Ian's post is pretty incisive, although I've read so many of these over the past 15 years or so. And the prescription is always to go back in time.
I don't really think that's possible. When you're a newcomer, a disruptor, the whole point is to be different. You're bold, you have a clarity of purpose, you say things like "we're building a new kind of a company" or "the user comes first."
But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. It's no longer "why wouldn't you try this" or "let's do the right thing." It's "why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have?" It's not just about profit. Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.
Risk tolerance aside, your organizational structure ossifies too. When you have people who have been running processes or departments in a particular way for fifteen or twenty years, they have little desire to start over from scratch. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, because what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the future of your job?
I think the only comedy here is that Google looked at these old-school companies like Microsoft or IBM and figured they can be different just because they "get it." And then, over time, they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way.
When I was an intern at Google circa 2010, there was a guest lecture from a business professor who described exactly this process. At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." But literally every single prediction of his came true, and I witnessed some of them happening in front of my own eyes even in just the months that I was there (and certainly in the years that followed, though I was no longer with the company).
On paper, Google's throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks strategy (that has lead to a substantial Google Graveyard) seems like it was intended to allow for some parts of the company to innovate while keeping the core products stable and boring. In practice, many of those innovations (Google Inbox, anyone?) were not deemed profitable enough to keep around. Others were never given the resources to grow beyond an experiment. And even with a long leash, a big company project is never going to innovate as quickly as a startup.
This year, however, with the extremely deep cuts to Google's internal incubator (Area 120), it seems pretty clear that they've given up on this strategy, at least for anything that isn't somehow AI-related.
It's worth noting that was a turning point: the "more wood behind fewer arrows" policy adopted by Larry [1] initiated the die-off cycle of Google products. Prior to that, as far as I am aware, they were much more tolerant of products staying around in a mature-but-not-wildly-successful state. Afterwards, it seemed as if they would only keep things that maintained a trajectory to become as successful as their core products.
Again, this was not entirely unpredictable. While I don't remember the details of that lecture, I remember the professor calling out these sorts of big shifts in cultural values as being typical of startups transforming into large companies. And Larry himself was part of the transformation, turning into (presumably, what he believed to be) what was needed to lead Google into its next stage as a large company.
Every time a socket is instantiated, Sun Microsystems comes alive; so too it is with NFS, and many other core technologies; there is lots that's left of Sun which still makes it live, even though it doesn't officially exist any more.
And any time 0xide Computer ships a cloud in a rack with the Helios operating system powering it, Sun Microsystems shines bright as a beacon of indestructibility due to quality.
They made - and still make - one crucial error: you need to spin those projects that are simply viable out immediately after they take root. Otherwise you will end up with the brand advantage but there will always be the pressure to use the resources (people, mostly) more efficiently in terms of ROI. And so nothing ever lasts and slowly but surely your reputation as a reliable partner for new products is eroded.
You can use your main brand for the launch, but then you have to be willing to support the child.
In addition, I don't understand why they stopped them entirely, instead of spin them off as subsidiaries under e.g. Alphabet; make them financially self-reliant, have Google/Alphabet as the main shareholder, and give the people that worked on it (and whoever else wants to) the opportunity to continue working on the product.
Some wouldn't have been viable, sure. Others were probably too ingrained in Google's hardware/software ecosystem to be separated out (although I wonder if nowadays everything Google runs on its cloud offering, which would make it simpler, just change the billing).
Most of them were probably built on Google's core infrastructure in ways that make them difficult to externalize at sub scale. There's also compensation disparity - it's virtually impossible for a new startup / spinout to pay FAANG comp and remain profitable & nimble. This results in braindrain.
The reason is quite simple: why spend engineering headcount on a less successful product?
> Some wouldn't have been viable, sure. Others were probably too ingrained in Google's hardware/software ecosystem to be separated out (although I wonder if nowadays everything Google runs on its cloud offering, which would make it simpler, just change the billing).
Google Cloud is built on top of Google's tech ecosystem, not the other way around.
Because things need time and alignment of incentives between creators and consumers and if you interfere in that relationship all the time things will never ever succeed. The last thing any project needs is an investor with a majority interest that fucks up your plans all the time, can take your employees away at will and can axe the project at any time because it doesn't perform according to their metrics.
That's why VCs take a minority stake in start-ups. The trouble usually begins when the founders dilute to the point that they no longer have a majority.
Assignment: Consider Agilent, itself a spinoff from HP, also spun off four (I think) companies, because they were good businesses but distracted the management.
Is this the right strategy? I'm tempted to say Yes.
I understand what you're saying (I miss Inbox, too). But end users like sameness and "it just works." Normies prefer stability over innovation when they are trying to get stuff done.
Inbox was not deterministic. It's like a social media feed for your e-mail. I'd rather have my mails left as-is, and allow me to work with them the way I want.
You don't have to be a "normie" to appreciate simple or old fashioned things. Most of the e-mails I receive is not for quick-consumption, and I prefer the standard way over Inbox's way.
Maybe it was a solution trying to find a problem, IDK. I used it for 30 minutes tops.
Thing is, they quit on it too quickly; sure, a lot of people would stick with gmail, but others - and following generations - would adopt and grow up with inbox.
I think / suspect that many people develop habits of this type in their 20's and never move away from it for the next 60 years because it works. Example, people who still use vi(m) / emacs. Nothing personal, but as an example, they use it because they're used to it and have been for decades. And no editor that claims to be better will ever replace it for them.
Gmail settings still look like they were made in 2001. Any UX designer will want to pour Clorox into their eyes by just looking at it. Remarkable how Google can just totally ignore it, but then again - email is a very specific product. Once you grab your market share, we are locked in into our emails.
I mean that incubator was a total waste of money. No one did anything, everyone was a bser from the top, and 95% of the projects were total failures. I think there were maybe 3 "successful" projects.
I joined Area 120 with huge skepticism. It was hamstrung and inefficient in its own ways. And I agree it didn’t reach its potential - largely because it was encased in Google 2020 instead of Google 2007.
But to my surprise almost all of the projects were impressive, well-conceived, promising bets. And the people in Area 120 were among the top 10% of Googlers I worked with in my decade at the company.
Google killed Area 120 because of bureaucracy and politics, full stop. Google is worse off because of it.
Somewhat spicy take - if the people in Area 120 were among the top 10% of Googlers you worked with, they probably weren't the right builders to start a new vertical.
Most of what makes people effective at large companies is neutral or negative value when applied to very early-stage companies.
You’re not wrong. They were among the top 10% of people I worked with in terms of passion, commitment, and creativity. They weren’t among the top 10% in terms of their skill in navigating Dilbert-land corporatism.
A significant number of the people in Area 120 projects were folks who were stifled and/or wasted in their previous Google jobs. One explicit purpose of Area 120 was to prevent the loss of these entrepreneurs to outside startups. Not incidentally, this was a form of cultural reinforcement - Area 120 burnished Google’s reputation as a good home for entrepreneurial mindsets.
I Don't think hoarding is necessarily the right word. They were using them to research potential new products or tools. The theory being that if only a few of the projects prove high value then it's worth it. That's not hoarding that's letting them flourish.
1) in the case of Area 120, this is one of the ways it was pitched to management. “Passionate entrepreneurs are leaving to work on new ideas; if you give them a place inside Google to pursue new ideas, it keeps them and their entrepreneurial energy at the company.”
2) in general, early Google used to hoard talent all the time. The founders would keep great people (or their friends) on payroll for ~ever just to have them stick around. That was most prevalent in the first decade of Google’s life, to my knowledge, and mostly applied to very senior people.
By the time Area 120 was pitched and approved (circa 2014), those days were largely gone. Area 120 was primarily filled with junior people (L4-L6) and constantly had to sing for its supper - it was not at all a sinecure.
That assertion applies to the middle 80%, IME. The top 10% are the people you can drop on to any project of any size and any org structure and they adapt quickly and deliver. They adapt themselves accordingly.
> That assertion applies to the middle 80%, IME. The top 10% are the people you can drop on to any project of any size and any org structure and they adapt quickly and deliver. They adapt themselves accordingly.
These are rather the top 10 % sycophants, not the top 10 % researchers or top 10 % programmers.
3 successful projects can totally justify what you call waste of money.
I sometimes wonder what people expect innovation is. You try and try and try. One thing is good and you must know how to use it - it can make history.
If I understood right, chatgpt comes from one of such ideas.... so the question is also: who evaluates the ideas? How come that Google was not able to capitalize on that idea?
So yeah, instead of treating the cause they treat the symptoms, like usual.
I think this is why these teams are really hard to have in a mature org. In reality maybe 5% of projects in one of these innovation orgs is actually great! But it’s impossible to evaluate and everyone else is thinking some variant of “this team is able to bs and show no value, while I have to hit real goals or risk being fired?”
I think the incentives would have to be much different for it to work (e.g. much lower base pay + higher rewards for success)…..but at that point just join a startup
Which 5% of projects are really great? In my experience, presuming you have tight filters such that all of your projects are plausibly potentially great, you really don’t know until you try. That’s the point of an incubator.
It’s not that hard to evaluate when something is working (ie the hard part in evaluation is false negatives, not false positives).
In Area 120’s case there was no coasting - if anything there was a hair-trigger standard to shut down underperforming projects.
I think these type of teams are a good way to give talented devs a break from the grind at bigger companies, even if the chances of a new product is low.
Not every company can afford these "paid vacations", but they do have some use at times.
> at least for anything that isn't somehow AI-related.
If you can't innovate at the base level of app design .... how do you have any hope of innovating for AI apps that require research/engineering/product/marketing collaboration?
That's true. What they need is what they had started doing, i.e. breaking down Google into Alphabet and letting some companies within the conglomerate act like startups.
Why was this effort unsuccessful? Perhaps they were unable to get rid of middle management? I have had lengthy discussions with employees from several of their companies, e.g. Calico, and that seemed to be the case. This article only reinforces my view.
If I recall past discussions on this topic correctly, it wasn’t just about profits. I believe the incentive structures are setup around launches and not maintenance. If that’s correct, then that would lead to people launching, collecting rewards (bonuses, promotions, etc) and then abandoning.
