I have a different theory about the cause of the decline.
Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to zero. It turned out hiring great programmers wasn't enough by itself, not many amazing new products were happening. That's what caused Google to change culture toward the corporate norm: the non-normal culture wasn't proving itself.
It reminds me of Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night". When you're young, that book is a tragedy of broken love. But when you're a bit older, you realize it's a tragedy of ambition, of a man who dreamed of becoming a famous psychiatrist but it just wasn't working out, year after year after year. And it wears on him, drives him to drinking and divorce. Simple as that.
That's the impression I have. I remember a little over a decade ago when the population at large was completely hyped about all of the world changing technology we were going to see coming from the moonshots at Google X. The excitement over Google Glass, the mystery over the Google barges. Eventually, people started wondering when these hyped up products in development were going to actually become products[1]. Not it seems people have forgotten about it in general, and the exciting stuff is likely to come from other companies.
I don't see people commenting on this a lot when they lament the former Google. There seems to be a lot of personal reasons why people prefer how the company used to be run - it was fun, we spent lots of time on side projects, the company had free stuff all over the place, it felt like a fun college and not a job, etc. But little reflection on how productive the company was being.
I do wonder sometimes if a Jobs (or maybe an Altman or Musk) is more valuable than people realize. People like to say, "But those people don't even create anything, they're just taking credit for other people's work!" But just letting smart people gather and work on pet projects doesn't seem to work particularly well either. Maybe having a headstrong product oriented person upstairs is useful/necessary.
I think you could go further - the old Google culture was not great at teamwork, and most definitely not when teams crossed boundaries with third parties, where they would expect to be dictating reality and struggled when this wasn’t possible. (Credit where it is due - certain people in the Android group worked this out and changed their tune, and much money was made as a result).
There are limits to how much tiny teams can do and old Google was pushing those limits too often.
Part of the function of a Jobs type character is to be the defining asshole in the organization that no one has a chance of defeating alone.
Absolutely. My outside impression of current Google is everyone is at war with everyone at their level. Get promoted and it's war with a new level. Your success at a given level is based on your ability to persuade the level above of your use to them ascending further levels.
It's tempting to blame Sundar for this, but he is the result of this game being setup that way in the first place, and he simply eliminated all possible other contenders, now using the viper pit around him as a moat.
What amazed me was how long it has taken most Googlers to notice that actually their VPs were at war with each other to a ludicrously counterproductive degree, and they were all being used as pawns in this. I heard some stories (and the post linked to here alludes to some) which are just off the charts craziness, and yet many are seemingly oblivious.
They fixed the VPs but they're way too busy to appeal to, even when they agree with you and everyone was told as much. And now you have extremes of rest-and-vest and "if I get the Visibility(tm) for this, maybe I'll get one more promo..." behavior from the L7s and lower.
Just having the power isn't enough. Nobody respects pushovers. Think of "Asshole" in corporate leadership as "a show of force" that earns begrudging respect.
But to your point you can earn respect without always being an asshole, or being one for no reason at all.
I think Jobs as an example here is confusing, because he's noted as being an asshole and also an asshole, so people will read it your way and people will read it the other way.
I wonder what it is about leaders like Steve Jobs that makes them popular despite how programmers working for them know the guy in charge has never written a line of code.
Is it charisma (whatever that means)? Is it vision? Is it luck and being at the right place at the right time? Is it a few devoted loyal programmers who spread the word about how amazing the Führer is?
I often think it also has to do with the person positioning himself/herself in crowds that appreciate/respect/value him/her. For instance, it's hard to imagine someone like Jobs at an Oracle-style corporation, or imagine Elon Musk running a bank. It seems like these types of people soon understand that certain groups match their "vibe" better, and it works as a positive feedback loop for them.
I don't need to know anything about masonry to respect a skilled mason or for it to be mutual. Why would it be any different for a programmer and a leader? I don't know much about programming and avoid it at all costs [0], but all my programmer friends appreciate insights I have when they bounce ideas off me.
> I wonder what it is about leaders like Steve Jobs that makes them popular despite how programmers working for them know the guy in charge has never written a line of code.
People want to believe in the genius that conquered the world, because it gives them the impression that success is a function of individual agency. It is much less impressive to hear that some world changing product was made by hundreds of engineers who all have been in the industry for decades working late nights on boring engineer stuff. These Jobs like figures are then chosen by the masses, because they are the only ones putting themselves out there and thus receive a disproportionate amount of the credit.
How do you resolve that with the fact that the same hundreds of engineers doing boring engineer stuff nearly bankrupted the company before they brought Jobs back?
Some of the groups that kept Apple alive were also among first to axe.
What Jobs did fix (and some claim it was due to getting bitter pills few times before returning to Apple), was to play on the feelings when you buy apple gear. And that you stopped being important the moment you paid, though some support orgs were on life support until income stream became just too stable to worry.
> You may want to watch [1] Steve Jobs Insult Response. And you can imagine most people are the guy asking that question.
Yes, but not every CEO is able to give the response he gave. At least, he tried to connect with the developers. When was the last time Google's CEO interacted with devs?
This Q&A is the evidence for why I think many tech people underestimated him, and as you observe such unfiltered Q&As do not occur with other tech CEOs, though he was not CEO at the time. He's not 100% right about how things would go, but he was a lot more right than anyone else proved to be.
Some of his answers to the really tough questions are not stellar, but Apple was in a truly terrible state at the time, and there were not nice answers to give. The fact that he stood there ready to take the hits spoke volumes though.
Exactly. Most people on HN dont commenting on Steve Jobs not only has never worked directly with or under him. They dont even bother to actually research into his real personality. Instead they rely on hearsay or very selective reporting or comments.
And if people hate him as an CEO so much, then no other CEO in tech history would get the pass mark.
