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Does any of that Chrome code include Chrome OS stuff? Google has been putting a fair bit of work into that. The web platform has been growing (progressive web

Does any of that Chrome code include Chrome OS stuff? Google has been putting a fair bit of work into that. The web platform has been growing (progressive web apps, more features in JavaScript include WebAssembly), and yes I'm sure there are some new features in Chrome. Does that include the mobile app codebases? Chrome for mobile has been adding features. 1000 people is a lot of money, so Google clearly sees value in what they're doing.

josephg 9y ago
I suspect it doesn't include ChromeOS but does include the chrome android app. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. They've definitely been busy, somehow. And they've definitely added a few marginal features here and there in the last year (position:sticky, grids, css modules, headless snapshot rendering all come to mind for me). But 1.5 million code reviewed lines of programmer effort seems disproportionally expensive for what they've done. How many startups could you start given 1000 google engineer-years of effort? 100? Don't get me wrong, I like webassembly. But the output of 100 new startups with world class engineering teams and 1 year of runway sounds much more interesting by every metric that I can think of.
- dangoor 9y ago
  How many startups can take advantage of improvements to the web platform to ship to more devices or ship faster? How many more "uber for cats" startups do we need? (That's purposefully not a fair characterization… A lot of startups are doing less interesting/useful work than improving the platform.) A team of 10 people can creatively put together some really cool stuff. But you know what? Not all problems can be solved by a team of 10 people. And what happens for the ones that manage to bring in either revenue or more VC? They start hiring. And then you can complain about "why does company X need 1,000 people to do what they do?" I do get what you're saying, but I'm pretty sure the list of things those 1,000 developers produced and those 1.5 million lines of code represented would be substantial if you dug in. A great deal of it might not have any appeal to you, but undoubtedly has appeal to someone.

josephg 9y ago

I suspect it doesn't include ChromeOS but does include the chrome android app. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. They've definitely been busy, somehow. And they've definitely added a few marginal features here and there in the last year (position:sticky, grids, css modules, headless snapshot rendering all come to mind for me). But 1.5 million code reviewed lines of programmer effort seems disproportionally expensive for what they've done. How many startups could you start given 1000 google engineer-years of effort? 100? Don't get me wrong, I like webassembly. But the output of 100 new startups with world class engineering teams and 1 year of runway sounds much more interesting by every metric that I can think of.

dangoor 9y ago
How many startups can take advantage of improvements to the web platform to ship to more devices or ship faster? How many more "uber for cats" startups do we need? (That's purposefully not a fair characterization… A lot of startups are doing less interesting/useful work than improving the platform.) A team of 10 people can creatively put together some really cool stuff. But you know what? Not all problems can be solved by a team of 10 people. And what happens for the ones that manage to bring in either revenue or more VC? They start hiring. And then you can complain about "why does company X need 1,000 people to do what they do?" I do get what you're saying, but I'm pretty sure the list of things those 1,000 developers produced and those 1.5 million lines of code represented would be substantial if you dug in. A great deal of it might not have any appeal to you, but undoubtedly has appeal to someone.