At roughly similar points in their lives, Microsoft and Google initiated video gaming platforms. Microsoft stuck with Xbox through seven years (iirc) of still-unprofitable growth to what it is today. Google abandoned Stadia after three years.
Yeah, I think Google is looking more like an IBM in the long run, while Microsoft manages to innovate despite its age and size.
There was a really interesting interview [1] with Astro Teller, the head of Google's moonshot 'x division', in 2016. In terms of project selection, he focuses on trying to dismiss projects early on, by looking for reasons that a project might fail. And even rewarding employees for scrapping things early on. That doesn't sound particularly unreasonable, but it largely just amounts to a conservative planning process. So then what exactly is the difference between a 'moonshot' and a regular new project?
And so when you look at this sort of selection process it ends up being unsurprising that Google's 'moonshots' ended up being things like Waymo, Google watches, glasses, drone delivery, and so on. One of the largest companies in the world, with some of the deepest pockets in the world, and their 'moonshots' are things dozens of other companies are building as well. It seemed quite telling of the present and future of Google.
Did Astro Teller have any successful project? A lot of money was spent, but what are the results? Looking at the wikipedia page it seems this whole Google X thing is a place where senior people have fun, while the rest of the company is undetstaffed. (E.g. no money for human customer service)
And those that were building were basically doing research, not refining a product that had achieved product market fit. The gp makes it sound like they were manufacturing widgets. The existence of others in the market is better described as “other people were also able to attract funding for the potential payoffs in that field.”
It demands that google’s mopnshots need to be something no other investor has considered.
The same comment translated to 1965 — “The US is trying to get to the moon? Well Russia is trying too. So I’d hardly call it a “moonshot” “
(Edited to change typo of “potential layoffs” to “potential payoffs”, possibly more fitting though)
This is not accurate. Wiki has a pretty reasonable page on self driving cars here [1], but you can also look to what led Google to go for Waymo to begin with. [2]
Levandowski had already created a self driving motorcycle for a DARPA challenged in 2004. In 2008 Discovery contacted him for a show about it, but being unable to lend them the vehicle - he instead built a new self driving pizza delivery car for them. He asked Google if they wanted to participate in the show or get involved in self driving, but they were uninterested due to liability. After they show aired and went off without a hitch, they decided to get involved.
I once noted that several of my coworkers and I had created a silent conspiracy to get a certain manager to clearly and concisely state her very bad ideas in front of the entire staff.
This was not news to one of the other two people. He confessed he was doing it “for sport” and thought we were in on it. Only sort of.
I think this statement might have been his little way to entertain himself.
can you give a few examples of what kind of bad ideas? like everyone should do all nighters or let's use email as the only login, no need for password for the first iteration, we will fix it later, or ... ?
It’s been long enough that I’ve successfully blocked a lot out, but it all kind of started because she put some terrible bullshit velocity graph up in a staff meeting that made our good weeks look like bad weeks and bad weeks look good. Derailed the whole meeting as people explained project management to a project manager.
Then the next staff meeting she put up the same graph. We explained five better ways to display the data.
All summer long, same graph, every meeting. At some point the relationship died.
She seemed like a nice person one on one, at least as far as I could manage to connect, but something happened when she got into a room of people, and we didn't have enough rapport for me to influence her to be more on-message with the lead devs in private.
Mostly we talked about her marathons. As an ex-endurance athlete I could at least live vicariously and get her animated.
There’s a great book by the guy that wrote The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel that is out right now and I’m really enjoying it. It’s called Same as Ever.
Because what never changes is humans and our source code, our DNA. Expecting Google to not turn into IBM is like expecting wings to sprout from our back. The great delusion we tell ourselves is that each business is different, but each business is powered by the same human engine. That engine evolves at a glacial pace on an evolutionary time scale. When I read about the Dutch East Indian company or a guy in Mesopotamia that can’t get good quality copper from his suppliers and his servant was treated rudely, it’s all the same.
I don't think it's literally impossible to avoid the same mistakes as our predecessors. But I do think that the default position that "oh we modern innovative companies won't end up like those stodgy old companies" is a recipe for repeating history. As they say in AA: the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have it.
Because yes by default you will absolutely repeat history unless you acknowledge that those old timey crazy people were fundamentally no different than you.
> I don't think it's literally impossible to avoid the same mistakes as our predecessors.
Our predecessors didn’t make mistakes; they made rational choices that led to outcomes we don’t like.
We (for some subset of us that become business leaders) will make similar choices that those who come after us will view as mistakes.
They will rightfully think that we made the “same” “mistakes” because our rational decisions will be made in response to similar pressures.
For example, we are going to make short term optimal/long term detrimental decisions, just like our predecessors, because we are subject to the same demands from investors for short term gains and from our leadership to hit short term goals in exchange for increased compensation.
Things tend to repeat but it's not completely impossible to have large and lasting changes.
Ursula K. Le Guin used to say how people thought inescapable the divine rights of kings.
On the other hand, Google did change the world. Everything's just more mature nowadays. There's less blue ocean in its business segments.
I wonder if a company could stay "evergreen" by constantly finding new business areas and somehow spinning off old ones? Apple for example almost died in between before really coming back with the iPhone.
Humans have great capacity to learn from our mistakes. Our source code or DNA have no encoding related to running business in a certain way. We mourn old google the revolutionary place, the likes of which could not have existed 100 years ago. But we forget that it was such a revolutionary place that its mere existence was an anomaly of sorts, and also that it spurned us to create several such new places, and that learning will continue us to create many more.
> At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative."
Yes, but how did everyone listening fail to notice that he winked 3 times in a row, paused silently for 30 seconds and looked disappointed when no one seemed to catch on?
Absolutely. And I'm sure the talker had a "<wait for laugh>" in their transcript, which they had to quickly skip since people were taking it seriously.
I can see this happening. Same as how "don't be evil" was a joke outside the company (cause obviously an evil company would say this) but taken seriously by some inside.
To be honest Google scrapping the "don't be evil" mantra was quickly followed by Google beginning to behave substantially less ethically. In retrospect it's hard for me to argue that it didn't work.
This is called Scumpeter's creative destruction (to be distinguished from other creative destruction) and why large companies may lose the ability to be innovative and compete
However. it's hard to see Google's core business dominance, search and ad, to be destroyed very easily. It's also super confusing that no other entity has been able to create a matching service and we do not have search duopoly similar to Visa Mastercard.
People are already lamenting the lack of useful results in Google Search, and adverts aren't returning as much value as they used to, and there's been a rise in modified client apps without ads as a reaction to ads being spammed on certain services.
I'm not sure what you mean by Visa/Mastercard duopoly, there's a lot of regionality so the picture could be fsirly different depending on what you have in mind.
To me Bing as a minority competitior in search, and facebook on ads for instance would be candidates to the same kind of duopoly.
Yeah, it's hard to go back to wading through SEO-optimized BS after just getting a decent answer (which, to be fair to the AI-sceptics, you do have to think about before using blindly).
It's an interesting mental shift - I wasn't googling because I wanted to find a web page, I was googling because I wanted an answer to a question. An AR or mixed-mode personal assistant is going to be a game changer.
This is also where the paid search engine comes into play. I get to pin Wikipedia so it’s always at the top whenever it’s relevant to my search, and there is almost zero SEO spam. And no ads.
I use a mix of that and chatGPT together depending on the specific thing I’m searching for, and it’s truly better than even the old Google.
Is that because ChatGPT returns better results, or because when it returns results, it wraps them in words that make you feel more
comfortable accepting them as better
For me it's because ChatGPT ignores less of what I type than Google currently does, plus it doesn't return spammy SEO results.
Google has become a search engine for advertisements, "People also ask" snippets, shopping listings and SEO spam, in that order. The rest of results is just a bonus.
Even stupid things like searching for the Wikipedia entry of a movie or TV show has become super difficult with Google lately, because Wikipedia is often buried. Apple's Spotlight is better for that.
> Even stupid things like searching for the Wikipedia entry of a movie or TV show has become super difficult with Google lately, because Wikipedia is often buried
I'm always amazed to see claims like this, given it's not how my world works at all. Picking some random popular favorites: searches for (verbatim) "Loki", "Hunger Games", "Oppenheimer", and "House of Usher" all return a wikipedia entry in at worst the second spot (generally behind IMDB, though Oppenheimer and Usher showed the real man and the short story ahead of the films, not unsurprisingly).
I mean, sure, there are glitches with all products and nothing is beyond criticism. But "Google buries Wikipedia results" is just beyond weird. It really seems like HN is starting to develop an "alternative facts" syndrome, where the echo chamber starts driving collective memory.
I had the same problem. Less with missing Wikipedia results, but I was definitely getting the first page stuffed with crappy SEO results and ads. I switched to DDG a few months ago and I'm finding the experience much, much better. I tried switching a few years ago and found DDG's search wasn't as good. But since then either DDG has got better or Google has got worse. I actually suspect the latter.
OK, but this is the "alternative facts" thing at work. Grandparent claimed something frankly ridiculous, you say you had the "same problem", then you redefine the problem to be, well... not the same thing at all? I mean, of course there are "SEO" pages in search results, that's literally what "Search Engine Optimization" means.
And it's impossible to know what you mean by it without specifics: are you complaining that a top search result is a useless page of advertisement and AI-generated text (which would be bad), or just that e.g. "tutorialspoint.com"[1] or whatever is above Stack Overflow on some search (hardly a disaster).
Maybe you have some examples we could try?
[1] Or some other vaguely low quality but still legitimate site.
I gave this a go. I typed google.com into my browser. First thing: oh yeah, that's right, because I use a VPN google puts me through captchas before letting me search (and I'm currently logged-in to Google on my gmail ID, so it definitely knows who I am, which is even more annoying). One annoying captcha session later, I can search. (and ofc Google wants to know my location, despite knowing my address as part of my Google ID).
I tried "El Dorado" because I happened to have that boardgame on a shelf in front of me. Actually the results were pretty good - wikipedia, national geographic, IMDB, no ads. But yeah, not something there's going to be many ads on, so let's try something more adworthy.
