4 ms·

> engineering brilliance What engineering brilliance? Their only non-trivial product is search, and it sucks and keeps getting suckier every year. Their ad bu

> engineering brilliance What engineering brilliance? Their only non-trivial product is search, and it sucks and keeps getting suckier every year. Their ad business is no better than the competitors.

kamaal 8y ago
>>What engineering brilliance? I think most people's point is some where in the mid-2000's they quite literally were the ahead of the crowd by a huge margin when it came to in house engineering. Google in many ways was the first mega web scale company. The scale of their servers, data centers, in-house research, things like MapReduce, BigTable etc etc the list is endless. Google indeed was a hub for very smart people to work pre-2010's. Not sure what changed. I also hear their engineering driven culture has faded heavily if not totally dead. 20% time projects are no longer there, and even if they exist by a miracle they are largely hated by the internal cartels and power structures. Arguably the biggest slip in an engineering driven culture happens when your big products come through acquisitions not in-house work. That's the first indication that bureaucracy has taken over, and no real person worth their salt is running their show. The reason why start ups can disrupt the market and not big companies, is because 1 - 2 people with a good team are what do the disruption. Its a mistake to assume that companies or your average middle manager Joe can do much in that area.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  I would consider Yahoo, Altavista, EBay and Amazon the first mega web scale companies, not Google.
zzbzq 8y ago
Product-wise, I agree. Tech-wise, most of the high-scalability infrastructure, along with many big data (and machine learning) tools and practices are copied from Google. None of the other tech giants come close to the level of innovation on the technology side. Actually, product-wise, there's some other high points as well. At any given moment, Chrome is usually the best browser, and it's certainly the one that pushed quality forward the most.

> engineering brilliance What engineering brilliance? Their only non-trivial product is search, and it sucks and keeps getting suckier every year. Their ad business is no better than the competitors.

kamaal 8y ago

>>What engineering brilliance? I think most people's point is some where in the mid-2000's they quite literally were the ahead of the crowd by a huge margin when it came to in house engineering. Google in many ways was the first mega web scale company. The scale of their servers, data centers, in-house research, things like MapReduce, BigTable etc etc the list is endless. Google indeed was a hub for very smart people to work pre-2010's. Not sure what changed. I also hear their engineering driven culture has faded heavily if not totally dead. 20% time projects are no longer there, and even if they exist by a miracle they are largely hated by the internal cartels and power structures. Arguably the biggest slip in an engineering driven culture happens when your big products come through acquisitions not in-house work. That's the first indication that bureaucracy has taken over, and no real person worth their salt is running their show. The reason why start ups can disrupt the market and not big companies, is because 1 - 2 people with a good team are what do the disruption. Its a mistake to assume that companies or your average middle manager Joe can do much in that area.

pjmlp 8y ago
I would consider Yahoo, Altavista, EBay and Amazon the first mega web scale companies, not Google.

zzbzq 8y ago

Product-wise, I agree. Tech-wise, most of the high-scalability infrastructure, along with many big data (and machine learning) tools and practices are copied from Google. None of the other tech giants come close to the level of innovation on the technology side. Actually, product-wise, there's some other high points as well. At any given moment, Chrome is usually the best browser, and it's certainly the one that pushed quality forward the most.