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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,
by 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.