I think it's literally just notoriety. There's collaborative and visionary leadership styles but nobody bats an eye because there's no conflict. People just work and its another Tuesday. Product gets delivered. Everyone moves on.
If the only X moonshot that lands is Waymo, I think that still counts as having a transformative impact.
But also, Transformers were invented at Google, even if they were given away and not commercialized.
I think there was plenty of room for the “old Google” to change the world, if they had not sold out / commercialized. Imagine what 20% time projects could have been created around 2017 with a modest TPU budget per employee?
You have observational bias based on the things that you are interested in and observed as an outside observer.
The real innovation at Google is internal and invisible to you -- often secret, maybe kind of boring, but totally transformational. It's infrastructure and its support. And all those moonshot things and stuff were mainly PR, sideshows, and not the primary focus of the company's brains.
And they ke thing is Google doesn't/didn't have to be productive" for these moonshot types of projects. As a % of headcount they are fairly low, even. The real money comes from ads ads ads and always will. The rest (non-ads/non-search) of the company is there to capture SWE headcount from the rest of the industry, not to produce monetary value for Google. The ad revenue firehose is so incredible that it was inevitable it would turn into a swamp of misused potential like you describe.
The real innovation in Google is the stuff that people on this forum don't see. Because it's mostly secret or invisible. It's giant data centres using a pile of custom technology to eek out massive throughput, more fiber and Internet backbone than you can imagine. And the SREs and ops people who keep all this stuff running.
All to keep that firehose running. The rest is all sideshow. I was a SWE at Google, but the real talent there is SRE and infra development.
I’m biased, as I am guessing you are too, but there is at least some innovation in infrastructure at Google outside of search and ads. Spanner, Borg/Kubernetes/GKE, PAAS, BigQuery and the successive internal query systems just to name a few. Sure many of these were funded by ads or motivated by their problems/use case originally - you’d expect that of a company that started with search and exclusively made money from ads for a long stretch - but they’ve all been developed to solve for many for workloads now, and even made available for external consumption as infrastructure products. For some they have made huge impacts on the entire software industry.
That said, yes there are a lot of SWEs and projects that are wasting engineering talent.
I’m guessing you were closer to the hardware than me, and also left at least several years ago, but I’m under the impression that the rest of industry has mostly caught up to where Google was in DC tech. They’re still at the tip of the spear with things like ML and unmatched in sheer scale, it’s just that the rest of the world has had a lot of time to play catch up.
Yeah I tend to think of all the core things you listed as outcroppings of search and ads :-) They're infra needed for that.
(I worked the first couple years in display ads, then some time on Jetstream/Google WiFi then some very brief time in Fiber, then many years in DSPA/Nest, and then for my last year in some Core stuff. So I only got to really use Borg & friends for the first two years and last year of my time there. Left two years ago.)
How do we break ads for Google? More generally, what do we do to make ads disappear or weakened? I guess that's the only way current Google would want to innovate more.
It’s like an Oil Rich Nation. Pumping oil is the only thing they know. They’ll build shiny cities, crazy buildings, and fund moonshots. But nothing else will compare to the profits of oil/ads, so nothing else can possibly matter.
The only big oil economy that isn’t totally dependent on their energy industry is the US, and only because we had other natural resources that allowed us to diversify early.
To divest Google from ads they need another source of infinite cash. If you can discover that, it’s way more valuable to you on its own instead of within Google. Maybe they can find a few thousand smaller side businesses to supplement revenue, but they’ll always be individually disposable (as we see now) and subject to cancellation.
I don't really care if Google innovates. The good thing that is coming out of these layoffs and recent departures is that talent locked up in Google will scatter out into other places, instead of being locked up inside. In the long run it will be good for the tech industry.
> People like to say, "But those people don't even create anything, they're just taking credit for other people's work!" But just letting smart people gather and work on pet projects doesn't seem to work particularly well either. Maybe having a headstrong product oriented person upstairs is useful/necessary.
I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was? Put smart people in a supportive playground and harvest the cream off the top? Lasers, MOSFETs(?), UNIX, C, awk, all those came in one way or another from there.
Methinks Google got too impatient. Something like "hey we launched Google X, build it and the inventions will flow" but the Bell Labs model requires something Google was and is constitutionally incapable of rewarding: iteration, time passing, just plain putting in the boring work, year after year.
Google is forever more in hyper growth mode, like birthing a baby that doubles its size on X months. But an 8 year old is not double the size of a 6 year old like babies do. And same for a 10 year old, you need another 8 years (16 year old) to approximately double the size again, and that process assumes constant focus and maintenance of growth attempts so that the body doesn't have stunted growth.
Google seems to be great at launching new products, then utterly fails to iterate them, because of new shinyism or internal promotion incentives or something. I suspect that bled over into Google Labs / X / other company initiatives.
> I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was? Put smart people in a supportive playground and harvest the cream off the top?
Was it? A lot of people here think the transistor was one of the most important inventions to come out of Bell Labs. Here's Wiki's description of its creation:
> In 1945, Bell Labs reorganized and created a group specifically to do fundamental research in solid state physics, relating to communications technologies. Creation of the sub-department was authorized by the vice-president for research, Mervin Kelly. An interdisciplinary group, it was co-led by Shockley and Stanley O. Morgan. The new group was soon joined by John Bardeen. Bardeen was a close friend of Brattain's brother Robert, who had introduced John and Walter in the 1930s. They often played bridge and golf together. Bardeen was a quantum physicist, Brattain a gifted experimenter in materials science, and Shockley, the leader of their team, was an expert in solid-state physics.
> According to theories of the time, Shockley's field effect transistor, a cylinder coated thinly with silicon and mounted close to a metal plate, should have worked. He ordered Brattain and Bardeen to find out why it wouldn't. During November and December the two men carried out a variety of experiments, attempting to determine why Shockley's device wouldn't amplify.
