been so far behind in Cloud.
I emphatically agree. Google had kick ass infrastructure way before most players and squandered it on internal use only. I think it's one of the biggest blunders in its history and shows the lack of vision in places.
As a standard disclaimer: I work at AWS in Professional Services. What I’m not going to do is criticize GCP. First it would be gouache to criticize a competitor and second I’ve never had any interaction with GCP as a user either personally or professionally. I have had experience with both AWS and Microsoft both from an implementation/hands on keyboard developer and from a more strategic business standpoint as a dev lead (Microsoft) and cloud architect (AWS) sitting in a room with CxOs dealing with vendor relationships working at startups.
That being said, despite the old wives tale that AWS came about because Amazon decided to sell its excess capacity, AWS was started as a separate initiative with completely different infrastructure when Amazon wanted to enter a separate vertical. It was led by Jassy (not technically from a business development standpoint) - a sales guy who looked at the market and went after a need (I refuse to say by “Working Backwards”). Every initiative that Amazon and AWS has starts with the business case, six pagers, PRFAQ’s etc with product managers and program managers involved. I even had to do a couple to get “funding” to spend time on a couple of features to a popular company sponsored open source solution I wanted to work on.
Being successful in the cloud is all about building relationships, knowing how to meet large organizations where they are, not being stuck on “the one true way”, developing and grooming a network of “partners”, etc. It’s very high touch. Microsoft has been doing that since the 80s and AWS had first mover advantage.
I won’t speak to GCP in particular. But none of the above characteristics is part of Google’s DNA.
That was sort of my point. Microsoft _used_ to throw a lot more stuff at the wall and see what sticks (I am talking about 10-20 years ago). These days it seems like the effort is much more concentrated with buy-in from the whole organisation (VS Code, .net core, WSL, Azure) and users can therefore put more trust in the company to continue investing into an endeavour.
(obviously there are still exceptions to this, I have lost count on the number of desktop UI frameworks Microsoft has developed in the last 15 years...)
Microsoft is playing an entirely different game than selling loss leader hardware. They are all about subscriptions and streaming games.
Then again, look at the revenue mix of the other companies to see how well they were able to move into new markets
- Apple - phones, tablets, watches, computers, accessories, services, and even the AppleTV+ series have been getting rave reviews.
Apple Arcade even isn’t in any danger of being cancelled.
- Microsoft - Windows, Server software, Azure is a strong second, at least they didn’t cancel XBox and I bet their streaming game service will be around for awhile.
- Amazon (same disclaimer I work at AWS): Amazon retail, AWS, Twitch, advertising, Prime Video, the Alexa devices
- Facebook - FB proper, WhatsApp, Instagram -yes two of those are acquisitions. But how many acquisitions has Google screwed up completely?
And then you have Google.
- YouTube is believed to be barely break even from a profit standpoint
- it was revealed in the Oracle trial how relatively little Android makes in profit . Yes I realize the numbers are old. But what has changed since then? By the time of the trial, Android already had the dominant market share. Google pays Apple a reported $18 billion a year to be the default search engine. That has to be more than Google is making from Android per year.
>Microsoft is playing an entirely different game than selling loss leader hardware.
Same can be said for Google, right? Google is playing an entirely different game than having paid-for-products but instead funneling products into the money-printing Ads machine.
>But how many acquisitions has Google screwed up completely?
I actually don't know and am very curious, how many? More or less than other similar companies? From my memory it's not many but I could be very wrong. Firebase for example, is alive and strong and rarely gets mentioned.
I don't think every company needs to have the same type of business model. Google became popular because it made really great products that were all free* which increased adoption. Maybe some of them (like say, Search) would have never gotten popular if they had charged for it right away. I'm not convinced there's a single right path.
>it was revealed in the Oracle trial how relatively little Android makes in profit
It makes sense though, right? I don't even know how Android would make money directly (ok, I do know of ways, not sure if that's how it is) but it's a precursor for making money from the Play Store.
> Same can be said for Google, right? Google is playing an entirely different game than having paid-for-products but instead funneling products into the money-printing Ads machine.
Look at the diversity of profitable lines that Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have gone into over the last two decades and compare to the number of failed attempts that Google had at trying to diversify.
I’m sure Oracle was counting Ad revenue coming from Android when calculating profits.
Take away that search monopoly and you have one one of the most dysfunctional and slowest moving companies in tech. Which is incredibly surprising as they hire really bright people but their leadership and product direction is not good at all.