So I switched to an Incognito window (many, many captchas) and tried "erectile dysfunction". Whole bunch of decent results, no ads until the bottom half of the page (and then it was solid ads of course).
I've got to say I was pleasantly surprised - it's not nearly as swamped with ads and shitty SEO as I remember. But that's the thing, isn't it? I only switched to DDG a few months ago because I was so fed up with Google's responses (and the endless captchas). I didn't dream that ;) But yeah, you're correct - the first page of Google isn't all ads and SEO crap. HN must be hallucinating that.
> I only switched to DDG a few months ago because I was so fed up with Google's responses (and the endless captchas). I didn't dream that
Well, that's the thing... maybe you did? I mean, clearly from context you live in a world awash in the kind of rhetoric we're seeing in this topic, with hyperbolic claims about the Descent of Google into Vice and Decay everywhere. And... it's easy to fit stuff into a frame if that's how you're already thinking. One bad result or one unexpected pop up ad can sway a *lot* of opinion even if it's an outlier.
Thus: "alternative facts". In the real world search results are boring and generally high quality because that's the way they've been for 20+ years (I mean, come one: it's a mature product in a mature market, you really expect it to change much?). But here on HN testimony like that gets voted down below the hyperbolic negativity, so what you read are the outliers.
I don’t like the “you’re remembering it wrong” defence
Google doesn’t publish a search quality report, or publicly index their results for the same queries over time, so you can’t objectively compare whether the quality has changed or not. Plus, the Google search signals and the product itself are constantly changing day to day and there’s no way to see those changes.
So if Google went through a spell of bad results, or their algorithm entered a degenerate state, or SEO figured out how to break through their algorithmic walls, or even their algorithm deemed you interested in something you aren’t, then “you’re remembering it wrong” because it’s fixed today, but at the time it really was worse.
I do agree though, people remember bad experiences far more than positive ones, there’s a definite bias in the human psyche there. But also, anecdotally, I’ve never been so annoyed with Google results as I have lately. I know I’m not alone, my low-tech wife even complains that Google has become useless for so many things. True or not, it’s a bad omen for Google because it’s very hard to rebuild a reputation.
One of the most annoying things about Google the last few years has been searching reviews, and they’ve just added a widget to combine product reviews which is nice to see, so they do seem like they’re working on these issues.
It's not a defense, just a postulate. I'll grant that sometimes search results are bad, that seems eminently plausible. But you'll likewise grant that echo chamber logic tends strongly to "create facts" by elevating outliers into assumed priors, right?
I'm just saying that right now HN has become an echo chamber of this kind of logic, with people writing and voting more for the visceral rush of anger against a shared enemy and not "truth", so much. Hence, the Fox News of tech.
I can see how you got there from where you started, but I'm not sure it's accurate ;)
HN is useful but like all new sources and social media sites, it's not the unbiased pure stream of news and educated opinion that we'd like. Humans are weird.
The movie example is an exaggeration (in my opinion). I find that mostly Google Search has issues with related ideas (Microsoft Project Silica) where there is not a direct article, yet a reference. Ex: [1]
There is also what I would call a phase delay. Google has a really bad issue with SEO, takes forever to get rid of it, but by the time you can check, its mostly resolved.
Finally. What you see as an end user is only partially Google. A lot of the page is farmed out to Real-Time Bidding (RTB) networks based on your user tracking. So its often difficult to correlate if someone else's user profile delivers wildly different experience. [2] You might get spammed by SEO and near constant TEMU ads, and others might get nothing.
Finally. Finally. 'Cause its spec.' I expect there are client side or man-in-the-middle viruses that mess with search results.
I specifically searched just now something I searched recently, "Scott Pilgrim Takes Off".
I naturally blocked ads, but it shows "Cast", "People also ask", the official Netflix result (good), "Trailers and Clips", "Reviews", "Episodes", "Top Stories" with some gossip, and then Wikipedia and IMDB.
However this is also not so bad! I will make sure to document all my problematic Googling experiences.
You can argue that those things are "noise that my brain should block" or that "they're actually useful", and that's entirely true. But Google is no longer returning the results I used to expect from it, and that's a fact. Maybe I'm not the target audience anymore? Well, that's not a big deal, there are other products. But my point still stands. Sorry but not sorry: Apple's Spotlight is still better for this and needs zero scrolling to take me to Wikipedia.
Did you try this? First hits are Walmart locations with hours. Followed by "People also ask" where the first item (with a correct answer) is "Will Walmart be open on Thanksgiving near me?". Followed by proper search results where the top two hits are, indeed, the two nearest Walmarts to me. How exactly would you improve that? Is there a better site to put at the top?
Twitter shouldn't be considered a proper source anymore. It's closed without an account and the access is severely limited. You can't see follow-up messages, questions, or whole threads.
Also I don't have Walmart here but it does show opening hours from Google Maps which is often better than official websites.
It's because ChatGPT isn't being monetized with ads yet. I use "yet" quite deliberately, mind you. The question isn't whether ChatGPT will eventually have ads; the question is how easily you'll be able to tell they're ads, or if it's going to be product/service placement worked into responses as seamlessly as possible.
I say it because I don't think enough people are going to pay for LLM/GPT services for investors to get what they consider a sufficient return on their investment. I'm pretty sure no "pure AI" company is anywhere near a track to profitability as of yet, and there is only so long that VCs will be comfortable with that. (And while there might be AI "true believers" who don't much care about the profit horizon, ask OpenAI's board how that worked out for them last week.)
If only Google offered the option to pay in return for no ads and other junk. But they would say it does not scale; they can't count that low. So people are flocking to chatGPT.
I suspect that by doing so they'd indicate just how much each user is worth to them in ads.
I suspect that folk who opted into this would be the ones getting lots of ads (hence the most valuable.)
If Google said "you can opt out for $99 a month" you'd freak out. But you're probably worth that (or more).
People aren't really flocking to ChatGPT though - not yet. Not at Google Scale. It's not like my mom will pay $20 a month when she just uses Google for free...
Sure some are moving. There are always some moving. But despite the HN bubble effect its a tiny sample.
Plus folk moving now are folk who'll move back later when they get disgruntled there. (No disrespect.) First movers are not the loyal customer base. Movers gotta be moving..
(I say this as a general rule not making an assumption about you personally.)
It's like even everyone "left" Facebook for google+.
My churn would appear as a loss in their lifetime value model, so it would be detected by a long-term experiment. And I am reasonably confident they are performing long-term experiments for such things.
Personally it’s because there’s no ads. Google’s UX is to choke the user half to death with cookies, popups, reminders to use their app, login screens, and banner ads. And that’s before we even get to the content, which is padded with SEO and filler, dancing around the point before finally giving an answer written by who-knows-whom.
(And yes I feel justified in calling these SEO sites part of Google’s UX because this is exactly the behavior their algorithm and business model are encouraging.)
instead of Googleing and getting a forum post from 2009 where you have to read the whole thread and then interpret the results, ChatGPT just gives you the answer directly. ChatGPT could be shitty and rude about it and it would still be better because it's a direct smart to your direct question.
what's hilarious is the conversation that must have happened inside google about linking to pages vs giving the answer on the search result page, and now where we are with ChatGPT.
I think “rediscovering” the old ways of operating is a charitable interpretation that makes it sound like these patterns are somehow better. Silos and fiefdoms don’t benefit the company, they benefit the professional managers that are using them to grow their careers.
I subscribe to the interpretation that sufficiently successful companies inevitably attract ladder climbers whose goals are personal advancement at all costs, which may or may not align with the company goals/mission.
Once enough of these people capture positions of power in the organization, the whole thing tips into a political morass. Unless you’ve got diligent leadership at the top rooting these people out (and how do you think most folks ended up at the top?) you get this cultural death spiral.
This is also why “founder led” companies are more dynamic. Founders by definition aren’t ladder climbers, otherwise they would have joined BigCo instead of founding a business.
Silos and fiefdoms allow small gelled teams who know and trust each other, have similar levels of competence, and sit physically near each other to put their heads down and execute with extraordinary speed and quality. Once silos are broken down and cross-team/cross-org collaboration becomes valorized, everything is strangers and Zoom meetings and time zones and Process and maybe if you’re lucky one person in your partner org or site who can be trusted to give a straight answer or get something done that wasn’t formally planned a year in advance. The best way to derail a project is to get the greatest number of engineers involved in it, especially engineers who don’t share priorities, timelines, conventions, geography, or language. This is coincidentally also the best way to get promoted at a large company that believes in breaking down silos.
> Silos and fiefdoms allow small gelled teams who know and trust each other, have similar levels of competence, and sit physically near each other to put their heads down and execute with extraordinary speed and quality.
...for things that align with that silo structure. If you try to build new things that necessitate conceptual integrity across org boundaries, then teams that think this way will first debate ownership and responsibility breakdown before it's even clear how the thing should work at a high level. I've seen too many examples of horrible engineering done by silo'ed teams, where they build down blind alleys that turn out to be unmaintainable and net-negative producing over time because they approached it based on what services they could touch rather than what made sense from an overall system and UX perspective.
Obviously "breaking down silos" involves greater coordination and communication overhead, and thus is harder to pull of successfully, so it's a tradeoff that should be weighed carefully in the context of business needs.
And this is another reason why managers growing their fiefdom to make big teams is bad for the organization.
Most of the most successful projects and incredible feats of engineering happen by tiny teams full of very talented people NOT a 4-layer management pyramid of people who are here for a nice stable 9-5. Not to say you can’t be successful with WLB but you need a certain fire in your gut and a hunger to execute as a small and efficient team.
I don’t disagree. But I have also seen situations where middle managers are highly attuned to and proud of cross-team projects, and basically don’t pay any attention or give any weight to value delivered for end-users within teams, so everyone is encouraged to structure their projects to maximize communication overhead (even line managers, since doing so gives them the opportunity to grow their directs).
Absolutely. There are a lot of failure modes. This is why true IC leadership with teeth is needed. The whole point of staff+ engineer roles (outside of specialist research) is to navigate the right technical decisions that span across teams.
IC leadership positions are earned by leading cross-team projects, so the senior engineers who want them (and the managers who want to grow IC leaders) are encouraged to turn everything into one.
