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Popular wisdom is that google culture rewards too much the creation of new projects, but not as much their maintenance - which looks comparatively worse in a
by kace91 8y ago
Popular wisdom is that google culture rewards too much the creation of new projects, but not as much their maintenance
- which looks comparatively worse in a CV or when being considered for raises. Since they also hire mostly high-achievers, the result is that everyone wants to move into new things and "old" products are soon left to wither.
I'd be curious to know the opinion of actual Googlers about this common theory.
- izacus 8y agoI've yet to see a single explanation why Google is supposed to maintain a non-profitable project/product indefinetly. If Inbox (or other projects commonly coming up on these whines) would be a startup, it would end up on https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ a long time ago. Why would Google keep maintaining and burning money on an unsuccessful free (!) product? Isn't "fail fast" the main praised mentality of startups here?
- rbritton 8y agoI wouldn’t expect anyone to maintain something unprofitable indefinitely, but Google’s reputation is to offer something free long enough to destroy any existing market and then kill it when there’s no one left to fill the void. It’d generally be better if they never offered it at all.
- opencl 8y agoA lot of these projects Google has killed were very obviously going to be non-profitable from the start because they had no business model. Take Allo or Wave for example, how was a messaging app with no ads supposed to make any money even if it was successful? So why did they even bother in the first place if they're going to kill non-profitable projects?