It's curious to me that there hasn't been an evolution in re-exit strategies. You want to get bought by Google, then sold by Google. Why don't we hear about something getting sold off by Google instead of just shut down? Is it just a given that if Google can't make it work, nobody can?
It's practically impossible to spin stuff out of Google because of interdependencies with the rest of google3 (the monorepo), not to mention assumptions about infrastructure. You might as well completely rebuild the entire thing from scratch.
The infrastructure problem is funny because this wouldn't be a problem if Google would use GCP by themselves. They should also be smart enough to create an export function for google3.
No other company in the world has workloads that match Google's. So there are two options. You can spend a shitload of money making GCP actually work for the ridiculous needs of google3 applications and then actually get everybody to use GCP rather that using borg directly or you can not spend that money building all the infrastructure to do things that borg already does and has zero external customers.
No. The google3 path itself is baked into so many things that it would be a monumental task to move. There was an attempt in maybe 2010 or so but it was quickly abandoned. Things are 1000x worse now.
What Google does now is just not rev the version in any repo paths. This is true of several projects that previously had versions included in the path. Now all versioning is handled separately.
There is one case: Google acquired Keyhole (Google Earth), John Hanke then built Ingress/Niantic which is a spunoff company (where Google afaik still holds some shares) doing quite well with PokemonGo it seems (while they had to stop their Catan project and killed off their Harry Potter game)
Boston Dynamics was never integrated into Google, so I guess relatively easy to split of.
Motorola is interesting, but considering it was less than a year in Google and more focussed on hardware development probably also not fully integrated and one could argue whether Google acquired it only for the patents they kept when selling to Lenovo.
John Hanke in contrast built Maps and related things after being acquired and only after a few years moved to build Niantic, where at least Ingress was developed fully inside Google (but apparently not fully in Google stack, but so that they could transition to Google Cloud)
motorola was patents ($8B in protection IIRC) + key talent acquisition (called ATG at the time). I don't think Google ever wanted the bulk of motorola's operations or rf engineering.
They bought it, stripped out the things they wanted to keep, then spun it back out.
Selling it off incurs the risk of strengthening a potential competitor. Also, in many cases at least half of the value is in the team of developers, which probably don’t want leave Google and which conversely Google doesn’t want to lose.
It also signals to the would-be customers of their other products that the service they want to sign for has a chance of surviving. At this stage I wouldn't touch any new Google service.
They are silo’d and it appears to be so bad that their organizational structure is now appearing in the actual products. Amazon and Apple (obviously more so Apple) don’t do silo’d product releases, they do product releases veiled within the shroud of the “ecosystem”.
What ecosystem is Stadia in? They couldn’t brand it right and veil it through YouTube or Google Play? You’d never shut down YouTube or Google Play, you’d just let that, you know, that “Google Play Live (Stadia)” feature quietly enter maintenance mode.
Apple won’t shut down Apple News. They’d never announce it. It’s just some product that’s interweaved into iOS. If it ain’t a hit, it quietly fades.
Google+, weave that shit in with Gchat. But no, no, it’s … yeah, it’s its own special thing. Special things get their own very special shut down.
I’m not wise like that, but if you want to try stuff to see what sticks, lay low and quietly try things. That way you can quietly cut it short if necessary.
If you enter loud, you exit loud. And if you don’t exit loud, people remember you left quietly and laugh that you entered loud.
To be fair, Stadia was an astoundingly stupid idea for Google to get into, the fact that it was ever green lit is crazy to me. It fits nothing in their business model. At least the Google Pixel showcases Android and digs deep into their AI, etc. Stadia literally didn't do anything, but maybe use GCP in some way...but they didn't do it in the way Microsoft is, which is to lure gaming companies to use the cloud for their own development. It was dead before it ever launched.
The whole point was to diversify their business model.
The tech behind Stadia is very impressive, I could play Cyberpunk 2077 on my TV/Mobile/iPAD/Mac with no lag in 4K.
Stadia integrated into YouTube could have been a Twitch competitor.
With Covid it could have been the perfect time to really launch the product when no one could buy a PS5/XBOX.
Google didn't invest in games, closed down their own game studio.
It's reminiscent of Windows Phone having no apps.
Internet performance in Europe has improved dramatically over the past year and a half. Average fixed line download speeds have increased by more than half (+51.9 percent), from 68 Megabits per second (Mbps) in March 2020 to 103.3 Mbps in June 2021.
