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What is going on with Google? I used to think Google had the best product team in the world. In some ways I thought they defined what modern product management

by tempsy 7y ago

What is going on with Google? I used to think Google had the best product team in the world. In some ways I thought they defined what modern product management is/was. Now I have no clue what they are thinking with their product launches as of late. All of their products (and marketing) invoke this conservative, risk-adverse blandness that tries to appeal to everyone and in turn appeals to no one.

dopamean 7y ago
Maybe I'm crazy but I've never thought google had a good product team. Has there ever been a coherent vision for their collection of products? Edit: just to be clear. I'm not saying google doesnt have good products. I use and enjoy lots of them but for a long time it has seemed like even google isn't sure how all their products fit together. Perhaps that leads to weird forays into territories that don't fit which then results in shutting things down.
- perlgeek 7y ago
  I think good had (and maybe still) good product teams. For example I'm regularly amazed at small features in Maps that make my life easier. What's missing is the company-level portfolio management.
  - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    > For example I'm regularly amazed at small features in Maps that make my life easier. While I generally agree that Maps is a great and amazing product, I really feel that it is now suffering "peak product" syndrome like MS Word circa late 90s/early 00s. That is, I think Maps was probably "optimal" about 2 or 3 years ago, but since then there has been so much organizational pressure to do something new and add features than each successive version gets worse overall with feature bloat. Yes, some of those new features are useful, but overall I have less and less screen real estate taken up by the actual map and more and more taken up by shit I usually don't care about.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      Agreed entirely. I struggle at times to figure out how to get directions between two places in the new Maps UI in a way I never used to. Same thing with Gmail - what was once zippy and performant-feeling now feels like swimming through molasses.
- juped 7y ago
  Has a Google product ever been good? - Search (was once good, now just "marginally better than Bing") - Reader (was good, the highest profile victim of Google Death Syndrome)
  - steelframe 7y ago
    > Has a Google product ever been good? Uhhh... Maps? Mail? Pixel 2 and 3? Fi? Sheets? Sure, their Cloud doesn't sell as much as Amazon's, but it's been praised as being a much more coherent product. Not sure how anyone could argue that Google hasn't gotten it right several times.
    - juped 7y ago
      Maps, thanks. Still pretty good. I agree with none of the others.
      - vonmoltke 7y ago
        I'm just one anecdote, but I love FI and my Pixel 3.
    - afishisafish 7y ago
      G-suite (Docs, Drive, ...)
  - ben_jones 7y ago
    Some of the Google Cloud Products are quite good in my opinion. Spanner, BigQuery, GKE. They have pretty high price points, but that's what you get to have with a good product. With GCP Google gets to show off what it is actually top of the world at, with these one-off consumer products Google Employees are just being naive to what their strengths really are.
    - juped 7y ago
      I can believe this (I only use AWS so I don't know firsthand).
- ogre_codes 7y ago
  Google has a few products which were stellar and singularly awesome at the time of launch: Search, Maps, and Gmail. In the years since I'm not even sure I love those products anymore. Search has nearly become pay-to-play, a model which the original search killed. Maps is not nearly as stand-out as it used to be (mostly because products like Apple Maps have improved massively over the years). And Gmail is a bit of a mess and it's gotten pretty damned creepy having Google shuffling through mail. They've also acquired Google Docs, YouTube, and Android which are arguably their most appealing current offerings. But those products are themselves giant question marks. YouTube and Android in particular seem plagued with privacy and ethical flaws. Probably the most compelling product to come out of Google in a long time is the Chromebook. Given their history, a lot of people are rightfully suspicious of Google's intentions with the Chromebook and privacy aspects around it. I tend to eye Google's offerings the same way I looked at MSFTs 15-20 years ago.
  - hyperdimension 7y ago
    Maps was an acquisition, too. "Skyhook" or "Keyhole" come to mind as to the original name, but I'm not sure which.
    - abtinf 7y ago
      Keyhole became Google Earth.
  - pavel_lishin 7y ago
    > YouTube and Android in particular seem plagued with privacy and ethical flaws. Ethical and privacy issues aside, they're also fucking riddled with UX nightmares.
droopyEyelids 7y ago
Google started to make sense to me when I started to understand their business model- Own every 'entry point' to engagement with a business, and then force that business to compete for users by purchasing Google's advertisements. Gaming is big business, Google wants to own the consumer relationship so it can force publishers to advertise/sell through them.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