Leadership positions should be granted not just on “projects”, but demonstrated technical ability and judgement. This often includes influence of what NOT to do just as much as it involves driving projects. Obviously any rubric is only as good as the people who apply it, and if you hire tens of thousands of smart engineers with only one really profitable product and not much in the way of vision it’s going to be a fucking mess.
But because of the stigmatization of silos and valorization of cross-team efforts, making a project cross-team when it doesn't need to be is considered an example of demonstrating the company's values rather than example of bad technical judgement.
That’s a false dichotomy and bad leadership judgement. I don’t doubt these arguments are made and sometimes won (especially in dysfunctional or apathetic orgs), but context matters, there’s no value system that supersedes critical thinking in context. One of the questions I ask in staff+ promo committee is what did this person prevent from being built.
High process and high collaboration/coordination is not the only alternative to silos.
Google in the mid aughts still had tightly aligned teams with clear priorities. But they were also transparent in what they were doing, and open to collaboration where it made sense. Teams felt empowered to reject requests that would trip them up, but also empowered to do small things to help another team (and got rewarded for doing so).
The reality at a large org is you’re going to have dependencies. In my experience, highly-siloed orgs have tremendous coordination barriers to even the smallest request across teams. Your one-line API change didn’t make it onto your dependency’s roadmap this quarter? Too bad, try again in three months.
And I’m not sure we have the same understanding of “fiefdom.” I’m talking about the pattern where middle managers try to grow their headcount as large as possible without a clear purpose other than building status within the org. This often manifests as disparate and disjoint teams aggregated under a leader who has little understanding or care as to what exactly it is they’re doing. It is hard to find value in this arrangement.
> Your one-line API change didn’t make it onto your dependency’s roadmap this quarter? Too bad, try again in three months.
This is one of the key problems of working across teams, and its impact is amplified by a culture that says you should turn everything into a cross-team project that you possibly can. The whole company grinds to a near halt on these sorts of blockages.
It’s Coase’s theory of the firm [1] in synecdoche. Silos escape the political transaction costs around them at the expense of access to external resources.
They can famously work, e.g. Skunkworks. But they also decay into fiefdoms.
I feel like you're working with a different definition of "silo" than the parent. My understanding of a "silo" is "closed off teams that aren't allowed to work with outsiders" who have their own culture that may be at odds with the company.
It seems like you're talking about team nimbleness and cohesiveness, which I want to say is orthogonal.
Building in silos is when you get something done by yourself or with your direct teammates. Cross team collaboration involves e.g. a weekly sync, coauthored design documents, code changes made in modules you’ve never seen before reviewed by people you don’t know, tasks that are critical blocking dependencies for you but totally irrelevant to the decision-makers of the teams that need to allocate time for them. The extent to which a company is siloed is the extent to which its engineers are talking to their desk neighbors and getting things done vs. navigating communication overhead and being blocked on people quite remote from them and their goals.
It’s hard to believe you could have a nimble and cohesive team at the scale of a large corporation, because the number of communication edges gets silly. Dunbar’s number and all that. You can have team nimble and cohesive teams within large corporations. But having several distinct networks is otherwise known as being siloed.
Ok how do you meaningfully define the difference and moreover how would you prevent his version of a "good" silo from devolving into a "bad" one in actuality?
Silos and fiefdoms are normally seen as negative things. And that's not entirely wrong.
But they can also describe skunkworks/internal startup/etc. teams doing their own thing without a lot of interference or having to constantly coordinate with every other organization in the company.
Breaking down silos de-risks a company, despite some of the costs you mentioned. Especially after covid, companies capitalize on the flexibility of employees and lack of (physical) offices. Employees can be replaced like never before.
But even without that in mind, breaking silos can also put the right people in the loop - for every successful silo you mentioned, I bet there is a successful company which was able to have a good mix of people from different teams.
For me it always boils down to: what does the company want? Who they want to be in the next 3-5-10 years? Based on this you need to have proper management training. Without that, they simply throw engineers at the problem, which as you mentioned, can backfire. If you as an organization are able to scale well (even with some small and monitored silos) I don't see why it should be a problem.
Reality is: companies want to be able to scale like Google for their pet projects, fire fast upon need, have a lot of teams all with the performance of 10x engineers, etc etc. That's the BS they write on their about page.
Do they have agile coaches? Do they have people that help them organize work? Skilled people, not random guy that developed software all his life and now he/she wants to try something new, and he/she read a book over the weekend or listened to some podcasts..
People have high expectations by paying little. It takes effort to do things right. That's in my opinion the truth.
As the other commenter mentioned, silos are not inherently bad. Indeed, in a large company, they're necessary to avoid dysfunction. You want stable groups of competent people who share priorities and lore, who own well-defined parts of the business, and who have the autonomy to set the strategy for their thing.
"Founder-led" companies are more dynamic mostly because they're smaller. Once they get to 100,000 employees, they will not be distinguishable from Google, Apple, or Microsoft.
Maybe? I'm having a hard time finding a contemporary example. Bezos bowed out (though Amazon culture was famously bad for years), and even Facebook doesn't have 100k employees.
My point though is there is a difference between having a leader who got there by politicking versus a leader who got there by building a great company. They're both going to have different strengths and weaknesses, but there's at least a chance the founder isn't going to tolerate the sycophants.
An example: I was at Google 2005-2008. My manager's manager's manager was one of the early empire builders. He hired like crazy with no plan at all for the people he was hiring, and kept getting promoted for managing such a rapidly growing org. Eventually he rose high enough up that someone near the top realized what was going on, and promptly fired the guy, leaving behind a fair-sized mess as folks tried to figure out what to do with all his hires.
From what I've read lately, if this guy had just shown up to Google a few years later, he'd still be getting promoted.
Executives need to observe the whole organization, not just their direct reports. How far from the top was he when he started empire building? You make it sound like it was already very hierarchical, when Google always advertised itself as a relatively flat company.
I have a long list of ways to improve processes and when I was young, energetic, and didn’t know any better, I got very, very lucky getting many or most of them through. As I’ve gotten older I’ve found more things that I “need” to improve and there’s been more time for me to forget how I need to justify things I consider “the right way” and so I don’t always win those arguments.
But the bigger thing I’m coming to grips with is that I have to stop entertaining offers from companies that give me an “I can fix them” vibe because I will only be able to fix half the things I know to fix before everyone else decides they’ve changed “enough” and would I kindly shut up now. Hello ossification.
Eventually having half good, half bad is going to drive me nuts and take other people with me. I need a higher bar where they are already doing at least half and I can settle for reaching 2/3 or 3/4 instead of fighting uphill to get to 50%, only to give up and start the cycle earlier. If this were dating I was talking about, someone would have sat me down by now for an intervention.
How do you distinguish "I can fix them" companies that will not improve because they are where they are because of organisational and human issues and the ones you can actual improve and are ready for you?
I think my thesis is that rather than looking for diamonds in the rough I need to reset my sense of good enough at least high enough that the exchange of new wisdom is somewhat proportional. I can teach you things and you can teach me things.
As a polymath my natural instinct is to learn by observation and doing rather than engage a teacher directly. Fortunately I can also learn by interviewing, so I’m not completely hopeless. If I’m asking you a ton of questions odds are good I think you’re a mentor or I think you need one.
The problem is that I’ve worked for a couple places that I thought could teach me a lot more than they did, I mistook individual attributes as a pattern that wasn’t there, and what I saw was more (or less) what I got. So at the end of the day I am probably the wrong person to ask. Thankfully other people replied.
I joined my current company 5 years ago, and I feel like we’ve ‘fixed’ a lot of things, but the effort to do so is so absurd.
And then it’s suddenly invalidated by some high-up rando on the other side of the world deciding we need to go back to the bad old way of doing things.
How do you cope with Told Ya So? I’ve found it’s never as cathartic as I think and keeping it to myself is somewhat stressful, so nobody wins no matter which option I choose.
Totally agree. The people complaining about culture shifts there seem to want the company to pretend it's ~2006. I was never impressed with old Google. All their revenue came from ads, and they loss-led other projects. Fun, but the market has matured from that.
Since I joined several years ago, perks have really degraded but overall I've become more satisfied with my actual work. Over-engineered pet projects in and around our team gave way to business focus, meaning we work on truly important stuff. I have little faith in Sundar's leadership and think his speeches might as well be AI-generated, but that was always the case.
Google has been trying very hard to diversify, mostly through Cloud.
How well they are succeeding at that is up to interpretation but they are chipping away at Ads' percentage of revenue. It used to be higher than 85% but as of 2022 it's down to only being 58% of operating revenue[0].
Yes Google is still less diversified than its peers. Cloud and YouTube (edit: and Pixel phones?) are profitable afaik. The overall tech market has matured is what I meant; it's no longer time to loss-lead everything.
I'm not into watching streaming services or TV for that matter, but that would be news to me. Does YT now produce own exclusive content? I think they don't 1. to keep content producers running their stuff on YT rather than acting as competitor 2. to avoid yet another reason for antitrust action (ie. the bad looks of extending their monopoly)
Cobra Kai started on "YouTube Red" which I think was renamed "YouTube Premium"
Then it went to Netflix where it became a big hit.
There was another show I liked named Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes on Television. They constantly broke the third wall making fun of YouTube Red being confused with some kind of adult content service.
HBO is paid programming with product placement at most, and NYT sells subscriptions that actually bring in the majority of their revenue. If it were 90% ads, I'd say yeah they might want to reconsider that.
YouTube has its own content while Search ofc doesn't, and its advertising model is different. I wouldn't lump it in with Search. But still, they've decided ads aren't enough and they need YT Premium subscriptions.
It is not. Think about it. Diversification ensures that if one of your assets degrades in value, you have an unrelated asset that can still do well. Back to Alphabet, if ads revenues disappears overnight, Youtube becomes a dead project. Simples
At least they have alternate ways of selling ads, though. For example there has been a lot of talk about how their search business ads are threatened by LLMs that answer questions directly instead of giving search results that include paid placements, etc. But even if that happened, it likely wouldn’t affect YouTube ad revenues much.
