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I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. Incentives are aligned to solve technical probl

by nvarsj 6y ago

I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. Incentives are aligned to solve technical problems. No one wants to work on something unless it is technically interesting and new. There is no incentive at all for delivering an excellent user experience over the long term - which usually can't be done with tech only, and involves a lot of dredge work of continuous introspection and improvement. We see this again and again. The cynic in me sees Stadia as yet another internal promotion scheme, masquerading as a product. I doubt this will ever change. The internal momentum of the company culture will make it so. What does it mean for investors? Google has enough money they can just buy their way into markets indefinitely. It will probably keep them going, but I don't expect huge growth. I'd probably be putting my money into other stocks if I had to choose. I honestly don't think people would miss Google much if it was gone.

engineeringwoke 6y ago
Brilliant comment
brundolf 6y ago
Stadia, from day one, has seemed like an engineering-oriented project. It's a cool tech that nobody asked for and not many people actually want (and has been atrociously packaged as an actual product). I can just hear the kickoff meeting: "We have some of the best cloud engineers in the world, we have one of the biggest fleets of data centers. Not a lot of companies could reasonably implement cloud gaming, but I bet we could!" That part is true! But then: "Productization? Pricing? Market-fit? Customer service and messaging? Whatever, we've got good tech, it'll sell itself. We can figure all that other stuff out later, that's the easy part." ...cue the flop. It was always going to be this way.
- moksly 6y ago
  Are you sure people don’t want it? I think it’s one of the biggest market potentials in gaming right now. I’m quickly approaching 40, and I would like nothing more to not have to own the windows desktop that I only use for one thing. To play blood bowl 2 (and eventually 3) a few times a week. If I could do that from a browser on my MacBook, you can bet I’d never own another desktop in this life. That’s anecdotal or course, but there’s quite a lot of us.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    The narrow "want to play games on my mac" problem could be solved if game developers chose to build the game cross-platform from the start and release a mac build. Many games are already cross-platform, as they run on both Windows and consoles. The fact that so many game companies don't even bother with a mac build shows they don't want to solve this for whatever reason (probably mac just not profitable enough). If a developer is not willing to lift a finger to port to mac (a small market, but one with a known size), why would they port to Stadia or some other unknown market?
    - brundolf 6y ago
      Doing a Mac build from Unreal or Unity is generally easy (and most of the smaller games that use those engines do release Mac builds); doing a Mac build from an in-house engine may be a ton of work But more importantly: Mac hardware usually isn't really equipped for high-end games. If you have a pro-tier machine you might do okay, but nobody buys Macs for gaming, at the very least. It's just too niche of a market to go through a lot of effort to support it
      - Applejinx 6y ago
        Apple's moving to the M1 chip for desktop/laptop Macs. That's going to make the target look more like top-end Mac hardware… and the iPhone. The latter isn't a niche market, it's a 'not high-end' market. But that could evolve, I think.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Still has a bigger market share than Linux, with people that actually pay for games, and all major engines support Metal. Whereas GNU/Linux, even with the massive amount of games targeting Android, hardly gets to see them. Same applies to Stadia, which is mostly GNU/Linux + Vulkan, with Google sponsoring Unity and Unreal as well.
      - ryandrake 6y ago
        > Doing a Mac build from Unreal or Unity is generally easy You'd think, but a lot of mainstream engine-based games that could "easily" have a mac port never get one, even an unofficial one offered as totally unsupported. Look at Among Us for example. Not by any stretch a high-end game. It runs on Windows, Android, iOS, a bunch of XBoxen, and probably other consoles. I bet the developer could spit out a working native macOS version with the push of a button, but so far hasn't. Kerbal Space Program is another example. When last I checked, they did have a native mac version, but it was hamstrung in some way--I think it was limited to 32-bit or something. I can't imagine these examples are actually a huge amount of effort to make happen. As a fan and programmer I'd be willing to do it for free.
- Axsuul 6y ago
  How do you know not many people actually want it?
- jes5199 6y ago
  my friend at Google reported almost exactly that: it's an amazing technical achievement, really pushes the cutting edge of what's possible. And the sales and marketing have no idea how to do anything with it.
  - nathanyz 6y ago
    Stadia works amazingly well which was actually surprising. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 in 4k with just a controller and Chromecast stick is frankly amazing. Consoles are great if you play enough, but I found that every time I could squeeze an hour here or there to play, the Xbox needed to update yet again for 20 minutes, and by then something else has come up and I am out. Stadia lets you jump in and out, no updates as far as I have seen, and just magically works. Disclaimer: I don't work for Google or any of the game studios and was actually skeptical they could solve the latency challenge.
    - brundolf 6y ago
      Slightly OT but you deal with the updates issue by leaving it running in rest mode all the time. When something needs updating the console will get a ping, download + install, and go back to sleep. Makes things much easier.
  - odessacubbage 6y ago
    they need an experience that sells the actual upsides of game streaming in the same way that mario 64 sold 3d movement and the analog stick. 'here's popular game except worse' will never be a winnable pitch. even casual users who don't know what latency means will instinctively recognize that all the games just feel kind of shitty to play. you need a tailor made experience where latency is a much more negligible factor.
- odessacubbage 6y ago
  i'd like to think even a middling engineer would be able to recognize an intractable infrastructure problem that is entirely out of their hands. stadia can have perfect tech and the best customer service in the world and it simply will not matter until you effectively create your own nationwide isp as well. space age technology does not mean shit if your customers are still in the age of horse and buggy. terraria also highlights the utter absurdity of game streaming. it can and has been ported to practically every relevant device and costs less than a big mac. google invented a billion dollar laser to cook microwave popcorn.
  - sithadmin 6y ago
