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Google doesn’t necessarily need innovation
- thriftwy 9y agoI didn't know Steve is on Medium. He's my favorite tech blogger, so that's an awesome development.
- mcherm 9y agoWhy? I see the move from independent blogs to universal use of Medium for tech blogging as a step backwards.
- gaius 9y agoMedium is a step up from what he was using before, Google+
- zeveb 9y agoI'm gonna give a shoutout to POSSE[0]: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Nothing wrong using Medium's infrastructure to serve one's articles, but the canonical version should always be under one's own control. [0] https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
- harlanji 9y agoThanks for this term, this is the model I'm using for a Vodcast for the past month or so... POSSE to RasPi for recording and syndication, serve edge-cache optimized segmented video content from CDN, RTMP to all the other networks. I'm mostly doing it to show that if it can be done for a Vodcast from a RasPi, it can be done for anything and inspire my artist friends (and have a platform for my creations as artist0 :). POSSE all the things.
- mcherm 9y agoOkay, I really like that concept and having a name for it makes it easier to discuss and advocate for. Thank you!
- lmm 9y agoMedium offers a consistent, no-nonsense design which is a nicer reading experience than most blogs, and made more so by not having irrelevant differences between different blogs.
- rocky1138 9y agoRSS solves this problem, since the content from many disparate sources appear in one place in whatever format you prefer. This is done without being beholden to one company who can change things on a whim (often to negative effect).
- lmm 9y agoOnly for reading (and even then, I've yet to find an RSS reader that looks as nice as medium). If you want to respond or comment then the RSS experience falls apart.
- rocky1138 9y agoIt's true that RSS is only good for reading. I think that's part of its name, though. If you want an RSS reader that looks as nice as Medium, then other people might also want that same thing! It might be worth a weekend project if you feel strongly enough about it.
- lmm 9y agoI don't think there's any money in it (I don't think there's any money in Medium either, frankly), and in terms of personal satisfaction I find Feedly adequate, though not as good-looking as Medium.
- icebraining 9y agoUnless the feed only shows an excerpt of each post, as is unfortunately not uncommon.
- benjaminjackman 9y agoI agree with the consistency point however there is never going to be a perfect for everyone version of consistency (in the same way there will never be a perfect pasta sauce that everyone picks as their absolute favorite). For example I really don’t find their designs to be particularly no-nonsense. I would actually prefer a more no-nonsense, absolutely minimally styled html. Like under 10 lines of css. Because I really like contrast, really really don’t care for a position sticky element right where my eyes naturally scan on mobile obscuring stuff, am fine with Open Sans, don’t need the extra page load time spent on who knows what. If there is a dial between form and function I would like to jam that dial to 100% function. Other people with vision issues really need large text formatted as white in black. Others still much prefer the aethestics of font other than Open Sans. It would be nice if somehow we could define precisely how we wanted our reading material formatted across all our devices and across all the varied ways we receive textual information. (Eg it would work with kindle, or in the growing number of electron apps, as well as in all the other software we use). And then sites just had to provide a minimal use of semantic html elements to make it work. So while medium does cleanup the box of chocolates mess of going to random blogs it turns all those chocolates into the one with the same minty flavor and some folks really don’t care for mint chocolates. So when they see a random blog post to them it’s a box of chocolates where they have a shot of winning, with medium it guaranteed to be something they don’t care for. Case in point I read another recent post don Stevie’s in my rss reader and that was pretty nice. Not sure if that will still be option (or for how long) now that he’s moving to medium.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoHis "independent blog" was Blogger: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/ http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/ Let's call it a sidestep.
- shoover 9y agoI had to create an account, begrudgingly, to follow. This is just silly when I have a perfectly good feed reader that works for everyone else I care to follow.
- capisce 9y agohttps://medium.com/feed/@steve.yegge https://medium.com/feed/@steve.yegge
- shoover 9y agoThank you! Subscribed. I guess my feed reader wasn't quite as good as I thought. Well, medium got me signed up in the meantime :)
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoI went through this same process. Registered for Medium... googled on Bing how to subscribe to RSS, and then added the feed to my reader and logged back out of Medium.
- icebraining 9y agoI wouldn't blame your reader; Medium only puts the RSS tag on the main blog page (https://medium.com/@steve.yegge https://medium.com/@steve.yegge) and not on each post, which is IMO not a good practice.
