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They hire people they don’t need, to build products they’ll kill in a few quarters. Must be weird working in a company with one well-identified money fountain,
by nikanj 7y ago
They hire people they don’t need, to build products they’ll kill in a few quarters. Must be weird working in a company with one well-identified money fountain, and then endless side projects that don’t really matter at all
- meowface 7y agoIf you had one solid money fountain, isn't that what you'd also do, though? Throw a lot of other things at the wall which you expect would have a high chance of failure but high reward if they succeed. (Though Amazon seems to have managed something similar without randomly shutting down AWS services and such.)
- zitterbewegung 7y agoThey have been doing this since before Alphabet. Now the future of that strategy seems uncertain and it doesn’t seem like it will be in their future strategy.
- what_ever 7y agoDisc: Googler Since you are comparing to AWS, do you have any source for apparently lots of products that were killed in Google Cloud?
- meowface 7y agoTrue, my analogy wasn't great. But when comparing Amazon as a whole and Google as a whole, the only thing Amazon killed that comes to mind is the Fire Phone (maybe there's more I'm not aware of), while there's a laundry list of things that come to mind for Google. Also not totally fair because Google has provided a ton of free web apps and Amazon hasn't, but I think it feels more personal when Google removes something that provides a daily quality of life improvement for many people.
- what_ever 7y agoHow many Amazon apps do you use other than Amazon.com, Kindle, Echo? How is it still a fair comparison?
- meowface 7y agoYeah it's still not really a fair comparison (though one could easily imagine Amazon shuttering Fresh, or certain Kindle or Echo features). I could compare it to a company like Cloudflare, who do offer lots of different public, free services (even if their market is different) and don't seem to have shut anything down. Maybe not the best analogy either, but the problem is no other company has the kind of breadth of free public consumer-facing services that Google has, so no analogy would work. On one hand that could be a defense, by saying what Google's doing is unique and risky so sudden cancellations are to be expected. But on the other hand who knows how another company might handle a similar situation; we have no way of knowing.
- what_ever 7y agoWell one has a way of knowing by looking at the type of services by their not so short track record instead of going on with their bias or intuition.
- toephu2 7y agoI guess you've never worked for a company that A/B tests products?