It's not just throughput, but also latency. I'm getting 20-30 ms ping to google, which is 2 frames latency. For something like an RPG, or among us, that's probably fine. But for an FPS or a fighting game, that's a huge difference. And I live in a city center with good internet.
Honestly they just didn't have any content due to their technology choices, I use GFN all the time because it has most of the games I want to play already
they put themselves in a position where they were stuck acting like a psudo-console-platform thing needing to get developers to support thier platform
It seems to be strongly synergistic with a lot of their existing product offerings.
Getting the technology done even better means that Chromebooks and Androids (or even the browser) could be heavyweight gaming machines -- and thereby increasing those audiences.
As those audiences grow (and they're already big), having better hardware streamlined into Stadia means they immediately have insane distribution power. If you consider mobile gaming dominance in Asia, and the ability to release triple-A games immediately to a billion devices worldwide, that creates huge leverage over iOS.
Then as you said, GCP. I think someone with an idea and roadmap was there, but FAANG incentive programs don't reward people focused on the long game.
I agree wholeheartedly - I’m currently using google fi which hasn’t had an improvement of any real impact in over 3 years, and it still barely works on my iPhone. I suspect it will be shutting down soon - which is a shame, it was a fantastic idea but they launched and then promptly did nothing but let it slowly rot.
Don't worry too much, Google Voice had been in that state for at least a decade and I'm still using it. (Not official statement, just long-time GV user, if your font is large enough to read in GV app it's because I complained internally and that was the only user-facing thing I ever got to improve).
The unknown unknown is the creation of a new advertising method. I doubt that any newspaper in 1990 thought that this thing called the Internet was going to all but destroy their ad business within twenty years.
The World Wide Web is more or less dead and Google Search is increasingly useless as traffic moves to TikTok, Twitch, Discord, and other siloed ecosystems.
It's possible that purchasing a Google ad still provides higher ROI than alternative options, but I'd certainly not bet on that remaining true in 5-10 years. Google's empire is built on a foundation of sand and the fact that the company seems incapable of launching new, lasting, innovative products should have its leaders and investors quaking in their boots.
I know some of the leads. One key guy I know bounced from Google completely right after Stadia went live. This is classic Google cool tech bad business/product
Well, we also gotta look at Google's outside incentives, those of being a monopoly. At the end of the day, it's not the most efficient use of resources to innovate internally at a monopoly (better uses include M&A, competitor sabotage, and sales/marketing, which they've of course also done).
Anyways, Google I think has been trying to maintain a semblance of its early culture of innovation so as to attract talent/applicants, to not cause too much internal turmoil, and to make investors think it is still an "innovation" company. Also, because growth comes with bloat and bureaucracy, so may as well have that bloat come up with new products.
Google will never be fixed internally to be its former self or a company centered on innovation because that's just not how monopolies work... Maybe once they capsize (which hopefully they do because monopolies are toxic and anti-competitive), they can once again become an innovator, like with Apple's early capsizing which led to them bringing Steve Jobs back.
> Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products.
The thing with x amount of products failing is true. Doesn't matter if you're an indie hacker or Google. It's been shown by giant after giant releasing products and them failing. Doesn't matter what industry they're in either. That's why so many corporations just buy new products lines. They get a product that is in demand.
That's why it made sense for Adobe to buy Figma. Building a competitor would have been probably rather expensive and risky. Where instead they just buy it and have the product and the market share.
why Amazon has been buying products like Ring and the robot hover. They're in demand and Amazon just needs to put some cash behind it and it's going to generate tons more cash.
If you're wanting to build the next big thing, you've got to try building lots of things until one catches off.
Meh. There is a reason you don't hear about MS shutting down services, or Apple, or Facebook... Failing or not, you can still pivot them until they succeed. It is just Google that is shutting down everything that doesn't grow huge fast.
I wonder if Google even realises, like at Pichai level, how much this hurts them. I’m fairly sure it’s at least one important piece as to why GCP is struggling to gain market share. Who in their right mind would depend on a Google product for critical business functions at this point.
Can an argument be made that antitrust action a decade ago could have saved them billions on now-shut-down projects? If I were an investor I would want brutal focus from the top on search search search and nothing that didn't directly create value in search.
> I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether Stadia was a success long term.
apparently the product manager was Phill Harrison. He's been active in games for a few decades, so I'm not sure if this is just a pivoting move to focus the product or his exit strategy. Time will tell.