Is it? If some new thing came along tomorrow that made Google's ad exchange obsolete, they could still sell ads on YouTube using whatever the new thing is. Or if YouTube became untenable, they'd have the ad exchange.
In 2022, premium subscribers accounted for a bit less than 9% of YouTube's audience (and 67% of premium subscribers were in the US), according to this:
No data for this, but I feel like 9% is less than they expected after 5 years of the "frustrate and seduce" strategy, which is why they're even going after ad-blockers now. If anything, they look frustrated. But they probably had to do this.
Why would they want people using an ad blocker to even use the site that much though. They’re denying them revenue while costing them. I mean it’s great as a user but as a service there’s not really much upside.
YouTube didn't seem to mind so much before. Maybe they wanted to keep those users' attention on YouTube instead of elsewhere. Now they're a lot more focused on the profits, which is fine.
I was about to correct you about GCP profitability, but I just looked it up, and TIL that GCP became profitable for the first time in 2023 Q2. Interesting.
Which is precisely why profit is a red herring. What matters is market share (which for GCP is still 10%, not amazing but gradually increasing) and, ultimately, revenue growth.
GCP burns massive amounts of cash and was a loss for many years. It just barely pulled a profit this year, though it looks more like some accounting tricks to make a small negative number look like a small positive one to make things look better during a downturn.
IIRC most of the public clouds changed their depreciation accounting recently. So all that cloud hardware is now good for 20 years instead of 10 years or something. Quite a boost to the old bottom line when you do that.
I loved old google they refused to share a business model. Google ~2006 I think is just past peaked google. I think they developed ads because it was the only model that fit their valuation.
Could be, they also had a pre-iso valuation that needed justifying. The signal to me that it was really over was when they stopped supporting jabber/XMPP and look where it go them. I never experienced Google as a stock. My only experience with google is as a search engine and a mail delivery system that broke all the rules of polite society.
Could be "Don't be evil" was the answer to the business model question of early google. My memory is that it spawned during an interview with Larry and Sergey regarding the business model.
> Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.
Google continues to print much more money than it burns. People get hurt by callous corporate decisions like layoffs. People don't get hurt by a company that has insane amounts of money taking risky projects, and if they fail, assigning those people to some other project. Given the size of Google and the fact that they hire generalists, being at risk of losing your project is very different than not being sure about the future of your job.
Layoffs at Google didn't happen because they had to happen. They happened because the leadership was concerned that in the good years, the company accumulated way too much dead weight - pointless projects, underperforming employees that the managers never had to deal with because they could always hire more people, etc. It's an awful fix and only a temporary one, but unnecessary risk-taking can jeopardize a lot more than that.
For example, let's say you have an idea for replacing online ads with a better monetization system for the benefit of the user. How do you pitch that at Google? A misstep here could literally destroy the company. It's insanity, akin to Exxon selling off their fossil fuel operation to try their hand at making solar panels.
Regulatory and PR risks are similarly grave. For example, Google couldn't have pulled off something like TikTok without all kinds of regulators jumping at their throats right away. They had to wait for ByteDance to clear the way and then launched their own "also-ran" clone. It's the same story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom to let it loose.
All of this is rational. You can get away with a lot more when you're a scrappy startup and don't have much to lose. When you're a multi-trillion-dollar company, the math ain't the same.
> Regulatory and PR risks are similarly grave. For example, Google couldn't have pulled off something like TikTok without all kinds of regulators jumping at their throats right away. They had to wait for ByteDance to clear the way and then launched their own "also-ran" clone. It's the same story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom to let it loose.
I think this is directionally true: Google would have taken a lot longer to release something like Bard/ChatGPT if their hand had not been forced, but I don't think pr/regulatory pressure was the reason YouTube Shorts was not done before TikTok.
I think short form video is just hard to monetize in comparison to long form. Why would you make a product that has uncertain appeal and is likely to be a money loser if it does succeed?
Indeed, the company behind TikTok (called ByteDance) didn't even have an IPO yet. It is unclear how much money they are earning from TikTok. It's conceivable that TikTok itself makes no money and is subsidized by the company's other products like Toutiao.
If Google were to try this early, it is uncertain that Google will discover a monetization strategy before the product joins the Google graveyard.
Let's not even talk about short form video, just YouTube. How many years did Google subsidize YouTube with Search money before it really turned up advertising on YouTube? Do we know how much effort Google expended in experimenting with monetization strategies for YouTube?
I don't know YT's monetization history, but longform video is incredibly easy to monetize because advertisers are willing to pay much more for their content being there. They get some edge from all the tech they have built for matching ads to users, but it's just fundamentally one of the easiest things to monetize on the internet, so I don't think they would have struggled there.
> Indeed, the company behind TikTok (called ByteDance) didn't even have an IPO yet. It is unclear how much money they are earning from TikTok. It's conceivable that TikTok itself makes no money and is subsidized by the company's other products like Toutiao.
Or, which is more likely, by the CCP. TikTok is the perfect piece of propaganda warfare - it gives destabilizing forces, anything from weird left-wing Hamas supporters to the hardcore far-right / incel crowd, a direct link to the brains of our children. It's unreal just how toxic the trending content on TikTok is, and how little effort is done to moderate it. Way worse than the YouTube radicalization spiral [1], but for whatever reason there's almost zero attention to TikTok.
Academic studies of social media are often very hampered by tooling and data access and studying a moving target.
It's hard to even know if the methodology of the paper you cited (analyzing comment trajectories) is a good one, given YT is constantly tweaking their algorithms, including in response to public outcry, and this phenomenon does not show up in other analysis: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...
I assume the methodological questions are even trickier for TikTok which has many more creators than YT.
I would love to see someone actually study TikTok though, since people love to ascribe blame to platforms for radicalizing people rather than accepting that some users just have views we find unacceptable regardless of the platform.
> It's the same story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom to let it loose.
I wouldn't be so sure, in my case ChatGPT passes the bar of being mildly useful but Bard is still absolutely useless. I can see two equally likely explanations for this: they simply can't manage to pull it off due to their culture or they can't release something that isn't massively more nerfed than the competition.
This story that Google would be destroyed if they had released GenAI tech before OpenAI is BS. Most people I know were instructed to tell people it was because of “responsibility” that GenAI was not out yet, while the entire company was freaking out and playing catch up with OpenAI (a 770 people company!) and promising non existent things to customers. There was nothing ready or thought through. Many people at Google thought they would be dominating AI forever. Little did they know that regardless of having a 170k people workforce, a 700 people start up nearly knocked them down. Google does not use Google Cloud for nearly nothing, also because of safety and security threats. I never understood why they could not be like AWS and use their own cloud. I wonder how long they will keep going trying to sell people something they don’t trust themselves.
About culture: it has deteriorated very much so. Working in Google was one thing, moving to Cloud was horrific and the sign I needed to get out of there. It has a culture that is rotten and somewhat worse than other Alphabet orgs, and tons of individuals with very poor technical acumen. Friends recommend friends who are morally flexible and they end up in Cloud. That is the easiest back door to Google and to a career ruin too given there are very poor execution and scarcity in technology innovation.
The rationalization given in this comment for the layoffs is obviously false. Google had ways of getting rid of underperformers without massive layoffs that they have been using for many years. Google has ways of getting rid of projects that do not involve layoffs.
> Layoffs at Google didn't happen because they had to happen. They happened because the leadership was concerned that in the good years, the company accumulated way too much dead weight - pointless projects, underperforming employees that the managers never had to deal with because they could always hire more people, etc.
This doesn't really match the reality of the layoffs. They weren't team/project based or performance based, they were seemingly random. If they were concernee about too many low performing products and employees they went about it in completely the wrong way.
Money becoming more expensive only matters for those who don't have any. I don't believe Google is one of them.
And before someone says opportunity cost, if the treasury offering a 5% ROI on your dollar is enough to dissuade you from executing on your business plan, that was never a very good business plan.
Most of the issues brought up by the author are not ones of priorities, but ones of a select group of mid-level directors (whom you've never heard of, but each of whom wield significant influence over the work output and roadmap for hundreds of engineers) doing a poor job, with nobody above them interested in doing anything about it.
> She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set
This is an example of that. Highly political, and also highly banal re-orgs, that leave the grunts scratching their heads, and picking up the pieces.
The risk-taking thing (for ICs) only became relevant post-layoffs.
I think it goes back to org structure ossification, but also keep in mind that in a sufficiently large company, every department is a thorn in someone else's backside. A world where the people you dislike regularly get the boot is also a world where you have to constantly justify your own existence, where you have aggressive stack ranks, and so forth.
It's a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of a deal.
Sure. It's an incentives problem. It's very difficult to align the incentives in any organizations with six levels of reporting chain so that people with the most day-to-day power over the direction of the firm (mid-level directors) are marching in the right direction.
I don't have a silver bullet for this, but I would say that, broadly speaking, managers that don't take feedback from below, as well as above, are probably doing a poor job.
And the degree to having some level of org structure ossification is to have lots of people sort of going off and doing their own thing. Which probably worked at Google for a longer time than is often the case just because they were printing money. So what if they were doing projects and then just killing them, living with duplication, or having a bunch of random activities that led to nowhere.
Even if it's a bit frustrating it can also be more fun to be in an environment where it's more of a make your own adventure sort of thing. Mature companies though mostly have to be very structured about how they operate.
Joined Microsoft in the early 2010s, and Google recently in the 2020s. I see the same bad company culture traits in both cases (incompetent & feuding middle managers, silos of information, promotion based on launches not business impact, hired too many people, etc.).
I think one big difference is that Microsoft at the time had clearly fallen behind competitors, while Google hasn't yet, or not to the same extent. I believe this failure created enough humility at Microsoft that I found many people & teams to be open to new ideas in terms of work processes & culture. Implementing change was harder, but having the conversation wasn't.
I see very little of that openness or humility at Google at any level, I suppose because there hasn't been a major business threat to force a change in mindset, or to let go of long-tenured ineffective leaders. It's been disappointing, because I would have expected a company with a lot of supposedly intelligent people wouldn't need external threats to avoid creating the bad culture common to big old companies.
