15 ms·

Weirdly this feels like a non-issue. Google has not felt like it has a "personality" for some time - maybe it's a function of hitting mega-corporate size, but

Weirdly this feels like a non-issue. Google has not felt like it has a "personality" for some time - maybe it's a function of hitting mega-corporate size, but it also feels a bit like when Microsoft (a Computer on every Desktop) essentially achieved its goal, it then spent a decade in "goalless and soulless exploitation" mode - something that one suspects is the next step for the worlds largest personality-free platform. If the two of them leave (have fun sipping pina coladas on the beach!) I am not sure (from the outside) what difference will be made. This may sound like great corporate succession planning - but I feel without a goal there will be little to stop business plans that boil down to "squeeze every dollar from everyone everywhere" (Was there a glimmer of light in "unbiased free information to all" - is that a mission for the new decade?) Edit: Just to emphasise - I hope they have fun spending their billions.

hnzix 7y ago
> is that a mission for the new decade? It would be nice to see a focused mission from El Goog. From the outside it feels like they incubate a bunch of random semi-competing products which are arbitrarily terminated or boosted. There's a lot of talent that could be marshaled.
- droopyEyelids 7y ago
  They have a mission, to control the interface between consumers and digital business. All their 'random' stuff makes sense in that context.
  - usrusr 7y ago
    Not just digital. In the analog age, all those little "yellow pages" publishers around the world were in a similar position and got quite fat from it as well. Now that entire market is concentrated, with enormous automation benefits, at a single address in Mountain View. Injecting Google intro the interface for brick and mortar businesses is why Maps and Android exist.
- RivieraKid 7y ago
  People find the thought of a company with a clear mission appealing but there's no clear advantage of having a mission other than maximizing financial value. The company mission is just one of the Sillicon Valley tropes, another one is the idea of "changing the world". Having a mission might be useful for focus and clarity in thinking but if it's taken as something more than that, it's just an artificial constraint. If you can use the company capital more effectively in a completely different market, you should do that, regardless the mission. I feel that the mission is often constructed backwards from the products. I.e. at Google they looked at their products and came up with a broad description of the user need (organizing the world's information).
  - paul7986 7y ago
    Google and it's story were inspirational! The prospect of working there .. free food.. working with fellow like minded people who were supposedly the best of the best(kids from Harvard, Stanford, etc), the 20 percent hacking time they advertised and the fact all was wrapped up in their "Do No Evil," bow made it further an inspirational place to dream to work for or with. It's "Do No Evil," ethos/mission was important and having one & sticking to it is equally important vs. swiping it under the carpet for the sake of profits. Further it's mission was important to all the women and men they inspired to start up and to get into tech. Yet once they brushed their mission under the rug & focused on money many who they inspired became shocked to learn that many times they do 'Evil," prompting disenchantment. You can see that disenchantment with Google everyday here on Hacker News with the various negative stories and comments about Google. Something I bet if you go back more then five or six years you'd never see here.
  - pm90 7y ago
    > The company mission is just one of the Sillicon Valley tropes, another one is the idea of "changing the world". Maybe you think of it this way because of how much its abused. At its core, I do sincerely believe (still) that Silicon Valley does represent a unique force of change in this world unlike any we've seen before. Semiconductors and then Software: it has changed the world (for better or worse, that's another question).
  - usrusr 7y ago
basch 7y ago
Ironically, they could find some focus by no longer being a one size fits all search engine, and instead offer different search products for different types of users, or focused on different types of information. They do to an extent with travel data, financial data, scholar, but their product just isnt great at crawling the web anymore. They, like Apple and Microsoft, also need some consumer experience advocates, who take a step back and ask how the consumers entire experience is across the whole suite. All of them have products that are often less than the sum of their parts.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > Ironically, they could find some focus by no longer being a one size fits all search engine Or just fixing the search engine that they do have. It really has become shockingly poor.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    I don't think they can. No matter how smart the people working on it are there well always be a group of equally smart people on the opposite side trying to game it.
gerdesj 7y ago
"Weirdly this feels like a non-issue" It is. That page is awful with a hood that keeps flapping around up and down and text that is trying to be true to italics for quotes instead of lots of diacritics and ends up looking badly diseased. Then the letter sidesteps into a memo, which is equally odd and awkward. It's all a bit odd. S and B (in my very opinionated ... opinion) did create a great thing in Google. I can't fault people trying to make a living and running with the ball to the point where the playing field is not just paved with gold but it nearly redefines what the concept of gold is. I think they should have retired before "do no evil" was ditched. That would have cemented their status as internet demi-gods. Instead I think their legacy will be wierdos whot spy on you
- abbadadda 7y ago
