4 ms·

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

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."

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."