    >stadia can have perfect tech and the best customer service in the world and it simply will not matter until you effectively create your own nationwide isp as well To add a layer of situational irony here: Google already tried to solve the last-mile delivery infrastructure problem and unsurprisingly appears to have found it intractable
    - myko 6y ago
      > Google already tried to solve the last-mile delivery infrastructure problem and unsurprisingly appears to have found it intractable This failure was more political in nature though, the technical solution is there
      - JakeTheAndroid 6y ago
        And we arrive at the premise. They can build the tech, but they can't be bothered to navigate the social dynamics that make up the rest of the world.
      - sithadmin 6y ago
        While the local politics are certainly an issue, their quirky micro-trenching methodology was also clearly a failure
- abandonliberty 6y ago
  Check out the stadia subreddit. It seems they've managed to connect with a pretty passionate group of innovators/early adopters. https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/
  - tdeck 6y ago
    To be fair, that described Google Glass as well and look where that product went.
- yyyk 6y ago
  The problem with Stadia is that it's a platform geared for AAA games, but doesn't provide much value for them. It can provide good value for more casual games/gamers, but Google's ego means the service isn't geared for casuals. When I write Stadia doesn't provide much value for AAA games, we need to look at it from both the gamer and the dev side. For gamers, if money was no object, one is better off with either a decked-out PC (better performance) or a console (wider variety). Stadia's main advantage is potentially being cheaper - which is precisely the gaming crowd which doesn't attract AAA gamedev companies. For AAA developers, they need to port their game to a different API, then pay the Google tax, in order to appear on a small platform whose users are often drawn in by being cheap and are less likely to pay for your product. There's no technical advantage for AAA - now that Google has closed their studios, nobody will try to make features that are only possible in cloud gaming in Stadia. If Google couldn't, can you? What happens when you ran into a problem, can you handle Google "support"? Stadia could be good for casuals. Except it doesn't have any good discoverability features or even a search bar. Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't need discoverability, but indies or anyone searching for them really do. Its payment model (direct 'purchase', no gamepass) is OK for AAA, but not as a good for casuals. And of course, one still needs to port the game which can be difficult and relatively expensive for indies (Luna is just a VM by comparison). Google could make Stadia better for casuals, but that means doing something less prestigious, no Google engineer will go for that, and they obviously don't understand the business model. So Stadia is geared for AAA games/gamers, but doesn't provide good features for AAA, and even Google itself couldn't manage to make cloud-gaming-only features. Stadia can be useful for casual gaming, but the platform just isn't geared for that, and Google is unlikely to change that. Likely result is cancellation within a few years.
  - ehvatum 6y ago
    > Google could make Stadia better for casuals, but that means doing something less prestigious, no Google engineer will go for that, and they obviously don't understand the business model. There are also many prestigious and lucrative engineering goals at Google that are totally untouchably intractable because money is involved. The Google Play store offers countless examples where graph algorithms and ML could identify the worst behavior for human review. If an established app is deluged by negative reviews, take a look at what’s happening. It’s either become a Trojan horse or a victim of 3rd world scamware competition. The average review for an app does not go from 4.5 stars to 1.5 stars overnight without cause! Attempting to address this glaring deficiency leads to the following problem: the other engineers who rallied to solve it, in the past, are no longer with Google. Do you like your job? Find a technical problem with no downside, in that case!!!!!!
ortusdux 6y ago
I think that their higher tier promotion system is partly to blame, and could be easily fixed. As I understand it, at a certain management level, the most effective way to pad out your promotion packet is to launch a new product. These packets are judged by an anonymous review board. This board could change the culture overnight by updating the criteria to reward managers that grow products or retain paid customers. Heck, if they just updated the definition of a successful launch to include a year+ of operation & growth or even just a proper roadmap, we might start to see and end to the usual pattern.
msoad 6y ago
This is not just Google. All other tech companies including Facebook are using the same system to promote workers. As a result: * Nobody is held accountable for the long term success of the product. Making little things work nice is not rewarded. Maintaining UX is defiantly not rewarded. * Rewarding process over product. That's why you see so many Google products shut down. It takes a few people from L7 to L8 to build it and rewards someone from L6 to L7 to wind it down. Every annual performance review in the process is all roses and rainbows!
m463 6y ago
I wonder if it's the lack of a single founder? Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk - founders at the top who owned it. More directly, Gabe Newell and Valve. It might be that google started with Page/Brin and co-ownership might have weakened that a bit, and now they are not to be found. Not that a single founder is a surefire recipe.
- ozim 6y ago
  Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak, "Paypal Mafia", For valve Mike Harrington would like to have a word with you. Bill, Steve, Elon, Gabe, were never alone masterminds and definitely not single founders because in companies they created there always was someone else who had shares.
rodgerd 6y ago
> I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. Incentives are aligned to solve technical problems. No one wants to work on something unless it is technically interesting and new. There is no incentive at all for delivering an excellent user experience over the long term - which usually can't be done with tech only, and involves a lot of dredge work of continuous introspection and improvement. This goes well beyond Stadia - Google has an air of institutional contempt for humans, especially humans who aren't inside Google. Dealing with humans who are struggling with getting bounced by "the algorithm" is something they simply aren't interested in.
jjav 6y ago
Sort of, but it's really a goog HR problem. That you can only be promoted by creating new things (even if entirely useless) and not by maintaining and supporting existing things (that customers actually want) is an HR problem.
JacobSuperslav 6y ago
Quite ironic that it's an engineering company and stuff doesn't work how it's supposed to so often. I'm looking at you, Google Cloud :P
spondyl 6y ago
> I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. I can recommend reading In The Plex. Quite literally the founders wanted to invert the usual model and put engineers first. There were some anecdotes from those in roles like marketing and so on that they felt like second class citizens.

