4 ms·

is google sinking? Between their mothballing/deletion of services and the obnoxious signup ads on youtube. I am wondering what is going on?

• gumby 6y ago
  Basically neglect and boredom (I say this not an an accusatory way). They have a huge gusher of cash that comes in pretty much regardless of what they do, so there is no penalty if their focus slips. You see this in other companies with this “problem” like Valve. This also happens with monopolies— note that standard oil made more money after being broken up than before that happened. In google’s case you can see this boredom on Android, on the number of products announced and casually killed (they might be excellent standalone products but can’t move the needle on earnings for the benefit of Wall Street so why bother?). Contrast this to early Intel in the Grove era: they were on top of the world with the memory business so they pivoted to something else. Google has had the same two products for almost 20 years. The later Intel has been more like that. Another contrast: they don’t know what to do about the advertising downturn, so are cutting back on hiring and such, while FB is trying to double down.
• tmpz22 6y ago
  No they've just secured their kingdom enough that they can do whatever they want.
• wegs 6y ago
  It's not doing so hot: 1) Hiring standards have drifted downwards over the past 15 years. Google used to be super-elite, compact, do-no-evil, massive-profit-per-employee. It's now a 140,000 person organization, and at that scale, standards just aren't high. You have a team of dozens of incompetent people doing what one person used to do. 2) With COVID19, ad revenues have crashed. It's not clear the impact on Google. 3) The smart, ethical folks on top (folks like Larry, Sergei, and Eric) are gone, and replaced with professional managers. They were smart to pick an internal CEO, but most of their executive team comes from places like Microsoft, Oracle, or Morgan. Having known a number of professional executives, the key skill is climbing executive ladders and moving into positions of power, not running successful companies. 4) Their products are increasingly starting to crash-and-burn, especially in B2B. Their culture relies on automated systems over people, and their automated systems have taken down tons of mission-critical businesses. Automated works well at 1000 people supporting 7 billion in B2C (small elite team model), and not so well for a massive, 100k person company. 5) I've switched mostly to non-Google products because they're better for what I need. AOL was massive too at one point. Losing the tech edge is not good. I still use gmail. On the other hand, their revenues have continued to rise exponentially since they started. So perhaps they're doing fine?
  • jcrawfordor 6y ago
    The cases of IBM and more arguably Microsoft and Oracle tell us that if you reach a certain scale, you can continue to coast for a very, very long time after you lose relevance. Microsoft might be an example of having the glide time to regain it depending on how Windows 10 and Azure go over years, but it's far easier for a large corporation to spend billions defending their shrinking turf than to make the big changes usually required to regain it. The problem is that defending your shrinking turf can show positive revenue numbers for quite some time, so it all looks great while it happens...