 > wierdos whot spy on you LOL. I agree with a lot of your points but this one really hit home. On this one, the spying, I always wondered how odd or awkward it had to be internally to push new methods, techniques, or initiatives for "improving user experience" (I.e., spying). I interviewed for some Technical Solutions Engineer role at Google a long time ago. I really wanted the job but when asked a couple questions about how I'd technically achieve some goal related to spying on users and I always found myself hesitating, looking at the interviewer, and thinking, "is it ethically okay if I say this?" I can't imagine how the work environment transitioned at Google over the years from "do no evil" to actively fostering spying on users. I have to imagine it happened because there were few if any laws around user privacy while Google was up and coming. But I know Google has good internal controls for privacy, but I have to imagine there were many unethical or borderline conversations in the name of better spying on users data. I'm still trying to get away from Gmail because I know everything I send/receive is parses but the struggle is real. This is in addition to Chrome and an Android phone, not to mention Google search results. What's the risk of all this spying? In sum, what is at risk is the loss of free will. People who don't care because "they have nothing to hide" cannot see the forest for the trees. Then again, I need to make some changes myself. As an ancient Chinese proverb says, "To know, and not to do, is in fact not to know."
 - Spoom 7y ago
lonelappde 7y ago
"unbiased free information" was never a goal because it's impossible.
TaupeRanger 7y ago
What makes you think they're retiring to sit on their asses all day and "spend their billions"? Maybe they have new and interesting things to do.
- netwanderer3 7y ago
  They recently acquired Fitbit so I expect we should see some brand new product developments within that category soon enough in the future. I do feel they have not participated as much within the IoT market which still has so much potential unrealized. Perhaps the market is not ripe yet without 5G availability? It's incredible that we have all these new AI and ML tools and still they don't really have a lot of meaningful impacts yet in improving our daily lives if we really think about it. The main opportunities still remain mostly unexplored.
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    I wouldn't expect to see a new kind of product coming out of Google. They have 0 track-record of product innovation. Their main innovation power is in the back-end, on the implementation side. Internet search existed before Google, but they came up with a newer and much better way of implementing it. Internet email existed before Gmail, but they vastly improved the offering. The iPhone already existed, but they came up with an alternative in Android. Same story repeats with GSuite, Chrome, Chrome OS. YouTube was sort of new, but it was an acquisition, so I don't know if it counts. When they do have ideas for innovative products, they fail to deliver.
    - drusepth 7y ago
      Waymo is a new kind of product coming out of Google, as was Chromecast, as is the so-far-successful Stadia. I'm there there are others, but those are a few I can think of off the top of my head that are delivering very well for the technical challenge they pose.
      - tsimionescu 7y ago
joshspankit 7y ago
What ever happened to digitizing all of the world’s information? That still feels like at least a 100yr mission.
- davidwihl 7y ago
  https://www.wired.com/2017/04/how-google-book-search-got-lost/ https://www.wired.com/2017/04/how-google-book-search-got-los... They got sued, prevailed in court, but by then the 10 year battle sapped energy out of the project. With antitrust and other scrutiny, I doubt Google will attempt other massive forms of digitization that need it like academic journals. My personal opinion.
jillesvangurp 7y ago
I share the sentiment that Sundar to me feels a bit like an invisible placeholder for leadership that I would argue is obviously lacking in Google lately. There's nothing wrong with its stock price and revenue and I'm sure from that angle a lot of financial people are pretty happy with the status quo of just milking that cow perpetually. However, looking at it from the technical angle, I see a company that is asleep at the wheel and showing a distinct lack of vision, leadership, and direction across the board of its product portfolio. Perhaps a bit like MS under Balmer ramming out increasingly less popular iterations of windows and office. MS turned things around under Nadella. Google perhaps hasn't sunken far enough that it needs that kind of leadership change yet but it seems in my eyes to be going down that same path slowly. IMHO all the money making units worth mentioning in Google have their origin in a brief period of the early 2000s perhaps up to the 2006-2008 time frame (i.e. the Android launch) when it was smaller, more creative, nimble, and definitely more capable of translating vision into execution. That includes things like google docs, hangouts, maps, photos, youtube, gmail, android, chrome, google cloud and of course the big money maker ads. A lot of other stuff launched in the years since has simply failed to get traction or got killed early. This has actually become a meme on HN and elsewhere where people openly wonder when they will kill X at the moment of the announcement where X is a long list of stuff Google tried and failed to deliver or just walked away from despite internal and external enthusiasm (e.g Google Inbox). The list of stuff that they announced in the last decade or so that actually didn't get killed is worryingly short. There actually is very little of significance that I can name that emerged out of Google in the recent decade that is worthy of being added to that list and only some stuff under the Alphabet umbrella that comes close (i.e. Waymo would be the main success story there that has yet to prove itself as a long term money maker). In other words, I think of Sundar as a caretaker, not a leader. He's greasing the wheels of the money printing machine that is ads but maybe not really the best for coming up with the next big thing. Maybe now is a good moment to start looking for a real leader to replace the founders that clearly just announced their permanent retirement from the industry and any other meaningful involvement with tech (tu un-sugar coat this announcement).
- perl4ever 7y ago
  "maybe not really the best for coming up with the next big thing" But does any huge successful company that ends up having a second act really do that, go and find a visionary* to rejuvenate the company? With Nadella, wasn't it more like, Microsoft did a lot of random things, and when one of them was particularly successful, then the leader of it (cloud, Azure) rose to the top? Not that they picked him and then he decided the direction of the company. *Jobs isn't really what I mean, because he was the original visionary, not a replacement.
tanilama 7y ago
Sundar lacks that maverick charm that founders of legendary company usually have. He feels ... reserved and safe. Maybe that is what Google needs at this moment
jansho 7y ago
> Edit: Just to emphasise - I hope they have fun spending their billions. Meh (time for my socialist side to come out) they could try and do the Bill Gates Foundation thing. Don’t be cynical — it is making some much needed positive change! Money = Power = Responsibility (with wisdom). Exponentially true if you are a super billionaire.