- shoover 9y agoYou are right, I would have to be asking the reader to special case medium or search up the path from the post. In this case it is Feedly which is excellent and does special case the xkcd alt text so I was a little surprised they didn’t do the dirty work.
- shoover 9y agoTurns out that feed is too noisy. In addition to the stories, it includes an entry every time he interacts with a comment on a feed.
- lukasm 9y agoso in other words Google is the biggest private equity firm that does search.
- melling 9y agoThey are an ad company. When people start asking their watches, phones, cars, and voice only devices questions, they need find a way to serve ads. I already skip search if I think Amazon's Alexa can answer the question. [UPDATE] Not sure why I'm getting downvoted. I'm not saying anything that isn't already being discussed. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/amazon-is-threatening-googles-ad-space-monopoly-wpp-ceo-martin-sorrell-says.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/amazon-is-threatening-google...
- encoderer 9y agoWait, Alexa answers questions for you? It’s always useless for me. I use it almost exclusively for smart home control.
- melling 9y ago"Alexa, who won best actor last year?" "Alexa, how old was Ronald Reagan when he became President?" It seems to know about movies and people. I hear that Google Home is a lot smarter. I'll get one when it goes on sale again. Siri is the assistant with the problem. It can't answer those questions: "Hey Siri, who won best actor last year?" "Hey Siri, how old was Ronald Reagan when he became President?"
- droopyEyelids 9y agoI think it's actually a throwback to the old days of conglomerates.
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- cletus 9y agoI'm conflicted by the world "innovation" just as I am about describing products as "revolutionary". Like if I have to sit through another iPhoen announcement to hear some "journalist" bemoan that the iPhone N+1 is "evolutionary not revolutionary" I'm seriously going to go berserk. The problem with "innovation" is it's actually kinda hard to define and somewhat subjective. Steve goes into this. I'm not sure I entirely agree about his point about Google making competitors though. I actually think that's worse than it used to be. The height of it was Google Offers (anyone remember that?) that was a response to Groupon, allegedly when buyout talks failed (I have no inside knowledge of this; just what I read here and elsewhere). To echo Steve's point, I do kinda wonder if there are too many engineers at Google now. Or, more accurately, more than is required for what they do to do. The problem with that is they'll find work for themselves to do, good idea or not, part of a coherent strategy or not. Generally speaking (rather than Google specifically), the danger with this kind of situation with large companies is decisions tend to then become political rather than merit-based and also you tend to end up in situations of endless internal reorgs, which seems to be a defense mechanism by middle management (in that a given org structure can't succeed or, more importantly, fail if it's never given long enough before the next reorg). Disclaimer: Xoogler.
- EmployedRussian 9y ago> The problem with that is they'll find work for themselves to do, good idea or not, part of a coherent strategy or not. Isn't that exactly how Gmail came to be?
- vanderZwan 9y ago> To echo Steve's point, I do kinda wonder if there are too many engineers at Google now. Or, more accurately, more than is required for what they do to do. The problem with that is they'll find work for themselves to do, good idea or not, part of a coherent strategy or not. You might be interested in Andrew Norman Wilson's take on Google's Culture: Workers Leaving the Googleplex from 2011. It's been discussed here before[0][1]. I first saw this as a live performance, which was 30 minutes with a lot more social commentary. In that performance he compared the strange cultural division within Google to the Alpha/Beta/Gamma/Delta/Epsilon division of society in Brave New World[2]. Your comment reminded me of that, but I don't know if this recording includes it. [0] http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/WorkersGoogleplex.html http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/WorkersGoogleplex.html [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500082 [2] https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090605154008AAqnjOK https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090605154008A...
- ordinaryperson 9y agoGreat article, although to paraphrase a famous (building) architecture quote: "You can't have a revolution every day of the week." No one can really say what the right balance is between world-beating innovation and soul-destroying bureaucracy, but it's easier to blog about then execute in a company with 72,000 employees. But I appreciated the essay, and from an employee POV it's much more satisfying to ship new products than sit in meetings for 6 months talking about process and budget codes.