It hardly sounds like they just gave a bunch of smart people a playground and told them to have fun. The problem with many historical examples is that people sometimes only pay attention to the fun parts they want to hear (a lot of focus was put on engineers and they were given some leeway) and often ignore the hard work that went into it (a lot of management, structure, and focus). We get left with overly simplistic solutions that sound wonderful, but then fail when people try to implement them.
One thing everyone here always forgets about places like Bell Labs and Xerox parc, was that it was NOT a monoculture of developers working on things. These places encouraged collaboration between many different disciplines. They encouraged diversity.
What turned me off tech culture is not just that tech companies became more like banks. It's that there is a monoculture of thought, and highly arrogant thought at that. It's the place where developers are royalty and everyone else is regarded as mouth breathing servants. Of course, most companies, for damn good reason, are not structured with developers running everything, and so you get a constant stream of toxic comments complaining about how every other role at the company is useless and holding back the oh-so-brilliant developers.
That's not diversity, it's not inclusion, and it's not a recipe for actually changing the world for the better.
> I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was? Put smart people in a supportive playground and harvest the cream off the top? Lasers, MOSFETs(?), UNIX, C, awk, all those came in one way or another from there.
In a somewhat-parallel to early Google, it's worth noting that Bell Labs was funded by, and operated in service to, a near-total national-scale monopoly. When that monopoly was deconstructed, it triggered a decline in the output of the research organization as well (there's a clear decline in the ground-breaking output of Bell Labs after the 1984 Ma Bell breakup).
The book "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory describes how the Labs was working.
The last chapter tries to figure out why it was working and one of the conclusion is that the Labs was always guided by the long term idea that it might help the telephone company (and that the breakup removed a) the long-term funding b) some kind of direction )
Bell Labs worked during the Cold War, in a Keynesian economic system. They were focused at fundamental technology, not in creating an end-user service to conquer the world.
Bell Labs did that, but they worked in service to the rest of the Bell system that was precisely targetting "creating an end-user service to conquer the world". Citing Bell Labs as if they were "an entire company" is misleading - they were the R&D wing for what was essentially a monopoly in telecoms.
> I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was?
More like Xerox PARC. I wish we could re-create the secret to how productive that engineer playground was. Yes, Xerox HQ (across the country) had little interest in monetizing their output but as an invention factory it was an immense success and we use their ideas every day.
But did Bell Labs put those out as products? There are things that have come out Google (Kubernetes, their contributions to Linux and containers, gRPC, HTTP/2-3, Bazel, Go, compression, etc.) that have been similarly useful for others to build businesses on, the same way Bell and Xerox's research stuff became the foundations for other things outside of those companies.
But the discussion here is around Google's inability to create good products, so I don't think the comparison is apt.
This is the real core of the problem. Bell Labs was populated by hackers who were perfectly content to earn double to triple what an average factory worker was getting for less toil while doing cool shit. FAANGs became too profitable and attracted people who would have been finance bros in the 90s. Engineers expected to be compensated like quants and directors like portfolio managers. You don't get a Skunk Works or DARPA from that. Moonshot basic research like that may or may not make money. Your fundamental motivating force has to be doing cool shit, not getting rich. If you want something like Google X to work, the culture has to be such that no one is going to jump ship when Netflix offers to double your cash compensation.
How do you get this? I don't even know. As far as I can tell, a lot of 20th century Skunk Works and Bell Labs type of stuff was motivated by heavy government investment and individual patriotism in trying to outdo Nazis and Soviets for the sake of free civilization. Bell himself was an interesting case. He only invented the telephone in the first place as part of his research into helping deaf people and he invested most of his riches from the invention back into research for helping deaf people. He rather presciently never even owned a telephone and refused to allow one in his personal workspace because of fear it would distract from the work.
Well one component that has changed there is that the marginal tax rate on the inflation-equivalent of a Google Director pay back then was 80-90%, so there wasn't really a point in enticing people with large salaries.
Also, the factory workers you mentioned could afford houses in a big city on a single income. Now a single FAANG eng struggles to do the same unless they get N promotions, and even moreso if you tack childcare costs on top.
You make a lot of good points, but was the failure of Google moonshots really the fault of the workers who were easily lured by comp, or management who were impatient about seeing material results? Seems like either could have been chasing higher returns.
Initiatives like Google Fiber flaming out were certainly not the fault of anyone at the company. Maybe for drastically underestimating the difficulty of the problem. Actually, maybe that’s a reoccurring issue with these moonshots.
I try to look at systems level more than blaming certain individuals. I'm sure a lot of engineers working on Google X projects honest to God cared deeply about the specific problem they were tackling. My own wife was once pretty close to taking a job there. But unless they're going to donate labor by working for free, they can't fund the projects themselves. The company has to be willing to lose money on most if not all of their work. I guess that worked for a while when ads were so profitable and no one else did them well enough. I may be misremembering my history, but as far as I understood, Bell Labs had to do this kind of public good work as a condition of being granted a national monopoly.
At the cultural level, though, during periods like the space race and cold war, there seemed to be a national zeitgeist such that companies, their owners, their directors, were all willing to sacrifice some profit to serve a common national mission. Maybe it was just the fact that the CEOs had grown up in a time when food was rationed and factories were ordered by federal fiat to produce war materiel.
I don't actually think this type of culture is completely dead, for what it's worth. But it's not exactly in vogue. I personally work in defense, I served in the Army, and I make more than enough money but quite a bit less than Netflix likely would have paid me, but I work on products that serve US strategic interests. Entire companies exist explicitly for this purpose, but they're not Google scale and never will be. I don't think very many people on Hacker News would even consider this good, though. Witness the backlash to OpenAI even being willing to work on military applications at all. The readership is so cynical that they can't imagine a military serving any purpose aside from valueless destruction. In the 20th century when militaries saved the world from German and Japanese conquest and mass genocide, that kind of thinking was a lot less prevalent.