by nvarsj 6y ago

engineeringwoke 6y ago

Brilliant comment

brundolf 6y ago

Stadia, from day one, has seemed like an engineering-oriented project. It's a cool tech that nobody asked for and not many people actually want (and has been atrociously packaged as an actual product). I can just hear the kickoff meeting: "We have some of the best cloud engineers in the world, we have one of the biggest fleets of data centers. Not a lot of companies could reasonably implement cloud gaming, but I bet we could!" That part is true! But then: "Productization? Pricing? Market-fit? Customer service and messaging? Whatever, we've got good tech, it'll sell itself. We can figure all that other stuff out later, that's the easy part." ...cue the flop. It was always going to be this way.

moksly 6y ago
Are you sure people don’t want it? I think it’s one of the biggest market potentials in gaming right now. I’m quickly approaching 40, and I would like nothing more to not have to own the windows desktop that I only use for one thing. To play blood bowl 2 (and eventually 3) a few times a week. If I could do that from a browser on my MacBook, you can bet I’d never own another desktop in this life. That’s anecdotal or course, but there’s quite a lot of us.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  The narrow "want to play games on my mac" problem could be solved if game developers chose to build the game cross-platform from the start and release a mac build. Many games are already cross-platform, as they run on both Windows and consoles. The fact that so many game companies don't even bother with a mac build shows they don't want to solve this for whatever reason (probably mac just not profitable enough). If a developer is not willing to lift a finger to port to mac (a small market, but one with a known size), why would they port to Stadia or some other unknown market?
  - brundolf 6y ago
    Doing a Mac build from Unreal or Unity is generally easy (and most of the smaller games that use those engines do release Mac builds); doing a Mac build from an in-house engine may be a ton of work But more importantly: Mac hardware usually isn't really equipped for high-end games. If you have a pro-tier machine you might do okay, but nobody buys Macs for gaming, at the very least. It's just too niche of a market to go through a lot of effort to support it
    - Applejinx 6y ago
      Apple's moving to the M1 chip for desktop/laptop Macs. That's going to make the target look more like top-end Mac hardware… and the iPhone. The latter isn't a niche market, it's a 'not high-end' market. But that could evolve, I think.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Still has a bigger market share than Linux, with people that actually pay for games, and all major engines support Metal. Whereas GNU/Linux, even with the massive amount of games targeting Android, hardly gets to see them. Same applies to Stadia, which is mostly GNU/Linux + Vulkan, with Google sponsoring Unity and Unreal as well.
    - ryandrake 6y ago
      > Doing a Mac build from Unreal or Unity is generally easy You'd think, but a lot of mainstream engine-based games that could "easily" have a mac port never get one, even an unofficial one offered as totally unsupported. Look at Among Us for example. Not by any stretch a high-end game. It runs on Windows, Android, iOS, a bunch of XBoxen, and probably other consoles. I bet the developer could spit out a working native macOS version with the push of a button, but so far hasn't. Kerbal Space Program is another example. When last I checked, they did have a native mac version, but it was hamstrung in some way--I think it was limited to 32-bit or something. I can't imagine these examples are actually a huge amount of effort to make happen. As a fan and programmer I'd be willing to do it for free.
Axsuul 6y ago
How do you know not many people actually want it?
jes5199 6y ago
my friend at Google reported almost exactly that: it's an amazing technical achievement, really pushes the cutting edge of what's possible. And the sales and marketing have no idea how to do anything with it.
- nathanyz 6y ago
  Stadia works amazingly well which was actually surprising. Playing Cyberpunk 2077 in 4k with just a controller and Chromecast stick is frankly amazing. Consoles are great if you play enough, but I found that every time I could squeeze an hour here or there to play, the Xbox needed to update yet again for 20 minutes, and by then something else has come up and I am out. Stadia lets you jump in and out, no updates as far as I have seen, and just magically works. Disclaimer: I don't work for Google or any of the game studios and was actually skeptical they could solve the latency challenge.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    Slightly OT but you deal with the updates issue by leaving it running in rest mode all the time. When something needs updating the console will get a ping, download + install, and go back to sleep. Makes things much easier.
- odessacubbage 6y ago