baybal2 7y ago
> the best product team in the world. There is no such team as a "product team." There are programmer teams, sysadmin teams, business admin staff teams, adhoc project teams, and taskforces. The moment the product ships, all go minding their own business till the next big assignment. This is an inescapable problem in big companies.
rchaud 7y ago
A "product" is something people pay for. Nobody pays directly for Gmail or Youtube, or most of Google's well known "products". That fundamentally distorts their incentive to develop and release improvements according to what the customer wants, because customer satisfaction or loyalty isn't the KPI, it's the growth rate of new customers. Get them through the door by any means necessary and suck up all their data. If a customer leaves the service, who cares? Their data has already been profiled for better ad targeting. They might have left Stadia, but they're still very much in the Google-verse of search, Youtube or Android.
- soneca 7y ago
  A lot of people pay directly for Gmail in the form of Google Apps for business. YouTube also launched a subscription model, although I have no idea if the number of paying users is relevant
  - rchaud 7y ago
    Google Apps for Business will stick around, I have little doubt about that. Not because it's a paid product line, but because the underlying free product is used by hundreds of millions of people for mission-critical tasks (email, schoolwork, office work etc). Same goes for Google Analytics and Tag Manager, which offers an incredible set of features for free, even though their is a paid Analytics 360 tier. How many users would it take for Stadia to achieve that kind of critical mass? Gaming is not as sticky as email or collaborative document editing. So if the critical mass is not reached, I'd expect them to discontinue it.
- robofanatic 7y ago
  > Nobody pays directly for Gmail or Youtube, or most of Google's well known "products". Paying ISPs for internet access and on top of that paying for accessing a particular web app? It's too much IMO.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
Google was really good long ago, before the IPO, when their motto was still "Don't be Evil", and for a short time after that.
kleer001 7y ago
My first thought is their obsession with their own culture as opposed productivity. Seems like something that could merge well with the Peter principle and put incompetents in important positions.
ungzd 7y ago
Not only Google, I can't remember any recent internet/web/mobile/computing consumer product I was excited about. Everything is either "meh, seen that already many times" or "nasty thing that's going to exploit users".
- smush 7y ago
  It's probably the HN filter bubble, but I feel similarly. I am excited about the return of 'dead' formats like landscape slider Android phones (Fxtec Pro1) or 'open source' hardware (PineBook/Phone/Time), but for most of the big companies out there, not much is new under the sun. I could be wrong, but this reminds me a lot of 2006 or so when smartphones existed but were mostly Blackberry / Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PCs. We were ripe for a technology revolution but didn't know it at the time. Either that or we are progressively turning into grumpy old people who don't like new technology?
hogFeast 7y ago
The view of Google within tech (oh, but the interviews are so hard...everyone who works there is a genius) is quite opposed to the view of Google without. They are quite poorly run. You have this huge monopoly product that is locked up super-voting shares. The people in possession of those shares appear to have no management ability or even interest (or just ability in the case of Larry Page). There is no oversight. So it shouldn't be too surprising that the products they develop have no value...that isn't really what Google do. They make products for staff to manage, not for consumers to use. Maintaining products isn't fun for managers: they need to build empires, acquire staff, and grow budgets. Google is a bureaucracy attached to a monopoly (btw, this is totally unique...I am not aware of another company that has ever been like this outside of tech/the present...the East India Company maybe?).
- zwischenzug 7y ago
  Big banks
  - hogFeast 7y ago
    Er no. Big banks, and indeed all large business, have features of bureaucracies but most banks are basically the Lord of Files in the corporate form. The point isn't that they are bureaucracy but that bureaucracy is actual goal, and it is run that way for employees.
twblalock 7y ago
I've never seen a consistent product vision from Google. What I see is a company that lets engineers spend a lot of time pursuing their interests, subsidized by the company's ad revenue. Sometimes that results in products, but sometimes it results in multiple teams working on chat apps that never see the light of day, or Android being shipped with multiple SMS messaging applications at the same time, or that weird split between Gmail and Inbox. The money wasted must be tremendous.

