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Google has the corporate equivalent of ADHD. Having talked with ex-googlers and current googlers, the problem seems to be deeply baked into their culture. The i
by areoform 7y ago
Google has the corporate equivalent of ADHD. Having talked with ex-googlers and current googlers, the problem seems to be deeply baked into their culture. The incentive structures seem to favor the sexy over the boring, making it much more likely that someone will get promoted for launching products versus growing one.
The fix seems to be obvious, create a separate path, a maintenance and growth hacker path, where people can take ownership of products and grow them over time. Perhaps people could be judged by their market traction, making them sort-of internal entrepreneurs who over a decade or more, get to share the benefits of shepherding their project.
- DannyB2 7y agoWhile Cloud Print may be an exception, a problem seems to be that Google has perverse incentives. Creating new products is probably over incentivized, while the boring work of operating and maintaining existing useful products is under incentivized.
- ajford 7y agoFrom my conversations with ex-googlers, it's exactly this. Like you and OP suggested, promotions and bonuses are heavily tied to launching new things. Being on the team that launches the next new shiny moves you up the ladder. However, those who stay on a product and continue to grow/advance the product don't get nearly as much recognition, and don't get the incentives that a launch does. This translates to people jumping on board an pre-launch project, riding it through launch, then moving on to the next thing, leaving the project in a post-launch slump with few people lingering to maintain and grow the project.
- Retric 7y agoMy guess is these things are generally unprofitable because their internal costs are so used to operating as a near monopoly they simply can’t do anything on the cheap. Which ends up killing off seemingly viable products. It’s much like how bell labs invented so much great technology, but could never make the transition to new producers themselves.
- CobrastanJorji 7y agoThey might not be wrong. Engineers who could be maintaining mildly profitable products could be invented new products that have some percentage chance of being much more profitable. If someone did the math and said the expected value of "engineer working on new projects" was bigger than the expected value of of the the profits of an existing project divided by the number of engineers needed to maintain it, then it'd be logical to abandon a bunch of seemingly profitable products. Bad for PR and for getting folks to trust you on new projects, and you'd need to bake that cost into the calculation, but still potentially the right call.
- thfuran 7y agoWhat's the expected value of not having your brand known for routinely canceling products without much notice? It seems like any company would have to be crazy to want to depend on any new Google service for anything important - and that's bad for Google.
- rudolph9 7y agoDo you use cloud print?
- privateSFacct 7y agoI have yes - at our office I just bought some cloud print enabled printers so that I could print without some quirks in the AD deployment and remotely. That said, I'm sure traction was low - I saw VERY few others using it. Still very annoying.
- dasil003 7y agoThe more relevant question is: for a new service by Google for which you are a target market would you have any reluctance to use it based on your perceived likelihood that Google will kill in the future?
- 7y ago
- j45 7y agoProbably more indicative of the amount of usage it got vs the data it generated for them
- bhouston 7y agoThis is the right move though because moving towards "Driverless printing" will solve the overall problem in a simpler way: https://openprinting.github.io/driverless/ https://openprinting.github.io/driverless/ Google is pro-adapting to change. And it is painful but it is usually the right thing.
- lxgr 7y agoAbsolutely! Google Plus is the superior way of keeping up with blogs and news sites, and I am really enjoying texting with my friends over Allo ever since they discontinued Hangouts.
- taborj 7y agoDriverless printing has been "the future" for over a decade now (I remember hearing much about it back in 2006 or so), and a concept for two decades. Microsoft first filed the patent back in 1999 [0]. The only thing that's changed is the patent is now expired (as near as I can tell), thus opening the door a bit wider for adoption. But, as with many things, "I'll believe it when I see it." [0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US6952831B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6952831B1/en
- pixl97 7y ago
- techer 7y agoSorry I can’t remember where I recently read this - but as I worked for a large company with one, entrenched major revenue stream it rang true to me: Sometimes it’s in the best interests of the company to only have one major revenue stream! They receive press and seem as innovators/bandwagon jumpers simply by entering the ‘flavour of the month’.
- zelly 7y agoThey should just sell their dead products. I know they don't need money, but someone could probably maintain the Cloud Print codebase and add value to the world.