I also don't think these are the only two options, either. People can also be motivated purely by the science itself or by the global wellbeing of all mankind. I just don't know that, historically speaking, those bring large-scale resource mobilization to bear quite as well as getting rich and ensuring the continued strategic dominance of a way of life represented by a country of birth you deeply believe in. As people come to believe less and less in their own countries, we seem to be left mostly with getting rich as the only viable option.
If I had to guess, it's because from the Iraq War to modern day border theater, popular image of the military ain't what it used to be. It also seems like tech intended for defense is adjacent to civilian intelligence and law enforcement use, of which there is also cynicism and fears of surveillance- see Palantir viewed as the commercial equivalent to PRISM, for instance.
The public has had substantial loss of faith in its institutions in the past couple of decades, and the military is not exempt from it. America's foreign policy has come a long way since WWII.
But I don't think all is lost. I'm pretty sure solidly civilian organizations like United States Digital Service and 18F have good reputations, much like the Postal Service does. But all of them receive a pittance of investment compared to defense spending.
And growth is not just in physical size but in intelligence. 40 year old me knows a whole lot more even than 20 year old me thought he did.
Sustainability is hard. Would Google still be a favorite if it had never gone beyond a handful of products? Well never know, but has chasing new shiny worked out?
Having someone with a strong vision to rally around and attract others with similar views probably works wonders in itself. This could be someone powerful at a large company attracting like minded employees, or a small company whose founder and mission mission attracts specific hires, which explains to a degree some of the performance of small companies (or lack of performance of large ones if you see it that way).
Maybe Jobs' strength was that he had strong visions in multiple areas, and was able to have a few different stacks of people really in line with each and keep them moving separately?
> The market, made up of a lot of people, seems to think the richest man in the world is pretty valuable.
By the same logic, our biology must think cancer is pretty valuable because of how many resources it dedicates to feeding cancerous cells. Wealth and value are not correlated.
When you really analyze at how many/most of the richest people in the world got so rich, they tended to extract (i.e. more parasitic) much of the value rather than create (i.e. more symbiotic) it. They have also often done so at the direct expense of others simply so they could have more... when they already had much more than they could ever use. Our economic system allows for this, but to praise these folks for much of what they did leaves a bad taste.
How is the market saying that the richest man is pretty valuable? Because the richest man owns a significant number of shares in a company the market deems as valuable?
What should one do with power once one has it? After immaturity wears thin, what should one become? The most simple answers seem to make an effort to hold onto power, expansion of power seems a method but I think popularity might be a greater preservant which in turn depends on what one chooses to become. Gluttony, specially on it's own, is pretty useless to everyone else. You could convert popularity into power, it isn't a net gain necessarily.
I suppose the todo table could have many columns. What are the great unsolved mysteries or challenges? How useful are they to humanity? How hard are they? What does it cost? How does one sort the rows?
Say each human is assigned a column with the value of the todo item. Most fields would be empty. We would need a column with virtual min-max values.
Then, while expanding the data set, you dump it onto the internet, sit back and eat popcorn for a while?
Your theory doesn't match the timeline. Under the engineering first strategy, Google became the juggernaut it is today, with products like Gmail, Maps, Street View and of course Search.
Unfortunately, the approach doesn't work for all product categories. Product design, usability, simplicity, and sheer style were not the forte of the Google of old. As a result they saw themselves fall behind Facebook in social, failed to stop the tsunami that was iPhone, could not compete with Amazon in e-commerce, and ceded heavy ground to it in home automation.
But Google still wanted these things and more, as all exceptionalist mega corps do. So they did the unthinkable. They handed the decision making back to the same product and business overlords that they had once shunned.
As someone who has one foot in engineering and one foot in product design, I know how important product experts are in producing well loved, intuitive, and incredibly successful experiences at scale. However, you can feel it in the experience as a user when the product team is given the keys to the kingdom and left unchallenged. The product becomes soulless and vapid. It loses it's charm and abandons it's loyal customers when the wind shifts even slightly.
I'm not placing the blame solely on Google's product apparatus, quite the opposite. It's clear that it's engineering apparatus has become so careless, so content with the status quo and the cushy paycheck and perks, that they don't push back anymore. Whenever you use a Google product as a software engineer and you wonder how it's possible that its blatantly obvious failures made it one day in the dev process of a company that apparently prides itself on hiring only the best engineering talent, know that it's not that these people aren't smart, it's that they do not care.
It seems likely that Google incentivizes it's engineers not to care. The engineers get the crazy salaries and all the perks, they don't get to decide things. If you want to decide things, get promoted into product. You don't want to do product? You actually enjoy writing code? Then don't complain when your opinions and concerns are deferred. You could have switched to the business side, made less money, and hated your job.
Google used to be an amazing engineering company because it promoted an atmosphere where engineers wanted to care about what they were doing. They have been unable to sustain that dynamic as they tried to make the company good at things that were not engineering, and as a result, the engineers just don't care enough to save it anymore and you can feel it every time you use a Google product.
“Product design, usability, simplicity, and sheer style were not the forte of the Google of old.”
This is completely wrong. Their style was deliberate indifference about aesthetics, but their products (maps, search and gmail in particular) were absolute masterpieces of product design when first launched.
Search was a product designed by two engineers. Maps from 2005 was a very sleek product, but at the time there were no competitors on the web, and now Maps is so ubiquitous, and requires such an insane data investment, that we'll probably never know the ideal Maps design, because every competitor out there is still catching up. Their primary advantage was the money they threw at mapping data and the ability for them to give it out for free.