by tempsy 7y ago

dopamean 7y ago

Maybe I'm crazy but I've never thought google had a good product team. Has there ever been a coherent vision for their collection of products? Edit: just to be clear. I'm not saying google doesnt have good products. I use and enjoy lots of them but for a long time it has seemed like even google isn't sure how all their products fit together. Perhaps that leads to weird forays into territories that don't fit which then results in shutting things down.

perlgeek 7y ago
I think good had (and maybe still) good product teams. For example I'm regularly amazed at small features in Maps that make my life easier. What's missing is the company-level portfolio management.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  > For example I'm regularly amazed at small features in Maps that make my life easier. While I generally agree that Maps is a great and amazing product, I really feel that it is now suffering "peak product" syndrome like MS Word circa late 90s/early 00s. That is, I think Maps was probably "optimal" about 2 or 3 years ago, but since then there has been so much organizational pressure to do something new and add features than each successive version gets worse overall with feature bloat. Yes, some of those new features are useful, but overall I have less and less screen real estate taken up by the actual map and more and more taken up by shit I usually don't care about.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    Agreed entirely. I struggle at times to figure out how to get directions between two places in the new Maps UI in a way I never used to. Same thing with Gmail - what was once zippy and performant-feeling now feels like swimming through molasses.
juped 7y ago
Has a Google product ever been good? - Search (was once good, now just "marginally better than Bing") - Reader (was good, the highest profile victim of Google Death Syndrome)
- steelframe 7y ago
  > Has a Google product ever been good? Uhhh... Maps? Mail? Pixel 2 and 3? Fi? Sheets? Sure, their Cloud doesn't sell as much as Amazon's, but it's been praised as being a much more coherent product. Not sure how anyone could argue that Google hasn't gotten it right several times.
  - juped 7y ago
    Maps, thanks. Still pretty good. I agree with none of the others.
    - vonmoltke 7y ago
      I'm just one anecdote, but I love FI and my Pixel 3.
  - afishisafish 7y ago
    G-suite (Docs, Drive, ...)
- ben_jones 7y ago
  Some of the Google Cloud Products are quite good in my opinion. Spanner, BigQuery, GKE. They have pretty high price points, but that's what you get to have with a good product. With GCP Google gets to show off what it is actually top of the world at, with these one-off consumer products Google Employees are just being naive to what their strengths really are.
  - juped 7y ago
    I can believe this (I only use AWS so I don't know firsthand).
ogre_codes 7y ago
Google has a few products which were stellar and singularly awesome at the time of launch: Search, Maps, and Gmail. In the years since I'm not even sure I love those products anymore. Search has nearly become pay-to-play, a model which the original search killed. Maps is not nearly as stand-out as it used to be (mostly because products like Apple Maps have improved massively over the years). And Gmail is a bit of a mess and it's gotten pretty damned creepy having Google shuffling through mail. They've also acquired Google Docs, YouTube, and Android which are arguably their most appealing current offerings. But those products are themselves giant question marks. YouTube and Android in particular seem plagued with privacy and ethical flaws. Probably the most compelling product to come out of Google in a long time is the Chromebook. Given their history, a lot of people are rightfully suspicious of Google's intentions with the Chromebook and privacy aspects around it. I tend to eye Google's offerings the same way I looked at MSFTs 15-20 years ago.
- hyperdimension 7y ago
  Maps was an acquisition, too. "Skyhook" or "Keyhole" come to mind as to the original name, but I'm not sure which.
  - abtinf 7y ago
    Keyhole became Google Earth.
- pavel_lishin 7y ago
  > YouTube and Android in particular seem plagued with privacy and ethical flaws. Ethical and privacy issues aside, they're also fucking riddled with UX nightmares.