- bobongo 7y agoThey would mean selling all documents ever printed using their product.
- slig 7y agoI've heard numerous times about how everything inside Google is so tightly coupled to their infrastructure that making it work outside is extremely difficult.
- 7y ago
- jorblumesea 7y ago> The incentive structures seem to favor the sexy over the boring, making it much more likely that someone will get promoted for launching products versus growing one. This is the entire industry. I work for a non-sexy "tech" travel company, and it's the same thing. Pay down tech debt? Good luck getting any kind of recognition. Make a react graphQL api? You're making senior.
- pjmlp 7y agoAndroid is specially bad, not only we have to deal with lack of updates, half backed Java support, many libraries and best practices announced at one IO, are already forgotten the following year. Latest example, now that ConstraintLayout is finally working properly, they come up with JetPack Composer, most likely due to Flutter marketing pressure.
- reaperducer 7y agoThe incentive structures seem to favor the sexy over the boring, making it much more likely that someone will get promoted for launching products versus growing one. Bottom line: Google is not ready for the enterprise. I know a mid-sized travel company ($500m+ revenue) that will have its workflow seriously disrupted by this.
- dbdjfjrjvebd 7y agoWhy would someone plan important workflows around a BETA product????
- reaperducer 7y agoTen years is not beta.
- dbdjfjrjvebd 7y agoThe status was always beta. If a company says their product is beta then you should believe them.
- olivierduval 7y agoGoogle should say: "My product is TECHNICALLY release quality, but my BUSINESS MODEL is not finished right now, so I will cancel a working product if I can get enough money out of it".
- uoaei 7y agoYeah, this is like the "early access" video games that never end up being released.
- minblaster 7y agoSounds like they’ll learn a valuable lesson about not relying on services they aren’t paying to keep alive.
- rgbrenner 7y agoTheir leadership has no vision. They don't know what to build, where they're going, or what problems they need to solve.. So they encourage these random projects hoping one of their employees will have a vision for them. So the organization just flails around hoping to win the lottery. Each new project is a new lottery ticket.. saving the leadership from making any hard decisions.
- gowld 7y agoWhat's wrong with tapping the wisdom of the rank and file? Why bottleneck 10K+ smart creative people by a few power-hoarding learders? That's usually regarded as the great "bazaar" / "free market" style of getting the best ideas out of the community. The failure is in not well supporting the good ideas that come up.
- scarface74 7y agoWhat’s wrong with putting ideas in public and then discontinuing them means that no one will invest time or money in your products. If you were a printer manufacturer would you support whatever Google comes up with to allow Android devices to support printing without needing to write specific drivers? Apple released AirPrint in 2010. AirPrint compatible printer still works with an iPad 1.
- cuban-frisbee 7y agoHaving a vision doesn’t prevent the rank and file from contributing quite the opposite. Look at Microsoft. Nadella has a strong vision for the company and great things are constantly created from every level that aligns with that vision. The new surface neo, xbox adaptive controller, gamebar,razor components, the whole .net team. All of it is about empowerment, that is what vision can do.
- _wldu 7y agoIt seems pretty bold and visionary to me. They've lucked out with gmail, chrome, golang, android, maps, etc. and they still have the best search in the world. Having a HIPPO tell everyone what to do, how to do it and when is not visionary. Letting engineers do what they want and then making money from the ideas is.
- debt 7y agoI mean they kept it around for 10 years before killing it. They certainly tried. It's printing physical paper. It's 2019, does it really confuse anyone as to why they would kill a product that prints paper? Even if it was successful in the short term, which it wasn't, it seems very rational to kill Cloud Print from a business perspective in the long term. The developed world been moving far, far away from print for a while now. I imagine if you look at the graph of overall paper usage, you'll see it going down and to the right for some time into the future until it's near zero. Definitely the wrong business to be in. It has no long-term prospects.
- Spooky23 7y agoPrint isn't growing, but it isn't dead either. Many people don't print as often as they did in 1999, but fewer people than you think never print.
- Spooky23 7y agoI think in this case, Google Cloud Print is a flawed product and doesn't present a business benefit for Google, specifically growing the ChromeOS platform and broader Chrome ecosystem. If anything it's a barrier to any organizational adoption. You have the exfiltration of data to Google, and a weird protocol implementation that's a relic of last decade.