Gmail was not actually a particularly elegant product design, it offered an escape from spam and manually managing your mailbox storage. Back then, if you used a free email experience, you were bombarded with banner ads, had 100MB of storage, and 99% of that was eaten by the spam sent directly to your inbox. Features are not product design.
Chrome might be a good exception, though. I still get the sense that it was primarily driven by inspired engineers. The reason for Chrome's success is probably not it's innovative design (it was it's performance), but it certainly was an incredible advance.
> Maps from 2005 was a very sleek product, but at the time there were no competitors on the web
Mapquest would beg to differ. To me, the interface was the killer feature for Maps. The data and trip planning functionality existed already on the web (as my print outs of driving routes in the late 90s can attest to). But being able to just scroll around a new city was amazing. Every other site required clicking through every North or West button with a round trip to the server.
It wasn’t until later that the satellite data and street view data became the next killer feature.
If I remember my thoughts back when Gmail was launched I was clearly awestruck. Gmail showed what was possible to do if one had fast internet connection. All those little interactions enabled through ajax! I think it was the first time, atleast for me, a product was as good as a desktop app w.r.t interactions and usability.
For comparison, with Yahoo mail one had to hit compose button and wait for a few seconds for compose window to open up. With Gmail it was extremely nifty and nearly instantaneous because I think it was done clientside and Ajax.
You seem to confuse graphic design and product design.
Product design is what something does, how it is structured and how it behaves to user interaction, _and_ how it appears, not just one of them. GMail was almost to email what the iPhone was to smartphones.
The primary reason for Chrome’s success was literal billions of dollars in pervasive advertising (I remember years of Chrome TV ads and billboards), ads plastered all over Google’s products saying “better in Chrome”, and product bundling into many many pieces of software a user might download (e.g. Acrobat[1]). That’s not to say that it wasn’t a technically good product, but it wasn’t so much better than the competition that it would have got to the market share it has on its own merits.
Honestly I feel like I am in a parallel universe with ideas like this.
Chrome was dramatically faster than anything else (thanks to v8 which was a total revolution for js engines) and each tab crashed separately, with far better security than other browsers of the time. On Windows (and initially it was only on Windows) this was a big deal and so it displaced a huge proportion of the tech aware userbase very fast, permeating out from there.
The billboards were a thing but not what drove initial adoption to critical mass.
Totally agreed. I remember the first couple years of Chrome, and I didn't work at a tech company at the time, but everyone did work in front of a computer.
It was remarkable how quickly Chrome spread among the employees. Nothing to do with advertising -- just that it was so much faster and the whole app never crashed.
Whenever you heard someone cursing because their browser had crashed and they lost their tabs and immediate work, someone in the next cubicle would go, "why aren't you using Chrome?"
It really was that simple. It was all word of mouth.
Also because Firefox had become bloated and clunky at that point, Chrome was much more lightweight and zippy. It was Mozilla’s complacency that ceded their position as the alternate browser.
Firefox wasn't "bloated", it had a whole ecosystem of browser extensions that HN types loved which by the nature of the extension model ran synchronously with the UI and often stepped on each other's toes, broke on updates, and led to terrible memory leaks.
They were then screamed at for being insufficiently "complacent" when they tried to fix those issues by changing the extension model.
Wasn’t FF getting long in the tooth by 2008, slow and dated? I didn’t have any extensions besides uBlock and Firebug and it didn’t feel as fast as it used to be. Wasn’t that the whole point of project Electrolysis?
I think the two viewpoints are compatible. The "PM takeover" was indeed a very distinct event, and the precursor of today's problems. I think the reason that takeover was allowed to happen is because engineers-in-charge wasn't bringing enough results, like I said. Maps and Gmail are good success stories but they happened many years earlier.
Yes, but Google as a business felt like they could do no wrong, like they were the best at everything, and failed to see that they threw the baby out with the bathwater while trying to chase product categories that weren't in their DNA.
Ah, if that's your point then I disagree. There is no "DNA". A big tech company can and should try to do many things in many markets, look at Microsoft. When they started with Basic interpreters, or even when they launched Windows, would you have said that Xbox is in their "DNA"?
Perhaps DNA is too strong a word, because it would seem to imply that change is impossible. It's more that Google executed the changes badly, after the "PM shift" as we're calling it happened, they continued to fail to see growth in these new markets, and failed to address exactly why that was. Instead they simply got very good at unlaunching their failed products.
All the while, the shift in the company began to dull the sharp edge that was their core competency: engineering driven products.
It is odd. It all stems from this idea that engineers make ugly products but that's just not true. I do think some engineers are more well versed in design than others though. I will say the ones I've met who are well versed in design are prone to doing odd things when comes to stuff like storing data. Like they won't know that area well and will introduce slowness or delay which also kills the product experience. I think like anything to be successful you need a high functioning team w/ various specialties, oddly enough I'm not convinced you actually need a dedicated "product" person.
I guarantee you that for most flaws you find in the product, somebody knew about it and cared about it, but fixing it didn't make the chopping block for the release.
You make some very good points. Just two critiques:
> Under the engineering first strategy, Google became the juggernaut it is today, with products like Gmail, Maps, Street View and of course Search.
Just by definition search predated any culture or strategy at Google since its launch came before any hiring or incorporation. Certainly it was refined and maintained well for years but I’d argue this is an exception to the culture as refining and maintaining things well are not regarded as Google’s strong suit. Search dominates revenue in a big way so they had to do that for search and made it happen.
And a second bit of pushback - Maps, Gmail and Street View were certainly best in category from a user standpoint but my impression is they are a rounding error when it comes to revenue (actual businesses success) compared with search. Maybe this has changed. But assuming it hasn’t, a common critique of engineering led orgs is that they tend to stop at technical sweetness and fail to fully follow through on delivering great businesses and all that entails (revenue, support, incremental evolution, maintenance). That shoe seems to fit.