droopyEyelids 7y ago

Google started to make sense to me when I started to understand their business model- Own every 'entry point' to engagement with a business, and then force that business to compete for users by purchasing Google's advertisements. Gaming is big business, Google wants to own the consumer relationship so it can force publishers to advertise/sell through them.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

baybal2 7y ago

> the best product team in the world. There is no such team as a "product team." There are programmer teams, sysadmin teams, business admin staff teams, adhoc project teams, and taskforces. The moment the product ships, all go minding their own business till the next big assignment. This is an inescapable problem in big companies.

rchaud 7y ago

A "product" is something people pay for. Nobody pays directly for Gmail or Youtube, or most of Google's well known "products". That fundamentally distorts their incentive to develop and release improvements according to what the customer wants, because customer satisfaction or loyalty isn't the KPI, it's the growth rate of new customers. Get them through the door by any means necessary and suck up all their data. If a customer leaves the service, who cares? Their data has already been profiled for better ad targeting. They might have left Stadia, but they're still very much in the Google-verse of search, Youtube or Android.

soneca 7y ago
A lot of people pay directly for Gmail in the form of Google Apps for business. YouTube also launched a subscription model, although I have no idea if the number of paying users is relevant
- rchaud 7y ago
  Google Apps for Business will stick around, I have little doubt about that. Not because it's a paid product line, but because the underlying free product is used by hundreds of millions of people for mission-critical tasks (email, schoolwork, office work etc). Same goes for Google Analytics and Tag Manager, which offers an incredible set of features for free, even though their is a paid Analytics 360 tier. How many users would it take for Stadia to achieve that kind of critical mass? Gaming is not as sticky as email or collaborative document editing. So if the critical mass is not reached, I'd expect them to discontinue it.
robofanatic 7y ago
> Nobody pays directly for Gmail or Youtube, or most of Google's well known "products". Paying ISPs for internet access and on top of that paying for accessing a particular web app? It's too much IMO.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

Google was really good long ago, before the IPO, when their motto was still "Don't be Evil", and for a short time after that.

kleer001 7y ago

My first thought is their obsession with their own culture as opposed productivity. Seems like something that could merge well with the Peter principle and put incompetents in important positions.

ungzd 7y ago

Not only Google, I can't remember any recent internet/web/mobile/computing consumer product I was excited about. Everything is either "meh, seen that already many times" or "nasty thing that's going to exploit users".

smush 7y ago
It's probably the HN filter bubble, but I feel similarly. I am excited about the return of 'dead' formats like landscape slider Android phones (Fxtec Pro1) or 'open source' hardware (PineBook/Phone/Time), but for most of the big companies out there, not much is new under the sun. I could be wrong, but this reminds me a lot of 2006 or so when smartphones existed but were mostly Blackberry / Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PCs. We were ripe for a technology revolution but didn't know it at the time. Either that or we are progressively turning into grumpy old people who don't like new technology?

hogFeast 7y ago

The view of Google within tech (oh, but the interviews are so hard...everyone who works there is a genius) is quite opposed to the view of Google without. They are quite poorly run. You have this huge monopoly product that is locked up super-voting shares. The people in possession of those shares appear to have no management ability or even interest (or just ability in the case of Larry Page). There is no oversight. So it shouldn't be too surprising that the products they develop have no value...that isn't really what Google do. They make products for staff to manage, not for consumers to use. Maintaining products isn't fun for managers: they need to build empires, acquire staff, and grow budgets. Google is a bureaucracy attached to a monopoly (btw, this is totally unique...I am not aware of another company that has ever been like this outside of tech/the present...the East India Company maybe?).

zwischenzug 7y ago
Big banks
- hogFeast 7y ago
  Er no. Big banks, and indeed all large business, have features of bureaucracies but most banks are basically the Lord of Files in the corporate form. The point isn't that they are bureaucracy but that bureaucracy is actual goal, and it is run that way for employees.

twblalock 7y ago

I've never seen a consistent product vision from Google. What I see is a company that lets engineers spend a lot of time pursuing their interests, subsidized by the company's ad revenue. Sometimes that results in products, but sometimes it results in multiple teams working on chat apps that never see the light of day, or Android being shipped with multiple SMS messaging applications at the same time, or that weird split between Gmail and Inbox. The money wasted must be tremendous.