  they need an experience that sells the actual upsides of game streaming in the same way that mario 64 sold 3d movement and the analog stick. 'here's popular game except worse' will never be a winnable pitch. even casual users who don't know what latency means will instinctively recognize that all the games just feel kind of shitty to play. you need a tailor made experience where latency is a much more negligible factor.
odessacubbage 6y ago
i'd like to think even a middling engineer would be able to recognize an intractable infrastructure problem that is entirely out of their hands. stadia can have perfect tech and the best customer service in the world and it simply will not matter until you effectively create your own nationwide isp as well. space age technology does not mean shit if your customers are still in the age of horse and buggy. terraria also highlights the utter absurdity of game streaming. it can and has been ported to practically every relevant device and costs less than a big mac. google invented a billion dollar laser to cook microwave popcorn.
- sithadmin 6y ago
  >stadia can have perfect tech and the best customer service in the world and it simply will not matter until you effectively create your own nationwide isp as well To add a layer of situational irony here: Google already tried to solve the last-mile delivery infrastructure problem and unsurprisingly appears to have found it intractable
  - myko 6y ago
    > Google already tried to solve the last-mile delivery infrastructure problem and unsurprisingly appears to have found it intractable This failure was more political in nature though, the technical solution is there
    - JakeTheAndroid 6y ago
      And we arrive at the premise. They can build the tech, but they can't be bothered to navigate the social dynamics that make up the rest of the world.
    - sithadmin 6y ago
      While the local politics are certainly an issue, their quirky micro-trenching methodology was also clearly a failure
abandonliberty 6y ago
Check out the stadia subreddit. It seems they've managed to connect with a pretty passionate group of innovators/early adopters. https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/
- tdeck 6y ago
  To be fair, that described Google Glass as well and look where that product went.
yyyk 6y ago
The problem with Stadia is that it's a platform geared for AAA games, but doesn't provide much value for them. It can provide good value for more casual games/gamers, but Google's ego means the service isn't geared for casuals. When I write Stadia doesn't provide much value for AAA games, we need to look at it from both the gamer and the dev side. For gamers, if money was no object, one is better off with either a decked-out PC (better performance) or a console (wider variety). Stadia's main advantage is potentially being cheaper - which is precisely the gaming crowd which doesn't attract AAA gamedev companies. For AAA developers, they need to port their game to a different API, then pay the Google tax, in order to appear on a small platform whose users are often drawn in by being cheap and are less likely to pay for your product. There's no technical advantage for AAA - now that Google has closed their studios, nobody will try to make features that are only possible in cloud gaming in Stadia. If Google couldn't, can you? What happens when you ran into a problem, can you handle Google "support"? Stadia could be good for casuals. Except it doesn't have any good discoverability features or even a search bar. Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't need discoverability, but indies or anyone searching for them really do. Its payment model (direct 'purchase', no gamepass) is OK for AAA, but not as a good for casuals. And of course, one still needs to port the game which can be difficult and relatively expensive for indies (Luna is just a VM by comparison). Google could make Stadia better for casuals, but that means doing something less prestigious, no Google engineer will go for that, and they obviously don't understand the business model. So Stadia is geared for AAA games/gamers, but doesn't provide good features for AAA, and even Google itself couldn't manage to make cloud-gaming-only features. Stadia can be useful for casual gaming, but the platform just isn't geared for that, and Google is unlikely to change that. Likely result is cancellation within a few years.
- ehvatum 6y ago
  > Google could make Stadia better for casuals, but that means doing something less prestigious, no Google engineer will go for that, and they obviously don't understand the business model. There are also many prestigious and lucrative engineering goals at Google that are totally untouchably intractable because money is involved. The Google Play store offers countless examples where graph algorithms and ML could identify the worst behavior for human review. If an established app is deluged by negative reviews, take a look at what’s happening. It’s either become a Trojan horse or a victim of 3rd world scamware competition. The average review for an app does not go from 4.5 stars to 1.5 stars overnight without cause! Attempting to address this glaring deficiency leads to the following problem: the other engineers who rallied to solve it, in the past, are no longer with Google. Do you like your job? Find a technical problem with no downside, in that case!!!!!!

