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It may be a byproduct of how Google incentivizes their engineers. As I've heard from chatting with engineers and PMs at Google, the biggest rewards go to those
by harryf 9y ago
It may be a byproduct of how Google incentivizes their engineers.
As I've heard from chatting with engineers and PMs at Google, the biggest rewards go to those that take a product to its first major release and the initial marketing fanfare.
After hitting 1.0 you typically see teams break up, the star engineers moving on to the next big thing. Once that happens the pace of the products development slows significantly, leading to ignored user feedback and a struggle make improvements.
The product mothballs for some years until - in the case of something like Google Talk - momentum is generated around replacing it with the next 1.0 product.
And so on...
- username223 9y agoWriting really good software takes years of user feedback, and a team of knowledgeable engineers digesting that feedback to write new versions. A company can afford to do that when its users are its customers. When they are its product instead, you get a steady stream of half-baked and quickly-abandoned software, often installed via forced update.
- erik_seaberg 9y agoIn theory the goal is "launch and iterate", but yeah, the incentives add up to "launch and leave".