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> perpetually killing small products to protect Google's secret sauce. I doubt Google kills those products because it can't spin them off because of secret sau

> perpetually killing small products to protect Google's secret sauce. I doubt Google kills those products because it can't spin them off because of secret sauce. Google kills those products because: - they are not profitable enough (profitable enough for Google) - they don't drive engagement and ad sales enough (once again, not enough for Google) - it offers no promotion paths for people who may run them, so it's hard to recruit internally (as many posts have shown, development of new shiny things, however superficial, is rewarded, maintaining is not) And "spinning something off" is not a simple task in itself and will most likely cost more money than just shutting a product down.

dodobirdlord 6y ago
This is really the core of it. If you run the numbers, Google makes something like $1 million of profit per year for each engineer at the company. If a product has a 10-person engineering team and isn't bringing in $40 million / year at a 25% profit margin then there are just better things for those engineers to be working on and the product will likely be shut down so that the team can reprioritize.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I remember back when I was an industry analyst talking to someone at IBM about some initiative other. And one of the things he said--I might not have the number/metric quite right but the idea is the important thing--was that if an initiative isn't going to bring in a billion dollars, it just doesn't move the needle enough to bother with. Every little project takes some number of cycles from everyone up the management chain as well as finance, HR, etc. etc. At some point, even if it is profitable on its own, it's just too small of a blip to bother with. Plus, of course, no one is going to want to work on it because it's that dead end thing that the company doesn't care about and may randomly cancel at any time.
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    As someone else mentioned elsewhere, Google has serious data security and privacy requirements to contend with. The “up the chain cycles” consumed by a small project are massively exacerbated when everything has to be done in a way that won’t open the company to risk of Chinese cyberattack or massive EU fines. Projects have to be large enough to justify the effort to build them to extremely high quality, because anything low-quality is a risk that outweighs any potential benefit.
- bsanr2 6y ago
  >Google makes something like $1 million of profit per year for each engineer at the company Gentle reminder that thisbis partly because Google isn't fairly compensating the people actually producing the value it accrues to itself: the users. They could start by having accessible customer service.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    That doesn't affect the balance of the equation much. The same analysis applies even if customer service cost more.
    - bsanr2 6y ago
      If profit were lower because Google were forced to address cost centers they neglect (to the dismay of a limited but utterly devastated portion of their clientele), then it would effect what they saw as "profitable."
klodolph 6y ago
Additional reason: all the infrastructure is changing underneath these projects. Let’s say you have a Google product for feeding people, let’s call it “Google Feeder”. Now, you need big piles of food to feed people, so you build it on top of “Google Pile System” to manage all of those piles. People like Google Feeder, but it’s not successful enough to fund an engineering team. At some point, Google Pile System gets replaced by a new system for managing piles, called Humongous. Now, what happens to Google Feeder? You’ve decide that it’s too expensive to migrate it from Google Pile System to Humongous, but the problem is, if you want to spin it off into a separate company, you’d need to migrate it off Google Pile System anyway.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  That just suggests that building on top of proprietary internal infrastructure is a massive waste of value. If web app code were books, Google'd be burning the Library of Alexandria just because nobody else could read what the books were written in. And that reiterates that breaking up Google would be good for Google's value. Not being able to rely on internal shortcuts means more dead products could be sold.
dehrmann 6y ago
> I doubt Google kills those products because it can't spin them off because of secret sauce. If Google were actually killing off products for this reason alone, you'd think they'd start building products on GCP so spinning them off would be easy.
- dmitriid 6y ago
  That's like saying "Google should build products destined for failure". No one builds a product with the intent of "easily spinning the product off". And no, building something on GCP doesn't magically make something "easy to spin off". Amazon is building their products on AWS. I highly doubt that any part of their business is easy to spin off because of that.

dodobirdlord 6y ago

This is really the core of it. If you run the numbers, Google makes something like $1 million of profit per year for each engineer at the company. If a product has a 10-person engineering team and isn't bringing in $40 million / year at a 25% profit margin then there are just better things for those engineers to be working on and the product will likely be shut down so that the team can reprioritize.

ghaff 6y ago
I remember back when I was an industry analyst talking to someone at IBM about some initiative other. And one of the things he said--I might not have the number/metric quite right but the idea is the important thing--was that if an initiative isn't going to bring in a billion dollars, it just doesn't move the needle enough to bother with. Every little project takes some number of cycles from everyone up the management chain as well as finance, HR, etc. etc. At some point, even if it is profitable on its own, it's just too small of a blip to bother with. Plus, of course, no one is going to want to work on it because it's that dead end thing that the company doesn't care about and may randomly cancel at any time.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  As someone else mentioned elsewhere, Google has serious data security and privacy requirements to contend with. The “up the chain cycles” consumed by a small project are massively exacerbated when everything has to be done in a way that won’t open the company to risk of Chinese cyberattack or massive EU fines. Projects have to be large enough to justify the effort to build them to extremely high quality, because anything low-quality is a risk that outweighs any potential benefit.
bsanr2 6y ago
>Google makes something like $1 million of profit per year for each engineer at the company Gentle reminder that thisbis partly because Google isn't fairly compensating the people actually producing the value it accrues to itself: the users. They could start by having accessible customer service.
- sukilot 6y ago
  That doesn't affect the balance of the equation much. The same analysis applies even if customer service cost more.
  - bsanr2 6y ago
    If profit were lower because Google were forced to address cost centers they neglect (to the dismay of a limited but utterly devastated portion of their clientele), then it would effect what they saw as "profitable."

klodolph 6y ago

Additional reason: all the infrastructure is changing underneath these projects. Let’s say you have a Google product for feeding people, let’s call it “Google Feeder”. Now, you need big piles of food to feed people, so you build it on top of “Google Pile System” to manage all of those piles. People like Google Feeder, but it’s not successful enough to fund an engineering team. At some point, Google Pile System gets replaced by a new system for managing piles, called Humongous. Now, what happens to Google Feeder? You’ve decide that it’s too expensive to migrate it from Google Pile System to Humongous, but the problem is, if you want to spin it off into a separate company, you’d need to migrate it off Google Pile System anyway.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
That just suggests that building on top of proprietary internal infrastructure is a massive waste of value. If web app code were books, Google'd be burning the Library of Alexandria just because nobody else could read what the books were written in. And that reiterates that breaking up Google would be good for Google's value. Not being able to rely on internal shortcuts means more dead products could be sold.

dehrmann 6y ago

> I doubt Google kills those products because it can't spin them off because of secret sauce. If Google were actually killing off products for this reason alone, you'd think they'd start building products on GCP so spinning them off would be easy.

dmitriid 6y ago
That's like saying "Google should build products destined for failure". No one builds a product with the intent of "easily spinning the product off". And no, building something on GCP doesn't magically make something "easy to spin off". Amazon is building their products on AWS. I highly doubt that any part of their business is easy to spin off because of that.