ortusdux 6y ago

I think that their higher tier promotion system is partly to blame, and could be easily fixed. As I understand it, at a certain management level, the most effective way to pad out your promotion packet is to launch a new product. These packets are judged by an anonymous review board. This board could change the culture overnight by updating the criteria to reward managers that grow products or retain paid customers. Heck, if they just updated the definition of a successful launch to include a year+ of operation & growth or even just a proper roadmap, we might start to see and end to the usual pattern.

msoad 6y ago

This is not just Google. All other tech companies including Facebook are using the same system to promote workers. As a result: * Nobody is held accountable for the long term success of the product. Making little things work nice is not rewarded. Maintaining UX is defiantly not rewarded. * Rewarding process over product. That's why you see so many Google products shut down. It takes a few people from L7 to L8 to build it and rewards someone from L6 to L7 to wind it down. Every annual performance review in the process is all roses and rainbows!

m463 6y ago

I wonder if it's the lack of a single founder? Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk - founders at the top who owned it. More directly, Gabe Newell and Valve. It might be that google started with Page/Brin and co-ownership might have weakened that a bit, and now they are not to be found. Not that a single founder is a surefire recipe.

ozim 6y ago
Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak, "Paypal Mafia", For valve Mike Harrington would like to have a word with you. Bill, Steve, Elon, Gabe, were never alone masterminds and definitely not single founders because in companies they created there always was someone else who had shares.

rodgerd 6y ago

> I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. Incentives are aligned to solve technical problems. No one wants to work on something unless it is technically interesting and new. There is no incentive at all for delivering an excellent user experience over the long term - which usually can't be done with tech only, and involves a lot of dredge work of continuous introspection and improvement. This goes well beyond Stadia - Google has an air of institutional contempt for humans, especially humans who aren't inside Google. Dealing with humans who are struggling with getting bounced by "the algorithm" is something they simply aren't interested in.

jjav 6y ago

Sort of, but it's really a goog HR problem. That you can only be promoted by creating new things (even if entirely useless) and not by maintaining and supporting existing things (that customers actually want) is an HR problem.

JacobSuperslav 6y ago

Quite ironic that it's an engineering company and stuff doesn't work how it's supposed to so often. I'm looking at you, Google Cloud :P

spondyl 6y ago

> I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. I can recommend reading In The Plex. Quite literally the founders wanted to invert the usual model and put engineers first. There were some anecdotes from those in roles like marketing and so on that they felt like second class citizens.