My theory is any engineer led organization is doomed to fail because the STEM education does not include professional communications, and as a result any engineer led project and organization has communications issues that ultimately lead to failure. Quality communications is so critical in any collaborative, it is simply amazing an emphasis on communications is not a part of technology development - where "new" and "how" and "what" needs to be continually redefined. While a "project manager" is an individual specifically selected because they have quality, or at least better than the average engineer, communication skills. It is no wonder engineers and developers dislike project managers: they run communication circles around their developers, and the developers do not have the training or skills to compete, so they lose every debate, including those they should win on facts, but they can't convey their points, so they lose, and we lose.
Engineers would win many more arguments if that was their full-time job. Who has the energy after completing a blitz to solve a highly technical problem by deadline to debate a PM who has spent months cooking up a product story?
My degree required a communications course, and a full year senior project course that included pitching, design documents, and demos. My understanding is plenty other universities require similar courses.
Furthermore, even if that were true, companies (especially ones like Google) look for project and product managers that have CS degrees or other STEM degrees.
Personally, my frustration with project/product managers often comes from (ironically) underspecified requirements and highly unrealistic deadlines. Neither of those I consider a failing of their education or skills, but a failing of the company's reward structures.
Those under specified requirements and unrealistic deadlines are both the outcome of poor communications. An adept communicator is able to identify and convey the critical importance of correctly defined requirements. Likewise, such a communicator addresses unrealistic deadlines and explains the reality to those that need such explainers why their unreality is impossible, and they thank the good communicator for their honest language rather than any form of negative reaction. Such is the power of quality communications. An unrealized super power that actually exists in our social civilization.
There is an entire college of communications devoted to the power of persuasion via language, professional communications, and media. Software developers culturally ignore that entire school of thought, to our determent.
I agree, I’m just wondering why other STEM fields don’t seem to have this problem or at the same level. I’m guess it’s the hubris of being the hotshot new lucrative world-eating industry.
"However, you can feel it in the experience as a user when the product team is given the keys to the kingdom and left unchallenged. The product becomes soulless and vapid"
Wow. Incredibly that there are people who think this.
So only an engineer with no product team input can build products with a soul? Really?
Yep, this is my intention. Good product is made via collaboration between the people writing the stories and determining the overall experience and the engineers that make it happen.
I would add that in the development of the best products, the engineers don't merely implement, they also invent new features and whole categories of services.
Completely agree with this. Did you work at Google?
Let me explain this a little more in concrete terms: are you passionate about what you do? Do you have pride in your work and want to create great, valuable (to users of course, but also profitable) software? You will probably dislike working at Google.
First, if you’re an engineer, you’re basically not going to be empowered to make important product-level decisions on anything people care about until you’re a well-established L6 or L7. Even then, you’re more of a voice in the room with the Product Managers and Directors/VPs (you might have 5 directors+ VPs who also are on your product) and business stakeholders for the little chunk you’re actually responsible for. Google is extremely hierarchical, not just in terms or a deep org chart but in empowerment, for a variety of reasons I won’t get into. Nobody will listen to you or care until you’re at this point, your ideas and suggestion will be treated like a child at the Thanksgiving kid’s table asking for a glass of wine.
Ok, so become a product manager. Well then you have to deal with the fact that you are amazingly constrained by things outside of your control, like the headcount and capacity of engineering teams who have to handle a bunch of internal migration bullshit, want to refactor or rewrite something for no business reason except because it’s easy coasting material, and handle requests from a dozen other PMs. You have to deal with a ton of bureaucracy and process bullshit just to get your product ideas turned into reality. You have no idea what’s easy and what’s hard because engineering at Google is different than at other companies (the “impossible” is just hard, but the “easy” is also hard). You’re not empowered to step in and code and design even if you can and want to. You are gonna spend a lot of time writing SQL and docs nobody cares about and still need to make it to a high “level” to matter.
Well what happens if you do get to that high level? Then you’re in charge of a million and one things and mostly doing performance management. You don’t have time to care about a product - you are the gatekeeper of it and can have strong opinions, but you simply do not have time to be passionate about it, because you have too many responsibilities and are too far removed from the actual work/product/users. You still have a deep management chain above you to contend with, you play political games for HC and need short term wins to secure it, you’re probably in a different stage of your life where your passion project is either career (not product) and/or family.
It’s still a great place to learn, the pay and benefits are still good, you still probably get to work on something cool. But your ambitions and passion will be crushed unless you can endure a decade+ of being a ~nobody. If you truly want to build something amazing you’ll have to go elsewhere.
Much of what you wrote here seems familiar with those who work for LARGE orgs or companies. The individual simply cannot have much influence when your org is > 10000 people.
I suspect the thing unique to Google is how (or so I hear) the technology stack is more or less a monolith, always designed to scale, and you can't (or are discouraged to) start "small" projects, so you're basically stuck with the huge orgs and don't have a choice to run/join a relatively small and isolated operation where you have more control.
Calling attention to this specifically, because do we want a single 'Google' to have foothold on every ground? Innovation needs a healthy dose of competition, after all.
From the outside it seemed like Google 20-25 years ago cared more about making good things than they cared about making money. Which counter-intuitively is why they made so much money, people trusted google. Somewhere around the doubleclick merger or the IPO that changed. When google launched Gmail people were paying for invites on ebay. Changing your email address is the biggest pain in the ass in digital life and Google had people paying for the chance to do it before their friends. That would not happen if they launched something new right now.
After a decade or two of trading goodwill for short term gains no one trusts google, and pretty much only use it because they think they have to.