- brlewis 9y ago"It’s hard to do anything there because for any idea you propose, three or four teams will run in shouting that they own that, you can’t touch it, and oh by the way, they’re not working on it for a few years. Microsoft calls this “cookie-licking”, and it’s obviously not good, but it’s very common there. I’ve heard from folks at other big names in the area that a lot of companies have this problem. And it’s ironic, because there’s an infinite amount of work to be done, and yet somehow it’s entirely covered by their existing staff, with no room for anyone to do something new. It’s pretty crazy." I work at Fitbit and I'm very glad that cookie licking is not prevalent here.
- vanderZwan 9y agoFor now. This is a kind of cultural shift that happens when companies grow. It doesn't happen overnight, nor does anyone actually want it to happen. But in practice it seems to nearly inevitably creep in. I'd love to read more about reasons why, and what can be done about it.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoMaybe these orgs are just too damn big. Google is 75k people, MS 124k. Those are on the small side, I can't remember which tech company, but they're at 600k. They're also chained to stock prices and earnings. They can't commit to any product for any sizable length of time. I'm gonna preach it until I try it or die and figure out it doesn't work, but my genuine belief is these companies are too big to effectively function or to counter threats. If your company population is a small town, how many middle managers do you have? Tens of thousands?
- tenaciousDaniel 9y agoNot necessarily a tech company, but I worked at Disney for a few years. They have about 500K employees. It's such a large company that their own companies sue each other. Like, our team couldn't use some Disney IP because we had to have our legal team clear with their legal team. That's when you know a company is too big. Edit: by "their own companies" I mean all of their subsidiaries.
- vthallam 9y agoI feel like this post is more of a self justification on why he wants to work for Grab. A company which started itself as a copy of Uber, I don't know what Innovation they do made him pick them. Like UberEats and UberEverything(will be out soon I guess) will be doing exactly the same. Also, Uber was out of China more because of the biased policies in China,not because they were not competitive enough. Their exit was also profitable, so to say they were defeated doesn't make sense.
- rocky1138 9y agoBuilding software for a very alien (read: different, not bad, not passing judgement) environment can be a fun and engaging challenge in itself. That sounds like what he wants.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoThen he should have said just that instead of bitching about Google's lack of innovation.
- Apocryphon 9y agoIt's a good thing to keep elephants on their toes. Then they can dance.
- vl 9y ago>I feel like this post is more of a self justification on why he wants to work for Grab. This post is a hiring piece for Grab.
- yeukhon 9y agoThis is not Yegge's first criticism on Google known to public. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3138826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3138826
- _pmf_ 9y agoThat's comforting for them, since they have not innovated anything externally observable since GMail.
- gautamnarula 9y agoAndroid? Waymo? Tensorflow? I get what people are saying but it's not like Google's been coming out with nothing new and useful for over a decade.
- crucifiction 9y agoThey acquired Android. Waymo and Tensorflow are cool r&d but not businesses.
- joshuamorton 9y agoAre you suggesting that Google did not innovate at all with regard to Android? That the product they purchased in 2005 was essentially the same as the one they began offering in 2008, or the one today? (just as an example, android was redesigned in response to the iPhone) Waymo appears to be on track to a business? Are you suggesting that, with tensorflow, innovation doesn't count if its infrastructural and not consumer-facing?
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoAndroid is a bit old of an example, but I'd argue it's not a good one for the parent's point. I would argue Google's last in-house consumer success probably is Google Drive? Circa 2012 or so. Everything newer has been a rebranded acquisition, a clone of a competitor's product, a failure, or a combination of the three. Google+: Fail. Allo? LOL! (Let's talk about Duo, Hangouts Meet, Helpouts, etc.) The third or fourth rebranding of Google Wallet? Okay. Inbox caused an internal riot at Google when they tried to replace Gmail with it. Currents? Newsstand? At the end of the day, almost all profit at Google still comes from ads, and all of their success comes from abusing monopolies they developed ten years ago, like Search, Android, and Chrome. You guys are Oracle. With a brighter colored logo. ---- Waymo is built on hype, not substance, it only works in limited areas which are excrutiatingly mapped in advance, and most of the marketing videos showed capability that predated the cars actually being so capable: They're staged. I suspect actual car manufacturers will far surpass Google's own offerings here, they have experience and they get how to make a consumer product that lasts more than three years without needing to be replaced.