To me Google work culture in 2023 looks a lot like the Microsoft work culture from 2010, but most can't accept that reality.
Tech workers have externalized a lot of this kind of hurt.
I have little sympathy for STEM heads who projected “screw you got mine” who then find themselves in a similar position.
It’s just meat based cassette tapes on Earth, engaged in vacuous min/max metric hacks given the physical constraints of reality.
Industry leaders fed on elders memories of war time production norms and educated us such was “normal”, so we normalized it in code for money, regardless of the externalities.
Elder generations need to have their authority over the next generation nerfed hard. Exploitation of youth to prop up some aging out figurehead smacks of old divine mandate memes.
Well said. I think this happens very naturally with every growing / successful company. Comparing my company of 30 or so with Google is like comparing a bacterium with a race horse, but even at our size being disruptive / staying innovative gets harder every month. Do you assign your best resources to the product that gets the money in? Or can you afford having capable people taking bets on new products, even when you know that such a product (if successful) is possibly years from making a dent in your revenue stream.
That decision is never easy and finding a product that creates a "dent in the revenue stream" at a company like Google with a once-in-a-lifetime product like Ads is probably not realistic even with their resources.
I think it’s fine if big companies stick to their core competencies, return money to shareholders, and the shareholders can then re-invest into innovative startups.
Overall, this leads to better outcomes for everybody involved, except for the CEO who’s ego is scratched by running an “old” company.
Has nothing to do with Google “being bad” and everything to do with emerging social trends questioning the corporatization of everything.
Such memes have gone viral across our society. From big beer boycotts, to turning on Google and SV. Filter bubbles across contexts are turning on the source of their fascination; we’re out for video games, Hollywood, beer, celebrities, experts, politicians. Knives aren’t out yet but the sharpening stones are.
The real value of decades old value stores foisted upon us in deference to the investor class, for if we do not validate their decades old choices and memes, they will have no choice but to engage in punitive acts, drive fiat economy off the fiscal cliff!
People are getting fucking tired of it. Sooner than later they’ll resort to whatever behavior is necessary to meet their needs and shoot anyone who takes issue with it.
> But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. It's no longer "why wouldn't you try this" or "let's do the right thing." It's "why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have?" It's not just about profit. Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.
I don't get this.
Why did they kill so many products which were running on standalone tracks? (at least in my opinion)
If I look at https://killedbygoogle.com I see for example "Stadia", "Podcasts", "Domains", etc... - in my opinion those projects would not conflict with their current main activities being Internet search & email service, respectively whoever is involved in it (ok, maybe excluding allocations of budget - but it's not that Google has currently liquidity problems so it's not that budget for existing depts would have to be reduced...).
I'm sure internal politics plays a large role. Managers knee-capping each other and so forth.
But there is another way to look at it. A company of Google's size will not be satisfied by a "small" $10M ARR business or perhaps even a $100M ARR business. It's not going to move the needle. The needle being, effectively, Google's stock price.
There are two ways to move the stock price: increased profit or decreased spend. Increase the pie or stop the number of people eating the existing pie.
All of those projects had more value in being ritualistic offerings to the stock gods. Much like the unreleased Batgirl film had more value being a tax write-off than selling for market value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batgirl_(film)
Though one key issue: Winning hearts and minds matter, public perception matters, they do indirectly affect the bottom line. Requires some nuance/between the lines sight to see this.
> But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift.
This is true, but I think you're mischaracterizing the required shift, and assuming this requirement is what's causing Google's problems today.
A company does eventually need to make a shift from "fast and experimental" to "responsible and steady". However this shift is entirely orthogonal from "focus on the users" becoming "focus on the bottom line and year over year growth".
Just because they're following the same path as other large tech companies have, doesn't mean this is inevitable. Instead it means they failed to learn the proper lessons. As a sibling comment points out, there was the attitude "but Google is special so that won't happen", when instead it should have been "to keep Google special, we need to work really hard on preventing that from happening".
Focusing on the user is easy when you have little to lose. When you have a trillion-dollar business and 200,000 employees you're responsible for, a large part of your focus is not destroying that. And quite often, it's not easy to reconcile that with what your users might want.
I’m curious to understand your perspective:m as to why a business that focus on the user may expose to risk? Doesn’t meeting user needs equals to making users happy which in turn equals to making more money?
This is my experience having been through 3 acquisitions.
In 1-2 years you go from:
- operating well, get bought
- throwing all the business infrastructure you've put in place that's deliberately different and better with what was before worse and slower
- then leaders get replaced or leave because we can't do anything anymore
- leaders start saying things like "we need to be more like a startup ", which would basically just hbe exactly what the company was pre- acquisition
I read it more as an indictment of layoffs being treated as business as usual. A company that grows a bit more modestly during boom times, fires fast continuously and maintains adequate buffers shouldn’t have to lay people off. Ever. The advantages of that haven’t been well explored. Ian makes a compelling argument that it should be.
I doubt it's provably true or false, as psychology tends to be.
Largely I agree with the OP though - treat your customers bad enough and unless there's something stopping them, they'll go elsewhere. That's how the free market works.
`why rock the boat` is spot on! Most large organisations eventually go into a mode of maximising the free cash flow for shareholders. I guess more or less this is by design. Investors, Founders and early employees take risks in short run for the rewards in the long run. A company cannot keep saying the promised green land is delayed by another 5 years.
Some criticism of CEO might be warranted. But remember that CEO compensations tied to profit after tax. I guess the only way to get back old Google is to start one!
Once number of employees hits a certain inflection point (roughly when one can't identify everyone with name), the focus for a lot of people is to keep their manager happy. Because any other goal is too abstract. Safi Bahcall's book Loonshots had some nice discussions on this point.
>But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. It's no longer "why wouldn't you try this" or "let's do the right thing." It's "why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have?"
Antitrust is important, wouldn't you think?
>A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the future of your job?
This is the state that the unanointed live in, and we even often deem it beneficial (however erroneously), for the good of society, or a market reality, or whatever, so it is very much an option to be considered. I'm sure many are aghast at the thought, and my memetic response is playing a video clip of SpongeBob's Plankton exclaiming, "I went to COLLEGE!", with a wry smile on my face.
Also he's saying "don't be evil" was the motto, but he joined a year after gmail and in the same year when the CEO was saying "don't be evil is purely marketing" in interviews in forbes in order to allay the fears of investors who were wondering whether to take that as an admission that google is defrauding investors and neglecting its fiduciary duties, clarifying that the only "evil" that matters is that which has no impact on, or that which materially harms shareholder returns. By that definition, their philosophy is no different from that of a tobacco company or Chevron.
> they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way
The main reason is: it's hard to hire to stop the culture regressing to the mean. Every time you get it wrong at a senior level, it has a big negative effect.
> I think the only comedy here is that Google looked at these old-school companies like Microsoft or IBM and figured they can be different just because they "get it." And then, over time, they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way.
This is funny because Alphabet's homepage still quotes Larry Page bragging they won't become a conventional company:
As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one”
Yes, Google couldn't find a good way to scale out its early model. Talents are not something easy to scale out. Transparency is inherently in tension against confidentiality, and when you have lots of eyes then the latter tends to win unless you're comfortable of spending your daily life with all those media outlets. If you want to do the right thing, then you'll figure out that there's too many "right things" at its scale because there are too many people with different, conflicting goals. The list goes on.
Still, the market expects it to keep its crazy growth rate and Google actually has done a good job there. Unless Google decide to shrink its business significantly, I'm not sure if going back in time is a viable option. The problem could be remedied by aggressive reduction of business/operational complexity but it won't solve the root issue. I don't know the solution as well.
But I still agree with the point that Google generally lacks of clear organizational goal/visions. This sort of inter-personal alignment is critical for scaling out any organizations, but Google lost it during its aggressive expansion period in Sundar's tenure. Many teams usually fail to find clear causal, logical connections between their daily works and company-wide OKR. Then mid-level managements tend to develop bad organization signal such as entirely metric driven projects since they don't know what to rely on. I guess this is something more actionable, but might not be easy to solve.
Companies confuse their initial product success with general success. "We made this amazing thing, so everything we do is amazing". The logic is flawed but can carry the company a tremendous distance before becoming unsustainable. Google is reaching the early steps of the unsustainable phase, and their initial product success is finally being threatened via AI. Working on an open source library for 9 years and then complaining that the company is changing is ironic.
I've seen a hypothesis that Google has never created anything new worth anything to anyone, after it created search and ads. Gmail is a clone of Hotmail, and YouTube and Android were acquisitions.
There were Internet search engines before Google, but Google did it way better.
I remember when Gmail was new. It was way, way better and more amazing than Hotmail. The idea was a practically infinite searchable inbox. Nothing else was like it at the time.
I think it would be unfair to not give credit to Google for YouTube. YouTube was indeed a visionary idea with legs, but it is so much further developed now than in 2005. And a lot of it has to do with the way Google has nurtured it over the years.
You could also say there were digital music players before the iPod, Apple copied the Mac from Xerox, and there were smart phones before the iPhone.
> why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have... It's not just about profit. Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.
I think we really need to define "risk" and the "hurt" people might experience. I've been at Google for 5 years, and I don't believe Google is at an existential risk. From my perspective, the biggest concerns I've heard people express were forms of not maximizing compensation: whether from not getting promo, not getting big bonuses, amenities being reduced, etc.
I confess that the layoffs change things, but 1) I'm not really sure how people can protect themselves other than rising to senior leadership position who seemed more insulated from the layoffs and 2) I am in the pool of people who wouldn't have minded 6+ months severance (including accelerated stock vesting).
I think the nebulous fear of hurting people is another way that the status quo secures itself. If this fear of "hurting people" is the fear that motivates Googlers to maintain the status quo when Googlers are among the most privileged people upon the Earth, I'm not sure who else could buck the status quo.
I dunno if Google as a whole can change itself. But I hope that enough individual Googlers do decide that they can change the status quo. I hope there are enough people who aren't so vulnerable and can thus risk getting "hurt", whatever that means in this case, while protecting the truly vulnerable people around us.
The risk to maintaining the status quo is real; there is a real risk that this massively powerful company sacrifices our people and our opportunity to maximize the good we could do on a truly planetary scale only to strive to maximize quarterly earnings through short term thinking.