I've given up trusting anything new they make. They've shut down otherwise perfectly fine products that they could of charged some money for and I would of gladly payed. Google Talk was perfect, the UI was stale but I could log on via Pidgin. Everything that followed Google Talk was a regression is what it felt like.
There are 2 sides of the same company working against each other. There's the side that wants to create new products and then there's the side that wants to tighten costs and improve earnings. New products will always be a cost and not being able to show a profit or fast growth will mark it for closure.
I suspect that starting a new project inside google is comfortable enough that the thirst to grow and show a profit is muted. Also, I bet, the politics between departments makes it hard to do what's need to succeed.
Google should consider extracting companies into their own entities rather than closing them. Or creating an incubator where they keep a big percentage of the company and let the companies grow or die as the market dictates.
Google's primary job should be to provide resources to scale up business models that are working like they did with YouTube.
>> I have no doubt whoever launched [project name] got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether [project name] was a success long term.
Same story in every company I've worked in. It's like the time horizon only goes as far as the next quarter.
Something I'm still hung up on about the "promotion then bounce" strategy is wouldn't having a history of launches followed by fizzle-outs actually look bad on your resume?
Sure, they launched Stadia and then went somewhere else before it failed. So the strategy works at least in the first transition. But wouldn't this become a barrier to further growth, when people can see that they have been leading failed projects?
> Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company
No no, please don't restructure, wreck the company, that's fine.
Or more realistically, the worst offenders are not going anywhere and Google is going to be okay (Search, Maps, Play, Ads, Analytics, Fonts, Chrome, YouTube, ReCAPTCHA…).
Genuine question to the Googlers here: how do OKRs factor in the misaligned incentives internally? in other words, are OKRs a good idea badly executed, or just ineffective period?
The crazy thing is if they delivered on promise it would have been huge. If you made games a part of the internet the way videos are they would have nothing but advantages.
Google kind of reminds me of IBM in the early 90s before Lou Gerstner. IBM built segments of its business around the fact mainframe money would keep pouring in.
If you go on any website that uses adsense, Google's real customers are using their services on you. The rest is just to feed the beast. I got suckered, I loved my very early invite only Gmail account. Not sure my protonmail isn't just more of the same performative 'i'm a techie and using the fashionable thing" but can I ever escape that?
Same on gmail early invite... and totally same on *IF* i trust protonmail... which is HQ Swiss... and if you know anything about swiss history, they are not to be trusted. (this may piss ppl off, but its true) -- however, I do trust (currently) protonmail.
but yes, we need to avoid being naive to "technically arrogant"
I'm not sure how bad this is. I think it's good that they like to try new things. They couldn't do that if they committed to supporting everything they start indefinitely.
try new things under a different brand name that doesn't taint everything related to Google if you want to experiment
Google shutting down consumer products hurts Google Cloud in many developer's minds. Doesn't help that Google Cloud itself just as frivolously deprecates products or APIs that people build their businesses on. And customer support is equally terrible across the company
Examples of Google Cloud sunsetting products? As far as I know it's very rare that they do that.
Killing consumer products, and quite possibly launching products that flop in the first place, or their failure to make their consumer products appealing over time, really rubs off on Google Cloud though, you have to keep repeating to yourself that Google rarely kills its Enterprise offerings
Edit: not to say anything about Workspace, you can be essentially shut down for nothing. But there's a wider problem of major email providers behaving like a cartel in basically only accepting email from one another.
several other examples as well, but the worst thing they do is very frequent breaking API changes which force companies to do maintenance work to adjust to Google
I believe you when you say they play fast and loose with the APIs. I've mostly suffered from the lacking documentation for the SDKs, they are often autogenerated and just plopped out there, with mutually contradictory sets of documentation scattered around the web.
I think ads are the equivalent of resource curse [1] for Google. It is so successful that it is kind of like oil gushing from the ground funding all sorts of inefficiencies that otherwise would be unsustainable.
Sundar Pichai has been destroying the company from inside out since he took over as CEO.
But all of that has been masked by the fact that he's been aggressively pushing the ad team to keep increasing the revenue each quarter - and he's been "successful" in that.
But all of that is killing the company both directly (too many damn ads in Google products these days), as well as indirectly (not having a good vision for all of the other products, destroying the "don't be evil culture" that make Google great and beloved, and so on).
Of course by the time this is obvious to Google's board, Pichai will already be a billionaire himself if he isn't already, so who cares what happens afterward, right?
Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. No serious business or developer is going to trust them. If governments get serious about ad regulation and damage their cash cow, Google is in trouble