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IC at BigTechCo: "There's another team building the exact same product as my team. It's frustrating and wasteful." Director at BigTechCo, when asked why that h
by Ozzie_osman 6y ago
IC at BigTechCo: "There's another team building the exact same product as my team. It's frustrating and wasteful."
Director at BigTechCo, when asked why that happens: "That's actually by design. We want internal competition. We can afford to spend 2 or 3x on building that product. We can't afford to have a competitor build it better."
- sshumaker 6y agoIn practice, “internal competition” isn’t competing in the way the free market does. The most politically connected product tends to win, not the one that has the best odds of success. And if you let these all go to market, you risk eroding user trust (think Google and messaging products). Confusing your users is not a good thing.
- koheripbal 6y agoThis is a half truth. Politics counts - but so does getting functionality out the door and gaining adoption. People aren't stupid. If one team is simply failing to deliver, then the internal competition is a hedge on that.
- 86J8oyZv 6y agoDo you mean "most politically connected" or "best marketed at the right time?" Outside of products being used by state agencies, I don't think political connections have much bearing...
- Ozzie_osman 6y agoI think he means politically connected internally. Ie the VP or Director of your group convinces the higher-ups that theyve won the internal competition even if they don't have the better product. This definitely happens.
- Ozzie_osman 6y agoVery true about the politically-connected team winning. That said, the high level point is even without the M&A lever, these companies can still succeed by doing things that seem wasteful. FB is a good example with Snap. They didn't have the M&A lever (for different reasons in that case), but they just built Stories into Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. If you were willing to spend billions on M&A you can just spend them internally. And you don't even need to build a free-market best product, because you have a brand and user base that startups don't. In any case, I do hope that alone isn't enough to keep big companies entrenched. Also hi Scott!
- TulliusCicero 6y agoThe problem there is that it makes for a confusing messaging strategy from the company. How does Google think I should do video calls? Hangouts? Hangouts Meet? Duo? And there's probably other options that I've forgotten, and I'm the best case here because I work at Google.
- ghaff 6y agoIs it that confusing these days? (I know it certainly has been in the past.) Maybe it's because I'm an enterprise GSuite user but Meet seems straightforward and is integrated with GCal. Indeed, it's mostly that integration that makes me strongly prefer Meet over our other option.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoI agree, but I feel like Meet, now that it's available to all, will finally "win", especially with it's improvements since the start of the pandemic, and the fact that it's the default in GCal. I mean, (just to show how confusing it is) I sorta thought Hangouts had already become Meet after they made Meet available to consumers. And it doesn't feel like Duo ever had much traction.
- twblalock 6y agoThat sort of thing seems to happen a lot more at Google than it does at other big tech companies. Frankly I don't believe that an explicit ethos of internal competition is really what drives it. That might be how people at the top explain it, but it's really driven from the bottom up by dev teams who want to launch something in order to get promoted.