Well, that was what made Google in the first place. That's a hell of a lot of proof.
What didn't work out was endless growth for the stockholders and "winning in every market".
I'm not sure when companies decided they can't just be fucking happy in their domain (and make the same thing, improve it slightly over time, sell it with a profit, and go on), and have to "win every market" or squeeze that market to death (probably around the time healthy profits became secondary to stock performance and enshitiffication began), but I sure wish we'd go back to before that.
Absolutely. And don't get me started on how M&A has created an absolute monster of technical debt that stares you in the face as a user. Many might disagree, because the trillion dollar veneer Google can throw at things obscures it, but it's there.
I used to wonder why Google moves so slow to add features and get literally anything done, but after experiencing the monumental screwup that is Google's underlying unified payments infrastructure, it's become pretty clear. The engineers are spending too much time mucking through the garbage left behind by M&A tech merging and code left behind by hotshot college grads on their way to early retirement at 25.
Joined Google relatively recently and have also worked in/with the payments infrastructure. Couldn’t agree more - absolute nightmare to work in and it’s a small miracle when anything gets delivered at all.
As far as I can tell, seems to be a lack of a cohesive vision from leadership and an absolute willing ignorance of existing challenges, as you’ve mentioned.
OK let me share more detail. My personal account has 2 payment profiles, one that is individual and one that is an Organization type with just my name which has a Public Merchant section. The second one clearly came from some kind of long retired way to accept payments via an older iteration of Google Pay or Google Wallet, that I didn't end up actually using, and which has long been removed from the platform or failed to migrate to the newer Merchant Center, and as a result I cannot remove it or manage it in any way except to edit the name, address, and credit card indicator in use. Merchant Center declares that I have no Merchant Center account.
90% of my personal Google services appear to be tied to the organization one for some reason, but a few recent ones from the Google Store are now tied to my personal one, meaning I need to use the profile switcher to access and manage them. There is no way to move subscriptions between payment profiles and the only option is to close one which will terminate the services immediately and remove the billing history. The one I should remove is the Organization one, as I'm not an organization...
-.-
Meanwhile, I have a single owner LLC that had GCP projects in play before the company was founded. I had tried to set up two separate GCP billing accounts, one owned by my GSuite admin and one owned by my personal account, to bifurcate the projects that fell under the new company.
Somehow that resulted in the one and only payment profile associated with my GSuite business GAIA identity being that same organization payment profile from my personal account! So I can see and manage personal subscriptions on payments.google.com. There's no way to change this that I'm aware of short of working with GSuite support.
You can in fact make a new payment profile, and Google says you should do this when you move to another country, but the help docs themselves note that your existing services will continue to charge on the old one. Which I guess means you are expected to cancel all your Google services, delete your old payment profile so that you can sign back up for all of them in the new payment profile manually, and lose all history of your previous payments.
So there's Billing Accounts which point to Payment Accounts, and Payment Accounts which point to Payment Profiles. In true Google fashion, there's a tooltip on the Payment profile ID which says it used to be called Billing ID. That's not confusing at all.
This is just a few of the utterly baffling things I found while trying to work this out. It reminds me of how PayPal has active subscriptions that it's UI literally cannot manage because they are too old and were incorrectly migrated from one of the zillions of older M&A subscription products that they merged in in their history.
>How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?
Parent is not talking about Google employees caching on Google stock.
They're talking about acquired company founders, getting the acquisition money from Google and retiring (or having the money to do show) through their "exit", while living Google with shitty startup code, created in "startup mode" with no regard to the future, just to ship, patch it to get enough traction, and exit quickly.
>* How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?
levels.fyi reports a L4 averages $270k/yr at Google. Can sock away a whole lot of that pretty fast.
$270k in the Bay Area is not retirement at 25 money unless you’re that Googler living in a van in the parking lot, or your retirement plan is living simply in a poor country. It’s a fine living, to be clear, but in a high cost of living area you’re paying high rent until you can buy an expensive house, etc. and the American healthcare system alone means you need to have millions saved as a buffer against illness over that kind of timeframe (kinda hard to re-enter the workforce at 40 with cancer when you realize your cost projections were optimistic).
>It’s a fine living, to be clear, but in a high cost of living area you’re paying high rent until you can buy an expensive house, etc.
You don't need to live in a high cost of living area, except if you're competing American Psycho style.
You could live where the other 95% of people working in the Bay Area live.
I'm pretty sure that the baristas serving those Googlers in cafes outside the Googleplex don't make $270K a year, and still get to work in the same area.
If that means more commuting, that's always an option. People commute 1-2 hours per direction too, to make $50K, I'm pretty sure a 20-something making $270K can handle it.
Heck, even a daily two-way Uber would be totally doable, and other expenses added, they'd still get to save over $150K per year still.
I could imagine that one problem with “ideas to win” in general is that companies like Google often attribute their initial success to some skill, which they then try to replicate.
I wouldn't say creating something like Google search is purely _luck_, but having the right skill and hitting it at the right timing_is indeed a big component of success
And, one of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards for the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it. And I made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. - Steve Jobs
To me Google is simply a technology company, and are constantly innovating with Technology and looking for uses cases with the new tech they have. Apple, or at least Steve Jobs' Apple because the current Apple is looking more and more like Google. Are a consumer company that identify a problem and work backwards to look for a technology solution.
Unfortunately, it turns out Technology, Business, and Consumer understanding is an extremely rare set of combination.
I think the main problem is because the reward from your innovative ideas being successful was not tied to the team members own rewards. Startup founders get crazy rich or get nothing so they will do their damnest to get their ideas to deliver value and capitalize their value.
All the researchers at Google still keep their jobs and salaries if their ideas/projects fail. And if they succeed they might get a promotion and a bonus, maybe, and probably only the top people behind the idea/project.