hnzix 7y ago

> is that a mission for the new decade? It would be nice to see a focused mission from El Goog. From the outside it feels like they incubate a bunch of random semi-competing products which are arbitrarily terminated or boosted. There's a lot of talent that could be marshaled.

droopyEyelids 7y ago
They have a mission, to control the interface between consumers and digital business. All their 'random' stuff makes sense in that context.
- usrusr 7y ago
  Not just digital. In the analog age, all those little "yellow pages" publishers around the world were in a similar position and got quite fat from it as well. Now that entire market is concentrated, with enormous automation benefits, at a single address in Mountain View. Injecting Google intro the interface for brick and mortar businesses is why Maps and Android exist.
RivieraKid 7y ago
People find the thought of a company with a clear mission appealing but there's no clear advantage of having a mission other than maximizing financial value. The company mission is just one of the Sillicon Valley tropes, another one is the idea of "changing the world". Having a mission might be useful for focus and clarity in thinking but if it's taken as something more than that, it's just an artificial constraint. If you can use the company capital more effectively in a completely different market, you should do that, regardless the mission. I feel that the mission is often constructed backwards from the products. I.e. at Google they looked at their products and came up with a broad description of the user need (organizing the world's information).
- paul7986 7y ago
  Google and it's story were inspirational! The prospect of working there .. free food.. working with fellow like minded people who were supposedly the best of the best(kids from Harvard, Stanford, etc), the 20 percent hacking time they advertised and the fact all was wrapped up in their "Do No Evil," bow made it further an inspirational place to dream to work for or with. It's "Do No Evil," ethos/mission was important and having one & sticking to it is equally important vs. swiping it under the carpet for the sake of profits. Further it's mission was important to all the women and men they inspired to start up and to get into tech. Yet once they brushed their mission under the rug & focused on money many who they inspired became shocked to learn that many times they do 'Evil," prompting disenchantment. You can see that disenchantment with Google everyday here on Hacker News with the various negative stories and comments about Google. Something I bet if you go back more then five or six years you'd never see here.
- pm90 7y ago
  > The company mission is just one of the Sillicon Valley tropes, another one is the idea of "changing the world". Maybe you think of it this way because of how much its abused. At its core, I do sincerely believe (still) that Silicon Valley does represent a unique force of change in this world unlike any we've seen before. Semiconductors and then Software: it has changed the world (for better or worse, that's another question).
- usrusr 7y ago

