5 ms·

Its far from trivial to change an entire corporate culture on a dime. From everything we have seen of Google's culture, working on new projects is exciting and

by throwaway2048 7y ago

Its far from trivial to change an entire corporate culture on a dime. From everything we have seen of Google's culture, working on new projects is exciting and is absolutely the way to get promoted. Doing maintenance work, especially on products that aren't wildly successful gets you no attention, no staff, no funding, and probably more than a little tongue waging. The CEO cant just change all that with directives, even if they do something extreme like a "No Depreciations" policy, products are liable to be depreciated in all but name (Joe the intern takes care of it every 5th Tuesday, technically not depreciated) by sheer corporate momentum alone, nobody wants to be stuck with a dead fish, even if its now illegal to openly comment on how much it stinks. It would require change at every level of Google to place value into fixing/improving existing projects, rather than all the glory going to greenfield development. Considering the kind of "kingmaker" culture Google's mentality breeds, ie what gets me ahead is gathering resources to focus on my project, changing things to a setup where contributing to other peoples silos is welcome and common is going to be an extremely difficult prospect because virtually all the people with power inside Google got that way by carefully tending their fiefdom, they aren't just going to throw that all a way, no matter what any executive says.

jbigelow76 7y ago
Its far from trivial to change an entire corporate culture on a dime. You can say that, but when it's a response to the fact that Microsoft did that EXACT THING on the the scale in which they did it your statement doesn't hold any water. Go back in time and walk onto the Microsoft campus in Seattle and tell anyone that will listen in say 1995, 1999, 2001, 2007, or 2012 that Windows licensing is a dead end and see if you don't get lumped in with the loonies talking about the end of the world. To say that Google can't do it is more an indictment of Google's leadership as opposed to the enormity of the task. To thinking a company with a 934 billion dollar market cap (Alphabet) can't figure out how to do enterprise software support if it wanted to, what a joke. Edit: spelling.
- dragonsh 7y ago
  I am not sure why you are saying Microsoft transformed, its still the same old one now trying to embrace Linux as it runs as the main workload on Azure instead of windows. This is just done for survival, otherwise Microsoft would have gone to irrelevance. Windows and Office licenses are still the main driver for Microsoft, just with accounting tricks and office 360 made into cloud revenues. This is an investor story to jack up the stocks. They are no better than google when it comes to platform lock-in. On top of it having used Azure services, I can say without a doubt its inferior to Amazon and Google cloud experience. Microsoft didn't transform it's just that enterprises who hold up upgrading Windows and Office did so after windows 7 debacle to Windows 10. This is just cyclical uptick, not really transformation, its just lucky Nadella. The only good thing Nadella did is, didn't take any disastrous decision to thwart the uptick by embracing Linux and trying open source, by understanding that if it's not done Microsoft will go the IBM path to irrelevance. In the process Microsoft having an old relationship with enterprises helped them to move some workloads to Azure even though it is an inferior service, by supporting Linux and showing commitment to it for financial gain not out of goodwill towards open source. Still today Microsoft relevance on mobile is due to its office products, otherwise it is as good as irrelevant on mobile application and development front. It's alive on mobile just due to proprietary platform lock-in to .NET. Now made it open source to try to increase the share as it's not as useful given the rise of nodejs, Python, rust and other platforms.
