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Strangely, why does a company like Google, wakes up so late when Airtable hits Series-D and not Series-A/B/C ? Looks like its straight forward product for som

by samblr 6y ago

Strangely, why does a company like Google, wakes up so late when Airtable hits Series-D and not Series-A/B/C ? Looks like its straight forward product for somebody who makes google spreadsheets.

ec109685 6y ago
I wonder that too. Their gSuite products evolve soo slowly (when was the last time diagrams changed?). Ironically, unlike desktop software when you had to convince people to purchase a new copy each year, it seems like the Cloud distribution model allows google to basically put their products in maintenance mode indefinitely since people will still be paying for the subscription each month and switching cost is high.
- danudey 6y ago
  I was reading a post-mortem of Google Wave, and the author stated that Wave's problem was one of incentives. At Google, they said, you get significant bonuses, promotions, and prestige for launching a brand new product, especially to large fanfare or hype. Conversely, you get little to no bonuses, promotions, or prestige for maintaining that product long-term. That means that Googlers have huge incentives to create and launch promising projects, and then immediately transfer off that project to some other new project to create and launch that, leaving some other team to maintain it, thanklessly. This means that, in the absence of top-down direction from the executive level, GSuite will remain effectively stagnant forever, with minimal, if any, improvements. In my experience managing IT for a small startup that used GSuite extensively, this was generally true; the service as a whole was "promising", but had huge gaps in functionality or integrations that would never be addressed (like being able to back up/export a user's data without having to log in as them and request a Takeout file). Another example is Google Inbox; again, a new-ish project, launched to much fanfare and rave reviews, but once it's launched, who cares? So it was "integrated into" regular Google Mail inbox, except it wasn't because the team doing the integration isn't going to get those huge bonuses for doing all that work so why bother? I'm not 100% sure that this is true; again, I "read it in a thing that someone said", for all the validity that has, but it would certainly explain why so many of Google's products feel 80-90% finished, and have for a decade or more. In this respect, I've effectively given up on Google ever improving anything, unless doing so will help stifle the competition's growth. Improve Android to counter iOS? Sure. Improve Google Docs to counter Microsoft Office? Nah, we're mostly dominant there already.
FirstLvR 6y ago
BTW Airtable is an amazing product, if this work then google will eat their customers
ksenzee 6y ago
There's plenty of competition in this space - it's not like Airtable invented the genre. Smartsheet predates it by far and went public two years ago.
haltingproblem 6y ago
It takes Google several years to wakeup, rub their eyes, brew some coffee, code it up and deploy it. You will be amazed how hard it is to not be lulled by the sweet sound of tens of billions in revenue adsense/adwords spews out every year. Why bother with anything else? Google's political economy is groups building new products not to build new revenue streams but to claim larger bonuses of the ad-revenue pie. Limited shelf life products and their users are just cannon fodder in that game.

by samblr 6y ago

Strangely, why does a company like Google, wakes up so late when Airtable hits Series-D and not Series-A/B/C ? Looks like its straight forward product for somebody who makes google spreadsheets.

ec109685 6y ago

I wonder that too. Their gSuite products evolve soo slowly (when was the last time diagrams changed?). Ironically, unlike desktop software when you had to convince people to purchase a new copy each year, it seems like the Cloud distribution model allows google to basically put their products in maintenance mode indefinitely since people will still be paying for the subscription each month and switching cost is high.

danudey 6y ago
I was reading a post-mortem of Google Wave, and the author stated that Wave's problem was one of incentives. At Google, they said, you get significant bonuses, promotions, and prestige for launching a brand new product, especially to large fanfare or hype. Conversely, you get little to no bonuses, promotions, or prestige for maintaining that product long-term. That means that Googlers have huge incentives to create and launch promising projects, and then immediately transfer off that project to some other new project to create and launch that, leaving some other team to maintain it, thanklessly. This means that, in the absence of top-down direction from the executive level, GSuite will remain effectively stagnant forever, with minimal, if any, improvements. In my experience managing IT for a small startup that used GSuite extensively, this was generally true; the service as a whole was "promising", but had huge gaps in functionality or integrations that would never be addressed (like being able to back up/export a user's data without having to log in as them and request a Takeout file). Another example is Google Inbox; again, a new-ish project, launched to much fanfare and rave reviews, but once it's launched, who cares? So it was "integrated into" regular Google Mail inbox, except it wasn't because the team doing the integration isn't going to get those huge bonuses for doing all that work so why bother? I'm not 100% sure that this is true; again, I "read it in a thing that someone said", for all the validity that has, but it would certainly explain why so many of Google's products feel 80-90% finished, and have for a decade or more. In this respect, I've effectively given up on Google ever improving anything, unless doing so will help stifle the competition's growth. Improve Android to counter iOS? Sure. Improve Google Docs to counter Microsoft Office? Nah, we're mostly dominant there already.

FirstLvR 6y ago

BTW Airtable is an amazing product, if this work then google will eat their customers

ksenzee 6y ago

There's plenty of competition in this space - it's not like Airtable invented the genre. Smartsheet predates it by far and went public two years ago.

haltingproblem 6y ago

It takes Google several years to wakeup, rub their eyes, brew some coffee, code it up and deploy it. You will be amazed how hard it is to not be lulled by the sweet sound of tens of billions in revenue adsense/adwords spews out every year. Why bother with anything else? Google's political economy is groups building new products not to build new revenue streams but to claim larger bonuses of the ad-revenue pie. Limited shelf life products and their users are just cannon fodder in that game.