basch 7y ago

Ironically, they could find some focus by no longer being a one size fits all search engine, and instead offer different search products for different types of users, or focused on different types of information. They do to an extent with travel data, financial data, scholar, but their product just isnt great at crawling the web anymore. They, like Apple and Microsoft, also need some consumer experience advocates, who take a step back and ask how the consumers entire experience is across the whole suite. All of them have products that are often less than the sum of their parts.

JohnFen 7y ago
> Ironically, they could find some focus by no longer being a one size fits all search engine Or just fixing the search engine that they do have. It really has become shockingly poor.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  I don't think they can. No matter how smart the people working on it are there well always be a group of equally smart people on the opposite side trying to game it.

gerdesj 7y ago

"Weirdly this feels like a non-issue" It is. That page is awful with a hood that keeps flapping around up and down and text that is trying to be true to italics for quotes instead of lots of diacritics and ends up looking badly diseased. Then the letter sidesteps into a memo, which is equally odd and awkward. It's all a bit odd. S and B (in my very opinionated ... opinion) did create a great thing in Google. I can't fault people trying to make a living and running with the ball to the point where the playing field is not just paved with gold but it nearly redefines what the concept of gold is. I think they should have retired before "do no evil" was ditched. That would have cemented their status as internet demi-gods. Instead I think their legacy will be wierdos whot spy on you

abbadadda 7y ago
> wierdos whot spy on you LOL. I agree with a lot of your points but this one really hit home. On this one, the spying, I always wondered how odd or awkward it had to be internally to push new methods, techniques, or initiatives for "improving user experience" (I.e., spying). I interviewed for some Technical Solutions Engineer role at Google a long time ago. I really wanted the job but when asked a couple questions about how I'd technically achieve some goal related to spying on users and I always found myself hesitating, looking at the interviewer, and thinking, "is it ethically okay if I say this?" I can't imagine how the work environment transitioned at Google over the years from "do no evil" to actively fostering spying on users. I have to imagine it happened because there were few if any laws around user privacy while Google was up and coming. But I know Google has good internal controls for privacy, but I have to imagine there were many unethical or borderline conversations in the name of better spying on users data. I'm still trying to get away from Gmail because I know everything I send/receive is parses but the struggle is real. This is in addition to Chrome and an Android phone, not to mention Google search results. What's the risk of all this spying? In sum, what is at risk is the loss of free will. People who don't care because "they have nothing to hide" cannot see the forest for the trees. Then again, I need to make some changes myself. As an ancient Chinese proverb says, "To know, and not to do, is in fact not to know."
- Spoom 7y ago

lonelappde 7y ago

"unbiased free information" was never a goal because it's impossible.

TaupeRanger 7y ago

What makes you think they're retiring to sit on their asses all day and "spend their billions"? Maybe they have new and interesting things to do.

