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At the time Google tended to destroy companies they bought by insisting they rewrite their product using Google infrastructure. By the time that was complete,

At the time Google tended to destroy companies they bought by insisting they rewrite their product using Google infrastructure. By the time that was complete, the product had died. For some reason, YouTube was allowed to keep their infrastructure.

mattrick 5y ago
Maybe because they were productive in their own environment (like the email mentioned)? Might be an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality, but I imagine that would've also applied to many other companies they acquired.
AlbertCory 5y ago
I remember going to a talk by the Dodgeball founders, a recent acquisition, and thinking "these guys are never going to make it at Google." I was right. https://www.cnet.com/news/dodgeball-founders-quit-google/ https://www.cnet.com/news/dodgeball-founders-quit-google/
nostrademons 5y ago
YouTube did rewrite on Google infrastructure - there was a paper they published c. 2008 about how they were leveraging Google's cloud to scale. It was largely back-end stuff; IIRC they moved from MySQL to BigTable, adopted Google's blobstore & CDN, integrated with Google's machine-learning systems, etc. They were allowed to choose which parts of Google's infrastructure they wanted, though. AFAIK the front-end was still Python when I left Google the first time in 2014, and it wouldn't surprise me if it still is now.
- izgzhen 5y ago
  It is mostly Java now. Backend ones are migrated to C++
- zigradett 5y ago
  "The front-end was Python..." "The back-end was Python... ...." okay.
  - iamstupidsimple 5y ago
    Frontend at Google means something like an HTTP server, not a JavaScript app. Backend is e.g. your API server.
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    We do have a contradiction here, if that's what you're saying. I was not in YT. I was only told their backend was Python by people who were. I can't explain that paper OP saw. Could be it reflected reality and I'm wrong; could be it was only a design. I do know for a fact that they still had their own experiment infrastructure, which does suggest that the backend was still legacy.
    - nostrademons 5y ago
      I was also not in YT (was in Search from 09-14), but a bunch of my coworkers went over to work there around '10-11. I read the paper before joining Google; I think it came out in 07 or 08. There might also be a lot of confusion over "backend" vs. "frontend" terminology. Like the other poster mentioned, "frontend" at Google usually means the webserver and sometimes extends back to various application-level services. Basically everything that involves user interaction. Experiment infrastructure has been part of the frontend in every system I've worked with at Google (which now includes Search, Google+, GFiber, Doodles, AndroidTV, and Assistant), though the flags often get plumbed back to backends to alter behavior there. By "backend" I mean the storage & offline processing areas. BigTable, Colossus, MapReduce, various blob stores, training machine-learning models, etc. This is the part of YT that (in my understanding) was rewritten to use Google technologies.
- fred256 5y ago
  "adopted Google's [...] CDN" Google's CDN was largely written for YouTube.
- cavisne 5y ago
  It's interesting that Vitess is a thing then https://vitess.io/docs/overview/history/ https://vitess.io/docs/overview/history/ Keeping mysql over bigtable seems like a much bigger deal than the application layer being python vs c++/java/go.
izgzhen 5y ago
YT is migrating more and more low-level infra to Google wide support now. But many core “middleware” infra is still maintained in-house.
summerlight 5y ago
> By the time that was complete, the product had died. Perhaps giving a list of those dead products would be helpful for discussions, modulo those products with merely brand changes.
- FridayoLeary 5y ago
  Not sure if this is what you looking for but look here https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

mattrick 5y ago

Maybe because they were productive in their own environment (like the email mentioned)? Might be an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality, but I imagine that would've also applied to many other companies they acquired.

AlbertCory 5y ago

I remember going to a talk by the Dodgeball founders, a recent acquisition, and thinking "these guys are never going to make it at Google." I was right. https://www.cnet.com/news/dodgeball-founders-quit-google/ https://www.cnet.com/news/dodgeball-founders-quit-google/

nostrademons 5y ago

YouTube did rewrite on Google infrastructure - there was a paper they published c. 2008 about how they were leveraging Google's cloud to scale. It was largely back-end stuff; IIRC they moved from MySQL to BigTable, adopted Google's blobstore & CDN, integrated with Google's machine-learning systems, etc. They were allowed to choose which parts of Google's infrastructure they wanted, though. AFAIK the front-end was still Python when I left Google the first time in 2014, and it wouldn't surprise me if it still is now.

izgzhen 5y ago
It is mostly Java now. Backend ones are migrated to C++
zigradett 5y ago
"The front-end was Python..." "The back-end was Python... ...." okay.
- iamstupidsimple 5y ago
  Frontend at Google means something like an HTTP server, not a JavaScript app. Backend is e.g. your API server.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  We do have a contradiction here, if that's what you're saying. I was not in YT. I was only told their backend was Python by people who were. I can't explain that paper OP saw. Could be it reflected reality and I'm wrong; could be it was only a design. I do know for a fact that they still had their own experiment infrastructure, which does suggest that the backend was still legacy.
  - nostrademons 5y ago
    I was also not in YT (was in Search from 09-14), but a bunch of my coworkers went over to work there around '10-11. I read the paper before joining Google; I think it came out in 07 or 08. There might also be a lot of confusion over "backend" vs. "frontend" terminology. Like the other poster mentioned, "frontend" at Google usually means the webserver and sometimes extends back to various application-level services. Basically everything that involves user interaction. Experiment infrastructure has been part of the frontend in every system I've worked with at Google (which now includes Search, Google+, GFiber, Doodles, AndroidTV, and Assistant), though the flags often get plumbed back to backends to alter behavior there. By "backend" I mean the storage & offline processing areas. BigTable, Colossus, MapReduce, various blob stores, training machine-learning models, etc. This is the part of YT that (in my understanding) was rewritten to use Google technologies.
fred256 5y ago
"adopted Google's [...] CDN" Google's CDN was largely written for YouTube.
cavisne 5y ago
It's interesting that Vitess is a thing then https://vitess.io/docs/overview/history/ https://vitess.io/docs/overview/history/ Keeping mysql over bigtable seems like a much bigger deal than the application layer being python vs c++/java/go.

izgzhen 5y ago

YT is migrating more and more low-level infra to Google wide support now. But many core “middleware” infra is still maintained in-house.

summerlight 5y ago

> By the time that was complete, the product had died. Perhaps giving a list of those dead products would be helpful for discussions, modulo those products with merely brand changes.

FridayoLeary 5y ago
Not sure if this is what you looking for but look here https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/