- cs702 9y agoYegge's blog post rings true. I can't help but wonder if Google should split itself into many smaller companies -- effectively, having offspring. And I don't mean housing different business units into different legal entities, each with its own team. Google has already done that, in the form of Alphabet. I mean splitting each business unit into multiple equal-sized competing businesses. Imagine multiple smaller companies offering Google Drive, fighting each other for customers, improving the service in different ways over time, each with a different brand. Perhaps corporate death and giving birth is the only way to avoid this kind of stagnation. I realize this is a possibly controversial, non-orthodox idea. I'm only wondering.
- simonsarris 9y ago> Imagine multiple smaller companies offering Google Drive, fighting each other for customers If you haven't read about Google's myriad competing voice and chat applications and services, I have bad news...
- cs702 9y agoImagine assigning every Google Apps/Drive customer, say, to one of 10 bins, and then creating and spinning off 10 independent companies, each offering the same exact service (Gmail, calendar, contacts, docs), each one under a different brand, but powered by the same code. Over time, these 10 companies would be forced to innovate to compete with each other. In other words, take the successful business units, break them into smaller units with the same product and a similarly sized customer base, and release these offspring companies to the wild.
- lettergram 9y agoI actually just wrote a post on "Is Search Solved?": https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/ https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/ In which, I actually discuss the fact I think Google is not going anywhere, but... I do think their search algorithms are starting to breakdown. However, it really doesn't matter. They have the market share, the money, and more importantely, the best search query parser (for the moment). Even if their searches do get worse and worse, people aren't going to jump ship. So I fully agree, "Google doesn't need innovation", they simply need to keep users happy - which IMO they are doing well enough (although we've started to see cracks).
- harryf 9y agoFor me a key point of search stagnation is the search field / keyword search. There's so much more we could do if we enabled users to be explicit about search _context_ but it's hard to express that with the humble search field. Googles solution to context has been collecting tons of data on us and trying to guess. But what if we enabled users to be explicit about context e.g. looking for restaurants enabling users to express "I'm looking for a romantic location we haven't tried before for an evening with my wife" vs. "I'm at a client at 1pm and need a quick snack on the way"
- tenpoundhammer 9y agoI agree, I use https://duckduckgo.com https://duckduckgo.com for the majority of my searches now and it just keeps getting better. Plus ddg has much better privacy policies.
- golfer 9y agoDDG misses the mark for me way too often. Simple query like "pizza near me" shows awful results. Places that are 10+ miles away. I live in a big city. There's hundreds of pizza places closer to me than the ones it shows. Movies -- doesn't show listings close to me like google. No sports scores, like Google. etc etc. I applaud their efforts, but it's got a long way to go to be anywhere even near Google in terms of utility.
- bduerst 9y ago
- KKKKkkkk1 9y agoFood delivery is hitting the world like a cat-5 hurricane. You can’t watch a network football game without seeing commercials about it. It is an exponentially-growing new industry built atop ride-hailing infrastructure, which itself only emerged a few years ago. The driver network can pick up food from literally anywhere and deliver it anywhere within a city-sized radius. When Steve Yegge just moved to Google, his final posts were about encouraging his readers to work on Big Things like the cure for cancer instead of cat videos. And now his Big Thing is food delivery?
- aaron-lebo 9y agoFound that really interesting, too. Hopefully he'll talk about it at some point. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811818 What a difference 2374 days makes. Really, though, Steve can go work for whoever he wants to, as long as he keeps blogging.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoI'd rather he go to work wherever he wants to for whatever reasons, but stop blogging about it. It's clear that the internet is signal boosting his opinions far more then they deserve to be.
- edanm 9y agoI wouldn't trivialize food delivery. Eating is literally something everyone has to do, multiple times a day. Improving it by eg making it cheaper, or healthier, is an enormous benefit to society. I mean, I didn't think about it much before, but now that I have a child, the days of just throwing together random things from the fridge doesn't cut it, and ordering takeout is too expensive. It's either cook every few days or spend tons of money. If the market starts giving me cheaper, healthier options than ordering pizza, then I'd consider it a huge quality of life improvement, not to mention a huge time saver.
