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When I get involved with a random 10 person company, I know what I'm getting into. Using the google brand provides(provided) a sense of respectability and deep

When I get involved with a random 10 person company, I know what I'm getting into. Using the google brand provides(provided) a sense of respectability and deeper pockets/longer term vision. Some users, I believe rightfully so, feel betrayed by google's lackadaisical approach to starting and shutting down projects. Especially when comparing the effort to market vs create a great product. Like google +, it was shoved down people's throats, only to be tossed.

wpietri 7y ago
This all seems pretty fair to me. I know how to evaluate a startup's potential failure. Who's funding them? How much money do they have? How popular are they? How solid's the product? What are the founders like? Heck, for a lot of small startups, you can just ask to talk to the CEO if it's what it will take to close the deal. And I have a good idea of the conditions under which they'll throw in the towel. But Google product success seems to depend entirely on internal politics, which are completely opaque to me. As traek explains, this product only exists at Google because Google wanted to hire the company's CEO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20815572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20815572 And it stopped existing because she left Google. How could I possibly predict that? Better just to stay away, I figure, unless it's an obvious money-maker or has high strategic value.
- bigiain 7y ago
  Also - if I build a business around a 10 person startup, and they run into trouble or get acquired - there's at least some chance I could negotiate to buy/lease/rent the piece of IP and platform I'm relying on, or to reasonable expect to replicate the important bits of APIs I'm using by starting my own 10 person team. I cannot ever expect to "negotiate with Google".
- jldugger 7y ago
  > And it stopped existing because she left Google. How could I possibly predict that? It's pretty easy really, and you don't have to predict Google executive tenures: if the founder of a service you are considering using sells the company to Google and runs a completely different product division afterwards, even if that service doesn't immediately sunset and lives on as a vanity project, it will die of neglect. The founder focuses on the job they were hired for, and the competition will not remain in stasis like the service inevitably does.
  - 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
    Ah, so the solution is to understand the internal culture of every company you do business with? Our definition of 'easy really' might be very different. In fact, whenever someone talks about complex topics and starts off with 'easy really' I cringe. There's a certain perspective people have to have to use such language, and that perspective is very far from my general understanding that 'reality is complex'.
    - jldugger 7y ago
      > Ah, so the solution is to understand the internal culture of every company you do business with? I'm comfortable treating this as a universal constant. Any company that buys a startup and immediately promotes their CEO to a different department never cared about the startup they just bought.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    I think that's a good heuristic if the product is a startup and if the executive moves on and if I can see that. But I'll note that even that's not perfect. YouTube was an acquisition where all of the founders moved on to other things, and 9 years later it's still doing fine.
username90 7y ago
Google internally is like a mini VC ecosystem. Google leaders calculate the opportunity cost of headcount instead of the actual cost, so if a project isn't worth at least a million per man-year it gets shut down in favor of other projects which might fuel the system in the future.
- 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
  Yes, but when a VC creates a product, he doesn't name it: VC's Product Name Why? Because then his name is behind it. Instead, he invests. Google could choose to create products that aren't google branded as an experiment. Then they can win/fail on their own merit. But google doesn't choose to do that. They use their branding and marketing machine. They know they are using their brand to create trust. Then they betray it. Seems pretty clear to me and it even seems odd the naivete some people here display, it's almost as if they had an interest in seeing google as a force of good, when they clearly removed their 'do no evil'. There is a choice being made, and the choice has a reason. They have every right to do as they please with their brand, we have every right to find it sneaky, dishonest and something that makes us less likely to get burned again (jumping on board other google projects) For better or worse, brands exist. I love my Nike shoes because they are super comfortable and last a long time. I might be able to get cheaper sneakers that are just as good. But I'm loyal to the brand because they consistently produce great products. If that stopped being the case, I'd stop paying the Nike brand premium. Can Nike experiment? Sure, hopefully not under the Nike brand (in fact, that does happen, many companies in many industries own more than one brand and keep the flagship brand separate from more experimental brands on a PR basis)

wpietri 7y ago

This all seems pretty fair to me. I know how to evaluate a startup's potential failure. Who's funding them? How much money do they have? How popular are they? How solid's the product? What are the founders like? Heck, for a lot of small startups, you can just ask to talk to the CEO if it's what it will take to close the deal. And I have a good idea of the conditions under which they'll throw in the towel. But Google product success seems to depend entirely on internal politics, which are completely opaque to me. As traek explains, this product only exists at Google because Google wanted to hire the company's CEO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20815572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20815572 And it stopped existing because she left Google. How could I possibly predict that? Better just to stay away, I figure, unless it's an obvious money-maker or has high strategic value.

bigiain 7y ago
Also - if I build a business around a 10 person startup, and they run into trouble or get acquired - there's at least some chance I could negotiate to buy/lease/rent the piece of IP and platform I'm relying on, or to reasonable expect to replicate the important bits of APIs I'm using by starting my own 10 person team. I cannot ever expect to "negotiate with Google".
jldugger 7y ago
> And it stopped existing because she left Google. How could I possibly predict that? It's pretty easy really, and you don't have to predict Google executive tenures: if the founder of a service you are considering using sells the company to Google and runs a completely different product division afterwards, even if that service doesn't immediately sunset and lives on as a vanity project, it will die of neglect. The founder focuses on the job they were hired for, and the competition will not remain in stasis like the service inevitably does.
- 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
  Ah, so the solution is to understand the internal culture of every company you do business with? Our definition of 'easy really' might be very different. In fact, whenever someone talks about complex topics and starts off with 'easy really' I cringe. There's a certain perspective people have to have to use such language, and that perspective is very far from my general understanding that 'reality is complex'.
  - jldugger 7y ago
    > Ah, so the solution is to understand the internal culture of every company you do business with? I'm comfortable treating this as a universal constant. Any company that buys a startup and immediately promotes their CEO to a different department never cared about the startup they just bought.
- wpietri 7y ago
  I think that's a good heuristic if the product is a startup and if the executive moves on and if I can see that. But I'll note that even that's not perfect. YouTube was an acquisition where all of the founders moved on to other things, and 9 years later it's still doing fine.

username90 7y ago

Google internally is like a mini VC ecosystem. Google leaders calculate the opportunity cost of headcount instead of the actual cost, so if a project isn't worth at least a million per man-year it gets shut down in favor of other projects which might fuel the system in the future.

4ntonius8lock 7y ago
Yes, but when a VC creates a product, he doesn't name it: VC's Product Name Why? Because then his name is behind it. Instead, he invests. Google could choose to create products that aren't google branded as an experiment. Then they can win/fail on their own merit. But google doesn't choose to do that. They use their branding and marketing machine. They know they are using their brand to create trust. Then they betray it. Seems pretty clear to me and it even seems odd the naivete some people here display, it's almost as if they had an interest in seeing google as a force of good, when they clearly removed their 'do no evil'. There is a choice being made, and the choice has a reason. They have every right to do as they please with their brand, we have every right to find it sneaky, dishonest and something that makes us less likely to get burned again (jumping on board other google projects) For better or worse, brands exist. I love my Nike shoes because they are super comfortable and last a long time. I might be able to get cheaper sneakers that are just as good. But I'm loyal to the brand because they consistently produce great products. If that stopped being the case, I'd stop paying the Nike brand premium. Can Nike experiment? Sure, hopefully not under the Nike brand (in fact, that does happen, many companies in many industries own more than one brand and keep the flagship brand separate from more experimental brands on a PR basis)