netwanderer3 7y ago
They recently acquired Fitbit so I expect we should see some brand new product developments within that category soon enough in the future. I do feel they have not participated as much within the IoT market which still has so much potential unrealized. Perhaps the market is not ripe yet without 5G availability? It's incredible that we have all these new AI and ML tools and still they don't really have a lot of meaningful impacts yet in improving our daily lives if we really think about it. The main opportunities still remain mostly unexplored.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  I wouldn't expect to see a new kind of product coming out of Google. They have 0 track-record of product innovation. Their main innovation power is in the back-end, on the implementation side. Internet search existed before Google, but they came up with a newer and much better way of implementing it. Internet email existed before Gmail, but they vastly improved the offering. The iPhone already existed, but they came up with an alternative in Android. Same story repeats with GSuite, Chrome, Chrome OS. YouTube was sort of new, but it was an acquisition, so I don't know if it counts. When they do have ideas for innovative products, they fail to deliver.
  - drusepth 7y ago
    Waymo is a new kind of product coming out of Google, as was Chromecast, as is the so-far-successful Stadia. I'm there there are others, but those are a few I can think of off the top of my head that are delivering very well for the technical challenge they pose.
    - tsimionescu 7y ago

joshspankit 7y ago

What ever happened to digitizing all of the world’s information? That still feels like at least a 100yr mission.

davidwihl 7y ago
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/how-google-book-search-got-lost/ https://www.wired.com/2017/04/how-google-book-search-got-los... They got sued, prevailed in court, but by then the 10 year battle sapped energy out of the project. With antitrust and other scrutiny, I doubt Google will attempt other massive forms of digitization that need it like academic journals. My personal opinion.

jillesvangurp 7y ago

I share the sentiment that Sundar to me feels a bit like an invisible placeholder for leadership that I would argue is obviously lacking in Google lately. There's nothing wrong with its stock price and revenue and I'm sure from that angle a lot of financial people are pretty happy with the status quo of just milking that cow perpetually. However, looking at it from the technical angle, I see a company that is asleep at the wheel and showing a distinct lack of vision, leadership, and direction across the board of its product portfolio. Perhaps a bit like MS under Balmer ramming out increasingly less popular iterations of windows and office. MS turned things around under Nadella. Google perhaps hasn't sunken far enough that it needs that kind of leadership change yet but it seems in my eyes to be going down that same path slowly. IMHO all the money making units worth mentioning in Google have their origin in a brief period of the early 2000s perhaps up to the 2006-2008 time frame (i.e. the Android launch) when it was smaller, more creative, nimble, and definitely more capable of translating vision into execution. That includes things like google docs, hangouts, maps, photos, youtube, gmail, android, chrome, google cloud and of course the big money maker ads. A lot of other stuff launched in the years since has simply failed to get traction or got killed early. This has actually become a meme on HN and elsewhere where people openly wonder when they will kill X at the moment of the announcement where X is a long list of stuff Google tried and failed to deliver or just walked away from despite internal and external enthusiasm (e.g Google Inbox). The list of stuff that they announced in the last decade or so that actually didn't get killed is worryingly short. There actually is very little of significance that I can name that emerged out of Google in the recent decade that is worthy of being added to that list and only some stuff under the Alphabet umbrella that comes close (i.e. Waymo would be the main success story there that has yet to prove itself as a long term money maker). In other words, I think of Sundar as a caretaker, not a leader. He's greasing the wheels of the money printing machine that is ads but maybe not really the best for coming up with the next big thing. Maybe now is a good moment to start looking for a real leader to replace the founders that clearly just announced their permanent retirement from the industry and any other meaningful involvement with tech (tu un-sugar coat this announcement).

perl4ever 7y ago
"maybe not really the best for coming up with the next big thing" But does any huge successful company that ends up having a second act really do that, go and find a visionary* to rejuvenate the company? With Nadella, wasn't it more like, Microsoft did a lot of random things, and when one of them was particularly successful, then the leader of it (cloud, Azure) rose to the top? Not that they picked him and then he decided the direction of the company. *Jobs isn't really what I mean, because he was the original visionary, not a replacement.

tanilama 7y ago

Sundar lacks that maverick charm that founders of legendary company usually have. He feels ... reserved and safe. Maybe that is what Google needs at this moment

jansho 7y ago

> Edit: Just to emphasise - I hope they have fun spending their billions. Meh (time for my socialist side to come out) they could try and do the Bill Gates Foundation thing. Don’t be cynical — it is making some much needed positive change! Money = Power = Responsibility (with wisdom). Exponentially true if you are a super billionaire.