I might be weird, but I want to fix bugs and reduce tech debt, but the company actively discourages me from doing so. Yes, I wouldn't be producing amazing new products but I think that's better than building something and killing it a year later. I'd rather have fewer products of higher quality, but no one gets promoted that way.
What successful product have they launched since 2008, when they embraced DoubleClick’s management culture? Ads bring in a lot of revenue, scaling with the general internet-using population growth, but they also seem to have made Google’s management incapable of thinking about products which are not immediately, wildly successful at selling tons of ads or harvesting data for ad targeting.
It’s fortunate that they’ve been able to sustain the ad business but the billions they’ve spent developing new products nobody wanted to use had given them the air of decline, our age’s IBM where they have a lot of existing users but few people expect a new success even if the finance guys reliably get fabulous bonuses.
That is from an user perspective. From a shareholder perspective they are doing just fine.
Yes, from an user point of view, Google sucks. But it's making money. Probably it's hard for a company to achieve behemoth status and still do nice things.
Your original claim wasn’t scoped to shareholder returns, but even as a shareholder (which I happen to be) throwing away their reputation & goodwill is a concern. Only a few businesses like ISPs have something like a natural monopoly insulating them from the long-term impacts of that loss. Saying it’s doing fine sounds a lot like the people saying it was good to have accountants in charge of IBM in the 90s, who were right until it was too late to recover.
The problem isn’t just size but business model: Apple does much better because they have never lost track of the need to have each user actively choose their products. The ad business is different since, say, a Maps user is not who gives Google revenue and that makes it easier not to respect them, with consequences which are not immediately coupled to revenue.
> And… infrastructure projects and unglamorous projects went wanting for people to work on them. They had a half day meeting to review file system projects because…it turns out that many, many top computer scientists evidently dream of writing their own file systems.
Absolutely agreed. The mythology of engineer driven innovation only applied to the brief birth of the web and even then it was more product vs programming, yt for example.
> When you're young, ... But when you're a bit older, ...
I remember when I was really young I thought batman (the original series) was an adventure show, but watching years later as an adult... lol, it was a comedy!!
The very premise that a single company should have as a goal to "win in every market" is problematic to its core. Can you justify this premise and how it relates to your assessment of Google?
Odd, it one mention of ‘hunger’ that I’ve seen in this discussion…
Bell labs, Watson labs, others all had hungry researchers that were passionate about an area of research and simply needed the resources to realize it. That is all, and guess what, they churn out some pretty damn amazing research. Almost like clockwork. Turning that in to an actual product? A product the market wants? That is a whole different can of worms; that doesn’t diminish the research though, and when it’s really done well the research trickles into many products.
A very wise episcopal priest told me once that you should seek discomfort, too much comfort leads to complacency, too much suffering leads to anything that feels like it can end the immediate pain, but just a little discomfort and that’s where you learn, are challenged and grow. I think it is generally true. ESR wrote I the Catherdral and Bizaare that an “itch” is the source of a lot of great software. I’m not disparaging anyone, but you have to wonder when a single “engineer” can earn $120m+ from a company without delivering a product or world changing research. It’s hard to imagine that there is a lot of hunger there, it’s also hard to imagine what some of the really hungry folks that make a lot less than 1% of that think there.
Not saying it can’t be fixed, I expect google to be around and make a lot of money for a long time, but it will be different.
The situations are nothing alike. At the time bell labs was making all of its world changing inventions, AT&T was a regulated monopoly that was only allowed to live if they made their research open and not compete in adjacent markets.
I have another explanation. Lets start with what the article says, but doesn't explain:
> And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives.
My theory is A/B testing or other research led then to short term optimization after short term optimization:
- a new design was tested that made ads more like ordinary links - profit increased (I am not saying this was on purpose to trick people, only I think experiments were made and their results guided the design)
- research in some form or another showed that most users reacted positively when search was made less hard core by removing or significantly reducing the effect of search operators like doublequotes
- etc etc
- meanwhile content farms and more legitimate web sites on the other side were also experimenting
- at some points the old engineers started to leave search and indexing and indexing deteriorates
Still everything worked for a while:
- DuckDuckGo were still worse and did all the same things: didn't prioritize results correctly, ignored search operators etc.
- Same goes for Bing until GPT
But at some point Google has optimized its result and its workforce to where we are today:
- results are as bad as the search engines they replaced
- the once clean results have been optimized step by step until most of the page above fold is ads
- search operators are gone
- and meanwhile Kagi and others have snuck up and snatched us that used to tell people to use Google
Google is a sad mess now IMO, but I guess every step on the way to were we are today was a measureable improvement.
While I can’t really objectively comment on the development of the quality of search result over time, one is for sure: the amount of data Google has to process and the amount attempts to influence beforementioned search results have grown a couple of orders of magnitude since Google’s creation.
2. lots of the problem (first page of results filled with ads that looks like content, including spam in the results and not giving us a block option) are not related to scale
3. Smaller (search.marginalia.nu) and larger (kagi.com) competitors keep demonstrating that it is possible to implement doublequotes correctly and not include results I didn't ask for - even in 2024.
For 2 it is related to scale. Because of their scale Google is targeted by spammers the most. The smaller searches don't need to fight off bad content because it's not targeting their specific algorithms.
Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to zero. It turned out hiring great programmers wasn't enough by itself, not many amazing new products were happening. That's what caused Google to change culture toward the corporate norm: the non-normal culture wasn't proving itself.
It reminds me of Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night". When you're young, that book is a tragedy of broken love. But when you're a bit older, you realize it's a tragedy of ambition, of a man who dreamed of becoming a famous psychiatrist but it just wasn't working out, year after year after year. And it wears on him, drives him to drinking and divorce. Simple as that.