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    Windows has not seen a payed upgrade for 5 years - that is in itself a major change. We'll see if they continue on this road, but for now their announced plan is that there will not be a new paid update of Windows. This clearly cuts down on one of the revenue streams for Windows Licensing. Microsoft is the largest single contributor to Linux development. They have a large hand in Kubernetes. .NET is open source and runs on Linux/Mac natively. They have released and are maintaining the most popular lite IDE/editor of the decade simultaneously for Linux/Mac/Windows, and it was open source from the start. MSVC has a Clang frontend. That they are not relevant on mobile seems a non-sequitur. The discussion was on whether the Microsoft Windows-first culture has changed, and it clearly has. They have clearly embraced open-source as a good strategy for them, and are making massive investments in it. I would also note that Azure, while having all sorts of unexpected limitations, is at least much more transparent about pricing than AWS. The Azure UI almost always includes pricing information on the resources you are creating, which AWS carefully segregates away.
- deboflo 7y ago
  Jeff Bezos in 2002: “All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network. It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired. Thank you; have a nice day!” https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
- hinkley 7y ago
  Microsoft’s culture didn’t change one little bit until after they started having trouble recruiting. I doubt Google will learn anything until most people stop thinking a Google job is the best of all outcomes.
  - badtux 7y ago
    They're already there on my part. Between their firing employees who organize or complain that their corporate slogan apparently now is "Be Evil", their chaotic product decision making, and their toxic internal politics, I have absolutely no interest in working for Google. Furthermore, I've noticed that the Google workforce seems to be becoming less.... Googly.... recently (disclaimer: I work down the street from the Googleplex and see many Googlers as they do their daily migrations). As in, they're now hiring a broader selection of people who aren't just the top 5% in class. What that tells me is that they're having more difficulty on the recruiting front and having to cast their net wider.
    - hinkley 7y ago
      When I first wrote that sentence, I said "until people", but it occurred to me that being shunned by a small group of engineers probably barely registers on any metric that a large company would pay attention to. It wouldn't be actionable until the well had been running dry for a while. I mean, shit, I work at a place where many of my favorite people have moved on to other things, few have been replaced, and yet we're only just having sincere conversations about how to fix our culture problems. That had to wait for one of the ringleaders to quit. So far as I can tell from my minuscule keyhole, Sergey and Larry are the ringleaders. They'll never quit, and it'll take hitting rock bottom for them to have a change of heart. Not unlike Microsoft, after their stock began to tank.
- zubairshams 7y ago
  One great book on how the culture of an entire giant company can change is "Who says elephants can't dance" by Lou Gerstner. He was the CEO of IBM who orchestrated IBM's transformation from a mainframe supplier to a service-oriented company. My take on the process is this - the change can be done and has been done when there is an existential crisis. The crisis may not be apparent from the outside, but company internals can notice a terminal decline of their core product/service and has an impetus to change the direction. Even then, it's not easy. I would argue that Microsoft had to make somewhat of an about-turn from Windows because first the Internet and second the Cloud was putting pressure on their core business threatening to make the OS a marginal player. I don't think Google is in that position, at least not yet. Google Ad business is not facing any terminal threat. Thereby it is much harder for Google to make a culture change because simply the pressure to make the change is not there at an organizational level. [Edit: Prepositional corrections]
NotSammyHagar 7y ago
Your comment really resonates with me. I worked at google for many years and I eventually got tired of exactly that. Inside the company we complained about all the problems they still have, canceling projects, no way to talk to a human not even paid support to talk about your whatever being turned off. It was really irritating.
scarface74 7y ago
Every major tech company has changed its culture based on a changing landscape. Apple - look at Apple’s revenue and profit mix over the past 10-15 years its apparent that they were able to change. Of course the change after Jobs came on is well known. Microsoft - was “Windows first” during the Balmer era. Facebook - was in danger of being made irrelevant after mobile. They were making a lot on games hosted on their platform. Amazon: AWS and their move toward services even internally. Netflix: went from shipping DVDs and had to become a tech company in the era of streaming. And then there is Google....