It's less about risk aversion than it is about position, size, and complexity. As these things grow, the incentives change and the ability to understand what the organization even is becomes impossible.
A startup starts at the bottom. It begs investors, customers, and employees from a position of optimism and humility. The organization enthusiastically changes itself to find a good balance between those three or it dies. As the organization grows, it starts demanding everyone else change for them instead. Google's interviews are an example. Its famous customer service is an example.
Then we get to size and complexity. Thanks to Dunbar's numbers, we know that there are numerical limits to a human's ability to know people. This makes sense. I can know everything about 6 people, most things about 50, and keep track of about 250 well enough. As the organization grows, your ability to know it disappears. You begin making abstractions. Instead of knowing exactly what Susan does, you say she works in X Department, for Y Initiative, doing Z position.
Google is so big that one person can't understand it anymore. The inevitable reduction to a corporate abstraction occurs and then people treat it like the X Company, which is just like Y Company but makes X instead of Y. Short term revenue and expenses are the only measures at the end.
And in this faceless abstraction, the professional parasite class infests and extracts resources and morale. Eventually the C-suite stops fighting it and joins in on it until only the sheer size and momentum of the company keeps it going. Maybe an investor group will come and force a rework of the company, but not before the company is just a shadow of the shadow of its former self.
I explain it in the third paragraph but to illustrate it further: Consider a function. A function that is 1 line long is immediately understandable. At 10 lines, it is readable within a minute or two. At 100 lines, it is maybe legible to someone who lives in that function. At 1000 lines, it is a black box. Human organizations are the same way.
You might suggest refactoring, which is what companies do too. They create departments, promotion ladders, org charts, and mission statements. The problem is that abstractions leak by design. As your abstractions accumulate and change outside your view, your ability to understand the entirety reduces.
But that has to do with the capabilities of the executives involved, it doesn't make it impossible. Just like in your example, there are many, many developers that can perfectly understand large functions or code bases without issue.
If you have such a code base and you hire people that are not equipped, either through inexperience or capability, of managing that code base that is a resourcing issue.
If your executives cannot understand and control the organization they are tasked with controlling and cultivating, then they should be fired.
Except large code bases do the same. They regularly die when their ability to be understood drops too low. Even with well organized code, they are pushed to add features until they aren't understood at the deepest level. Once you hit millions of lines of code, even when you spend decades in that code base, you still forget changes you made even if you have an overarching picture. That's ignoring other people working on it all the time. The understanding gets reduced to contracts, types, and interfaces.
And most importantly, humans are more complicated than code. With enough time and knowledge, I can accurately tell you what any piece of code does on a single expression or statement. Humans regularly do things they don't even know for purposes they don't understand.
Do you have any resources to learn this. How to untangle the situation. What would happen if the resources indeed isn’t the problem to tackle, rather its complexity that is hard to untangle.
too many things going on, involving too many people and nobody can possibly keep track of it all in their head. You have to split it up. But by splitting it up, the left hand doesn't really know what the right hand is doing.
So controls and processes are put in place to ensure no bad outcomes are possible, but this also prevents good, innovative outcomes from sprouting.
Fundamentally, it's a loss of trust that can exist in a smaller organization.
Well-said. I think this is all pretty well encapsulated in the truth that "we tend to become what we hate", or "if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
So when Bezos says "your margin is my opportunity," he's talking to Google?
It's not just that Google can take risks because they have margins. It's more that they need to take risks to diversify their source of margins before they disappear to someone like Bezos.
Interestingly, Amazon's move to ad placement seems to coincide with how terrible Amazon's search is. It's a pay-to-play free-for-all wasteland. Not too dissimilar to the SEO wasteland of Google search.
Here lies the problem. Market dominance should mean anti-trust kicks in to prevent businesses from shifting to this more conservative, rent seeking behavior. You want businesses kept in that sweet spot where company vision is more than a PR checkbox.
> I think the only comedy here is that Google looked at these old-school companies like Microsoft or IBM and figured they can be different just because they "get it."
How is that different from all the nattering of posters here on HN who clearly know better and "get it"? Or for that matter from Gates & Allen in the late 70's "getting it" where IBM and DEC didn't?
Hubris is universal. The difference isn't who "gets it", it's who actually does stuff. The overwhelming majority of people in this fight are just picking a side in a dumb turf war, mostly over what fruit is printed on the phone in their pockets.
> ... what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the future of your job?
No, I think the ideal structure for a company which accumulated a great amount of resources is to become a sort of Venture Capitalist with the teams of people they control.
So, ZERO "corporativism", ZERO bureaucracy, ZERO control, just give access to the company resources and let the teams come up with a business model.
So, yes to more risk for employees (don't perform -> get your team reorganised -> get fired), but also gives way more upside in the form of significant bonus when a team deliver amazing financial results.
You'll get the majority of teams performing badly and getting axed and a few delivering unicorn-like results to the company at large, with the stars doing that being rewarded greatly.
Then what's your incentive to work at the company instead of starting the project externally? If the product is a sustainable business model in isolation, surely it's sustainable without the external resources.
The guy who drove Sears into the ground also did the classic private-equity self-dealing to carve off all the valuable bits and saddle the company with debt. Berkshire Hathaway is an example of a company that owns lots of businesses which are mostly independent
I’d theorize it has something to do with whether the separation actually makes sense. Berkshire Hathaway owns separate businesses that have zero to do with each other and may spin off or bring in new ones anytime. Sears had different departments of the same store trying to beggar each other which is counterproductive.
This is a good way to be biased towards the most lucky and the most cutthroat. Also, why would the best talent look to work for you if they have to take so much personal risk without the possibility of the upside of stock options of a startup?
> what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment
No. Sure, that's the easy route. You can reposition and retrain folks. You don't need to fire people to change, although that is what's commonly done.
C-Suite can drive a culture where folks feel safe through reorganizations. Setting those expectations in a believable way facilitates the large changes an org like Google needs to periodically make to stay relevant.
I work at another large tech company and, despite its problems, I'll say that they have done a great job of showing they don't easily toss people aside and that results in a better culture overall.
> C-Suite can drive a culture where folks feel safe through reorganizations.
The larger version of that is mergers and acquisitions. The Wall Street Journal has pointed out a few times that M&A activity is usually a lose for stockholders. Reorganizing the corporate structure is one of the few things C-suite executives can do themselves. For most other things, they have to work through others, managing rather than doing.
> Ian's post is pretty incisive, although I've read so many of these over the past 15 years or so. And the prescription is always to go back in time.
My take from this post is not "go back in time" but "restore vision[ary management]":
> Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.
Observing how companies evolve and face challenges as they grow is interesting. Priorities, risk tolerance, and organizational structures often change this process. While newcomers may emphasize innovation and disruption, market-dominant companies may prioritize maintaining the status quo to protect what they have achieved. Various factors, including the potential impact on careers and incomes, can influence this shift in mindset. Additionally, due to its uncertainty, established processes and experienced personnel may resist starting from scratch. In some cases, companies that aim to differentiate themselves from traditional models may operate similarly over time, realizing the reasons behind established practices.
> But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. It's no longer "why wouldn't you try this" or "let's do the right thing." It's "why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have?" It's not just about profit. Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.
Many will laugh, but I'd make the case that in general (of course there are some nasty exceptions), Apple has managed to keep prioritising its customers even after achieving their current market share.
It's a conscious choice by leadership, not some inevitable destiny.
This is spot on. I'll only add that the necessity of showing perpetual growth in the quarterly income report strongly incentivizes big companies to act this way, especially where--as in most tech companies--the employees have equity.
You've described why older companies do not inevitably grow into monopolies and take over the world. They get so set in their ways and bureaucratic that they get destroyed by the next wave of upstart companies.
Personally all large company processes start to rhyme and things feel like ground hog day.
After spending the first 10 years of my career at 100K+ employee firms, I've only worked at 500 - 2500 person companies since.
There's benefits from a process perspective of working at a big place and understanding what guardrails may be useful, and I suppose later in career boomerang back and sort of slowly coast into retirement..
But mid career if you know what you are doing and want to deliver, huge firms can be very very stifling places.
logical move is to get better at splitting off their research and innovation into startups by licensing or funding employees who leave. Spinoff anything risky into an independent company so it can move faster and isn't slowed down by Google's risk aversion and bureaucracy. Basically what Microsoft did with OpenAI, give them cash and compute resources but have plausible deniability if things go wrong
I honestly think it’s possible to have large/mature companies that are still innovative, fast moving, transparent/candid internally, user focused, and low on internal bureaucracy. It’s just really, really, really hard.
You need to constantly be eliminating red tape and causes of slowdowns, because they’ll keep appearing. For tech companies this means spending a lot of time eliminating tech debt, slow/unreliable workflows, toil work, etc. It also means reducing cross-team dependencies, keeping decision making units small and independent.
You need a very performance oriented culture, where you only keep strong performers and fire miss-hires (or ppl who start strong but later start coasting). This is maybe the hardest part, as firing people is very tough and can have real negative consequences on the person being let go, but an accumulation of ppl who are just sort of coasting is one of the biggest reasons companies slide into mediocrity over time.
I think very, very few companies pull this off in practice, but I don’t think it’s impossible to pull off, just EXTREMELY hard.
It's one of those things that ought to be possible, but the problem is scaling middle management. Plenty of IC talent on the bottom, but it's impossible to have hundreds or thousands of IC report to the same individual executive with a vision. One you start to hire middle management, you get politics: fiefdoms, silos, power games, selective storytelling, cherry-picking statistics. In a small company where an executive oversees a single layer of middle management, it can be fought against, and stamped out where it's found. Two layers of middle-management, getting executives to be out of touch with the IC level, it starts to get very difficult to parse through what's bullshit and what's not; by three layers, there's too many people playing telephone, and you have an echo chamber.
The challenge for executives is to achieve strategic success in spite of the necessary evil of layers of middle management.
I don’t think middle management are the ONLY cause, but I do agree that once you start getting layers of management, managers “shielding their teams” from the rest of the company, cross-team dependencies that require lots of planning, and execs/upper-management that are very disconnected from the details of the business and product, you’re basically doomed to mediocrity-at-best.