- mumblemumble 7y ago> Google has the corporate equivalent of ADHD. This isn't Google-specific. Based on my own first-hand experience working in a Global 500 company, I'm inclined to say that it's actually inevitable in any sufficiently large company with a sufficiently large range of business. The fundamental problem is that there's just way too much heterogeneity for senior leadership to possibly understand all the company's lines of business. Which means that it's impossible to make thoughtful, intentional decisions about all of it at the corporate level. I'm guessing the best strategy is to focus on the bread-and-butter business, and treat all the rest with a sort of benign neglect. That seems to be what Google is doing. But you can't neglect things indefinitely - you do need to occasionally clean out the hallway closet and get rid of all the stuff you didn't even remember you had.
- magduf 7y ago>The fundamental problem is that there's just way too much heterogeneity for senior leadership to possibly understand all the company's lines of business. Which means that it's impossible to make thoughtful, intentional decisions about all of it at the corporate level. Enormous Japanese and Korean companies don't seem to have this trouble, and they're far more heterogeneous than any American company. Yamaha for instance makes boat engines and high-end pianos and audio electronics.
- tech-historian 7y agoI don't disagree with your assertions. But I want to point out that other tech giants sunset stuff all the time too. It some ways, it's endemic to the industry. Here's a list of everything Microsoft shut down over the years. It's a big list. https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-microsoft-products https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...
- Majromax 7y agoAs of this writing, that list contains about 270 items over about 35 years (from the first closure). The "Killed by Google" list contains 191 over 13 years.
- wetpaws 7y agoIt would be interesting to know total lunched products to closed products ratio, pretty sure MS looks better in this aspect as well
- tech-historian 7y agoThat would be an interesting analysis. Just keep in mind that "products" are nuanced; it's not always apples to apples. Both companies have some products that are free and some that cost lots of money. Some items are full blown enterprise applications, and some are just labs-style projects. All these different types of products are weighted the same in these lists. But I don't necessarily think they have the same weight, so to speak. For example, the majority of products Google shut down were free, and the majority of Microsoft's were not. How should that be evaluated? I don't really know! It would be interesting to look at this.
- scarface74 7y agoMany of those products were cut down consumer products with a clear migration path (Outlook Express, Works, Personal Webserver, etc) or products that were declining in popularity (the older languages). They were also mostly software that you could run practically forever without MS support because MS strives for backwards compatibility. Once Google subsets a service, you can’t use it anymore.
- malvosenior 7y agoThat's funny because other than Google Street View, I can't think of any "sexy" things Google has done. It's mostly really mundane (if sometimes well executed) products and me-too style copycats of chat products. Oh and of course tons of horrible ad tech stuff. I can't say Google's launched anything exciting in the past decade. If they're shooting for sexy, they're failing miserably.
- datguacdoh 7y agoLoon, Waymo, and Stadia seem pretty sexy, for entirely new product spaces. And within the current products AR maps, digital assistant, and AI auto complete in Gmail are pretty cool but I guess that's highly dependent on what you as an individual would care about.
- pjmlp 7y agoStadia you say? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive
- rishav_sharan 7y agoGmail was the sexiest thing when it launched. I remember I was so desperate for the Beta invite.
- paganel 7y agoThere was a time when the YouTube “recommended” list was quite good (around 2011-2013), that’s how I discovered lots of very interesting music back then. In the meantime things have gone considerably downhill.
- freedomben 7y agoI've noticed this too, and not just with Google. Same with Amazon and many other big tech companies. I've wondered why, and the only thing I can think of is that they are all jumping to machine learning, and the results are worse than the old-fashioned algorithms.
- daxfohl 7y agoBut many of these products, if they were a company in themselves, would be out of business. So why should Google keep them alive?
- JackRabbitSlim 7y agoFix what? What's broken? The fact that they don't give a fuck what customers want? Doesn't seem to be a problem given their market position. If something is deeply broken, it's what allows them to thrive in spite of themselves.
- pishpash 7y agoWhen you can print money every project looks good. It's the same thing as government waste or academic faffing.