- Thriptic 9y agoIf someone came out with a service where I could get healthy meals delivered to me, with decent nutritional macros (a bunch of protein, not just vegis), and costs which were substantially less than eating out, I would be standing outside their offices on day 1 waiting to sign up. Healthy food delivery services do exist, they just end up being astronomically expensive when you look at the amount of food (calories or macros) you get for your money. I was looking at one a few days ago which was trying to charge me 10-12 dollars for a single 400 calorie meal. As a lifter who eats 3500 calories per day, that is an absolute non-starter.
- i6Respawns 9y agoGreat article. Very well written. Refreshing.
- sssilver 9y agoMost of my software engineer friends that work at Google are, in fact, pretty arrogant. Not without merit, because they're all pretty exceptional programmers, but still somewhat annoying.
- inlined 9y agoI often ponder company culture and how what's good for the customers and the users can often be at odds. I find it interesting that "cookie licking" is terrible from the inside, though whenever there are overlapping products from Google customers complain. What's the best way to let the wild ones innovate without confusing the overall product lineup?
- dustinmoris 9y agoThe truth is that Steve is a fairly old engineer who's been working his entire life for big companies working off his soul for nothing but a plain salary. He's not achieved anything for himself or progressed to any top level position in either companies and probably just got bored of doing the same stuff for too long now. Google has been innovating in many areas and perhaps Steve wasn't part of it for too long so he craved some change and in order to justify the move from Google to an Uber clone you gotta tell yourself how boring his current employer is to convince yourself to such a change. Grab is a startup in a foreign country far away from silicon valley, everything seems exciting, different and ground breaking when in reality it's not. They are just cloning Uber in their own region, perhaps even with the hope to be bought up by someone like Uber one day. I have been to South East Asia many times, actually I've been to all countries in South East Asia and many islands and I'm going to Asia for another 5 months this year and apart from the normal cultural differences which you have there's not much difference to Uber (or a clone) there than anywhere else. I think he should chill out for a bit and first experience it for at least a year before claiming any groundbreaking wisdom he thinks he got from visiting this part of the world for the first time in his life probably.
- posharma 9y agoAs per his linkedin profile, he was a senior staff engineer at Google. That's a pretty damn respectable position to reach at Google. So I would politely dismiss that he didn't progress to any top level position in any company.
- dustinmoris 9y agoLet's agree that your definition of a top level position in a 72k+ huge organisation is very different than mine. However, this doesn't mean that I think badly of him in any way, just that I can see very well where his motivation comes from to try making a bigger splash in perhaps a smaller pond. Nothing wrong with that though, just a note to myself and anyone else who's reading this blog post that everything needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. I think Google is extremely innovative, but the sheer amount of products which they have might give the impression that the innovations which they release out every now and then are a lot less than they actually are.
- pascalxus 9y agoI've been a very long time reader of his. ever since the early days of his interesting and dramatic posts. i can't believe it's been 13 years since he joined google. I still remember reading that he joined google and it doesn't seem like that long ago. i guess it's because he hasn't written quite as much in the last decade.
- sgt101 9y agoIn the original post.. >Google’s Cloud Spanner, BigQuery, TensorFlow, Waymo and a few others yup a few exceptions... I think we can safely end this discussion now.
- dustinmoris 9y agoInnovations: ------------ Google Search Adsense Google Analytics AdWords Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc. Google Calendar Gmail Google Maps Google Earth Google StreetView Google Translate Google Chrome Kubernetes AlphaGo Spanner TensorFlow AI Self driving cars Go (programming language) reCaptcha Firebase Special projects (not making money from it, purely to make the web/world a better place): ------------ Project Zero Google Fonts Google Crisis Response Acquisitions: ------------ YouTube Android Waze (and now Waze Carpool) Excellent clones (where I consider it better than competition): ------------ Nexus and Pixel phones Google Home Google Cloud Engine Google Drive Google Photos Google Play Movies/Music/etc. So yeah... I think Google is not any less innovative than they have ever been... I mean Google literally changed the web, from search, to mail to maps to everything. They are not doing anything different today than they did 15 years ago. Just in recent years they released things like Go, Spanner, Kubernetes, etc. If they wouldn't have such a huge portfolio of so many other products then just these 3 products alone would be proof enough of how innovative they are.
- nieksand 9y agoAdsense, Analytics, Docs/Sheets/Slides, and Google Earth belong in the acquisitions bucket.
- balls187 9y agoThe parts where he praises Bezos makes me think Grab's long term play is acquisition by Amazon.