I haven't worked personally at these places, so just going on what I've heard:
- Netflix is a poster child for this, I've heard their "culture deck" isn't hot air, but is really how they operate. Combo of high autonomy and high responsibility, letting ppl go who don't pass the "keeper test" ("would you fight to keep this person if they told you they were leaving the company" - if not let them go), very open and candid communication, and generally a smart and driven group doing great work
- I don't know that Apple is still like this, but for a long time, as a massive company, it seems they did keep going a really high performing group, that were passionate about their work and hustling hard to build great things. Although could be pretty brutal in terms of long hours and lack of work/life balance
- Have heard SpaceX is similar to how Apple used to be
> what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment
Sure. Isn't that how the financial industry operates? (Or maybe that's more of an illusion, and people in finance just tell themselves they're in a cut-throat environment, even though in reality they'll never leave it. Whereas if it were really a cut-throat environment you'd expect to see more churn as the weak employees fail out of the industry.)
> And then, over time, they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way.
This may be true in tech companies, but I'm not sure it generalizes to other industries.
I wonder to what degree these organizational behaviors are emergent from the personality types within the industry. If you put a bunch of conflict-averse personalities in an organization, and then hire more aggressive personalities to manage them, perhaps that organization will inevitably develop into something resembling IBM.
Finance is cut-throat in the upper echelons, and also around culling people producing less value than their salary. But once they find someone willing to produce $400K of value in exchange for $200K salary, who is not otherwise interested in career growth, they usually just leave them be, that's how you see people staying in the same job with roughly the same responsibilities and skills for 10-15 years. Which creates other pathologies, but in some sense is less harsh than tech.
Big tech, yes, lots, but an extra skill required there is to recognize and actively avoid ambitious managers, who would sacrifice/burn out their own team for self-advancement. Lots of churn in big tech is purely from that. Small tech, I think the capital pressure is much higher, so just getting a steady good deal on labor is not enough, leadership there is constantly optimizing and trying to upgrade the labor value without matching comp (ie, people are expected to always be acquiring more skills, giving internal talks/lectures, mentoring etc, and those who don't, well, they turn out to not be a good culture fit).
And yet somehow most people in charge of resourcing and budgeting for projects, teams and companies have some idea of who to hire, how much to pay them, etc. How do you think they do that with something that is nearly impossible to measure?
It certainly wouldn't benefit anyone who hires people if those people could estimate their own contribution, or, god forbid, compare it to their compensation. I think there's a term for the difference which now eludes me.
> How do you think they do that with something that is nearly impossible to measure?
The floor is mostly arbitrary (see the wage collusion scandal between Apple and Google for an example), and then beyond that it's a question of who is the most productive, effective at getting things done, etc.
So while they do have "something to measure," these metrics can be uncorrelated with profitability - or even negatively correlated with it. It's possible for a productive team to spend their time on an unprofitable project, while another team barely works but ships a profitable product.
Profitability is not the only short-term metric. In poker I know when a bet is worth it, even if it ends up not winning the pot (unprofitable). Is your argument that business people are just randomly guessing and have no idea how much profit they could expect to make by spending specific amount of payroll?
Sure. But people in this thread aren't complaining that Google's profitable. They're complaining about the culture. Long term, such a poisonous culture is not a sustainable path to growth or retained profitability. And it's even less sustainable when the company is dependent on an undiversified revenue stream, since they need to be innovating to mitigate that risk, and a poisonous culture is toxic to innovation.
But yes, Google is a money printer, and it's printing at a higher speed than it was ten years ago. But in that same ten years, Microsoft has grown at a faster rate and even displaced Google in some areas, like developer tooling and AI. In fact, Google has lost its ability to innovate to such an extent that a startup was able to beat them to market by productizing research that originated from Google! And now Microsoft basically owns that startup. That's an embarrassing failure of leadership.
Microsoft has certainly had a pretty amazing transformation. After they lost mobile and the client OS market was clearly stagnant to declining, it seemed they were toast if you looked at where their revenue came from. (And their early hybrid cloud strategy was sort of a mess too.)
Whereas, as you suggest, Google's cloud strategy has been marginal except for Google Docs and they're still mostly an ad company.
> Long term, such a poisonous culture is not a sustainable path to growth or retained profitability.
Are you sure? This feels a little bit like when I read the American capitalism is going to collapse because there are a lot of homeless people. Just because something has the effect of making some people miserable doesn't mean that it's unstable or doomed to fail. IBM, GE, Boeing, or any number of other "dinosaur" companies haven't gone anywhere. And Microsoft itself shows that even a conservative culture can manage to adapt to changing circumstances when it's necessary.
But Google doesn't intentionally have a conservative culture. They're trying to innovate, since they need to mitigate the existential risk of their undiversified revenue stream. But they're failing to innovate.
So perhaps such a conservative culture does have its merits, but claiming that Google sought those merits is post-facto rationalization of their failure to innovate. Google never intended to turn into IBM (which, btw, they havent - at least IBM has more diversified sources of revenue!).
That said, you make a good point that Microsoft itself is a counterexample. So maybe there is still hope for Google. But IMO, that hope is not aligned with the path they're currently traveling. They need to fire Sundar and make some drastic cultural changes if they want to outcompete Microsoft between now and 2035.
Sure, they're not achieving everything they want, but I think most people would be pretty happy if they just achieved a huge money-printing machine through an app store and ad exchange.
A cutthroat environment is going to encourage plenty of people to behave conservatively so that their rivals do not seize on their failures, real or perceived.
I find the real comedy here is the emotional attitude towards an employer TBH, especially with GOOG doing just fine.
The other thing I find worthwhile is the many Googlers/Xooglers coming out here quite bluntly. Which is appreciated when there was a noticeable lack of contributions recently that I was beginning to attribute to some newly imposed corporate social media policy by Google (like, to prevent leaks to competitors or antitrust authorities or sth).
Can we just say it? Business school graduates ruin innovation. They ruin principles. They ruin quality. Their goals are not aligned with the goals of creators and makers. Their goals are, chiefly, to make money.
The worst thing you can do as a company looking to continue to burn with innovation is hire someone with a business degree. I don’t have any problem saying it.
> Can we just say it? Business school graduates ruin innovation. They ruin principles. They ruin quality. Their goals are not aligned with the goals of creators and makers. Their goals are, chiefly, to make money.
This is actually the second-worst possible goal. Worse than the desire for money is the desire for power.
You've just described why once prominent companies fade into shadows of their former glory (eg. Kodak, Blackberry, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft). Definitely not inevitable and could be avoided with better leadership.
But not a problem, either. Turnover is natural. Nobody but the investors care very much whether Kodak pivots to digital cameras, or whether Kodak remains the leading film camera company as the industry shrinks, and a different company makes digital cameras. In fact the latter is often better for the economy and consumers, due to the better specialization.
Yes it is a problem if a company is failing not just for the investors but the workers. Nobody wants to work for a sinking ship. Can't believe this even needs to be said.
"Market dominance" simply shouldn't be achievable under capitalism. We would be much better off as a society if the government started enforcing anti-trust laws again.
Thing is, under capitalism large companies get significant control over the governments' actions. And large companies don't like not being allowed to be as powerful as possible, holding monopolies.
It's people having families that is the ultimate corrupt or. If worst comes to worst thy values come first on the chopping block..
One of the reasons old people can't look each other in the eye, is that they all have seen what they are willing to do to each other to get junior a good start in life.
I'm half senile, and so when you replied I wondered if I did that.
But re-reading it several times now, I don't see it. When I look at their kids and think to myself "hey, they might make good husbands/wives for my own kids" where is the Freudian?
I am on the lookout for my kids. I can't tell them who to marry, but I can put them in circumstances where there are people their age that I approve of, such that familiarity might blossom into something more. I've seen how it turns out with other people's kids when they act like that's none of their business and actively avoid the thinking, and I don't much like the outcomes.
My parents had a lot of ideas about my romantic life too, none of them particularly good or welcome and none of which I listened to. Maybe you'll have better luck.
I'm not the OP, but you realize that implying they were looking at the kids as spouses for themselves is extremely creepy right?
(Not that I agree with what the OP said either - I think most people have a protective instinct towards all children without thinking of them as potential spouses for their own offspring. We see this behavior in other primates too, eg: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2021/mountain-gorillas-ad... )
I think you've misread me. My point was the guy seemed to be suggesting some general human tendency towards extreme self-interest but then used personal pronouns ("I think to myself"). Not that people are generally seeking child brides. If you look at the position of the word "myself" your interpretation does not really fit.
No, as can be seen by the other comments in this thread the use of "myself" there is entirely appropriate.
He is using personal pronouns consistently: "myself" and "my children". "Their" children is the other children he is observing, and he is thinking to himself.
This is a very strange comment. Yes people often get territorial about their kids. This is long shot to evil, corruption, or not looking each other in the eye.
Kids often bring out the worst level of 'fuck you, got mine' politicking in humans. All that school segregation stuff in the 60's? Parents 'protecting' their children. Same for the school segregation stuff in the 2010's.
To close to home for many? Then again this is what life is about from moralphilosophical view. A body horror show with a "what have I become" at the end? Spoilers not welcome?
I don't really think that's possible. When you're a newcomer, a disruptor, the whole point is to be different. You're bold, you have a clarity of purpose, you say things like "we're building a new kind of a company" or "the user comes first."
But once you achieve market dominance, your priorities have to shift. It's no longer "why wouldn't you try this" or "let's do the right thing." It's "why would you rock the boat and risk the nice thing we have?" It's not just about profit. Careers and incomes are at stake. People will get hurt.
Risk tolerance aside, your organizational structure ossifies too. When you have people who have been running processes or departments in a particular way for fifteen or twenty years, they have little desire to start over from scratch. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, because what's the alternative? A cutthroat corporate environment where you're never sure about the future of your job?
I think the only comedy here is that Google looked at these old-school companies like Microsoft or IBM and figured they can be different just because they "get it." And then, over time, they rediscovered the reasons why old companies always end up operating in a particular way.