jbigelow76 7y ago

Its far from trivial to change an entire corporate culture on a dime. You can say that, but when it's a response to the fact that Microsoft did that EXACT THING on the the scale in which they did it your statement doesn't hold any water. Go back in time and walk onto the Microsoft campus in Seattle and tell anyone that will listen in say 1995, 1999, 2001, 2007, or 2012 that Windows licensing is a dead end and see if you don't get lumped in with the loonies talking about the end of the world. To say that Google can't do it is more an indictment of Google's leadership as opposed to the enormity of the task. To thinking a company with a 934 billion dollar market cap (Alphabet) can't figure out how to do enterprise software support if it wanted to, what a joke. Edit: spelling.

dragonsh 7y ago
I am not sure why you are saying Microsoft transformed, its still the same old one now trying to embrace Linux as it runs as the main workload on Azure instead of windows. This is just done for survival, otherwise Microsoft would have gone to irrelevance. Windows and Office licenses are still the main driver for Microsoft, just with accounting tricks and office 360 made into cloud revenues. This is an investor story to jack up the stocks. They are no better than google when it comes to platform lock-in. On top of it having used Azure services, I can say without a doubt its inferior to Amazon and Google cloud experience. Microsoft didn't transform it's just that enterprises who hold up upgrading Windows and Office did so after windows 7 debacle to Windows 10. This is just cyclical uptick, not really transformation, its just lucky Nadella. The only good thing Nadella did is, didn't take any disastrous decision to thwart the uptick by embracing Linux and trying open source, by understanding that if it's not done Microsoft will go the IBM path to irrelevance. In the process Microsoft having an old relationship with enterprises helped them to move some workloads to Azure even though it is an inferior service, by supporting Linux and showing commitment to it for financial gain not out of goodwill towards open source. Still today Microsoft relevance on mobile is due to its office products, otherwise it is as good as irrelevant on mobile application and development front. It's alive on mobile just due to proprietary platform lock-in to .NET. Now made it open source to try to increase the share as it's not as useful given the rise of nodejs, Python, rust and other platforms.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  Windows has not seen a payed upgrade for 5 years - that is in itself a major change. We'll see if they continue on this road, but for now their announced plan is that there will not be a new paid update of Windows. This clearly cuts down on one of the revenue streams for Windows Licensing. Microsoft is the largest single contributor to Linux development. They have a large hand in Kubernetes. .NET is open source and runs on Linux/Mac natively. They have released and are maintaining the most popular lite IDE/editor of the decade simultaneously for Linux/Mac/Windows, and it was open source from the start. MSVC has a Clang frontend. That they are not relevant on mobile seems a non-sequitur. The discussion was on whether the Microsoft Windows-first culture has changed, and it clearly has. They have clearly embraced open-source as a good strategy for them, and are making massive investments in it. I would also note that Azure, while having all sorts of unexpected limitations, is at least much more transparent about pricing than AWS. The Azure UI almost always includes pricing information on the resources you are creating, which AWS carefully segregates away.
deboflo 7y ago
Jeff Bezos in 2002: “All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network. It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired. Thank you; have a nice day!” https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
hinkley 7y ago
Microsoft’s culture didn’t change one little bit until after they started having trouble recruiting. I doubt Google will learn anything until most people stop thinking a Google job is the best of all outcomes.
- badtux 7y ago
  They're already there on my part. Between their firing employees who organize or complain that their corporate slogan apparently now is "Be Evil", their chaotic product decision making, and their toxic internal politics, I have absolutely no interest in working for Google. Furthermore, I've noticed that the Google workforce seems to be becoming less.... Googly.... recently (disclaimer: I work down the street from the Googleplex and see many Googlers as they do their daily migrations). As in, they're now hiring a broader selection of people who aren't just the top 5% in class. What that tells me is that they're having more difficulty on the recruiting front and having to cast their net wider.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    When I first wrote that sentence, I said "until people", but it occurred to me that being shunned by a small group of engineers probably barely registers on any metric that a large company would pay attention to. It wouldn't be actionable until the well had been running dry for a while. I mean, shit, I work at a place where many of my favorite people have moved on to other things, few have been replaced, and yet we're only just having sincere conversations about how to fix our culture problems. That had to wait for one of the ringleaders to quit. So far as I can tell from my minuscule keyhole, Sergey and Larry are the ringleaders. They'll never quit, and it'll take hitting rock bottom for them to have a change of heart. Not unlike Microsoft, after their stock began to tank.
zubairshams 7y ago
One great book on how the culture of an entire giant company can change is "Who says elephants can't dance" by Lou Gerstner. He was the CEO of IBM who orchestrated IBM's transformation from a mainframe supplier to a service-oriented company. My take on the process is this - the change can be done and has been done when there is an existential crisis. The crisis may not be apparent from the outside, but company internals can notice a terminal decline of their core product/service and has an impetus to change the direction. Even then, it's not easy. I would argue that Microsoft had to make somewhat of an about-turn from Windows because first the Internet and second the Cloud was putting pressure on their core business threatening to make the OS a marginal player. I don't think Google is in that position, at least not yet. Google Ad business is not facing any terminal threat. Thereby it is much harder for Google to make a culture change because simply the pressure to make the change is not there at an organizational level. [Edit: Prepositional corrections]

NotSammyHagar 7y ago

Your comment really resonates with me. I worked at google for many years and I eventually got tired of exactly that. Inside the company we complained about all the problems they still have, canceling projects, no way to talk to a human not even paid support to talk about your whatever being turned off. It was really irritating.

scarface74 7y ago

Every major tech company has changed its culture based on a changing landscape. Apple - look at Apple’s revenue and profit mix over the past 10-15 years its apparent that they were able to change. Of course the change after Jobs came on is well known. Microsoft - was “Windows first” during the Balmer era. Facebook - was in danger of being made irrelevant after mobile. They were making a lot on games hosted on their platform. Amazon: AWS and their move toward services even internally. Netflix: went from shipping DVDs and had to become a tech company in the era of streaming. And then there is Google....