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The only substance I can extract from this article is that the author really dislikes Google. If there is any other signal it's buried in the noise of the preac

by bhawks 5y ago

The only substance I can extract from this article is that the author really dislikes Google. If there is any other signal it's buried in the noise of the preachy and verbose writing style. At least the links to $90 books don't include an affiliate tracker :). Google is a company that has built things which have changed the world (whether this tends to the good / bad / neutral will take a much longer time to sus out - and it'll certainly vary on the perspective of the person looking back). Any undertaking that results in the impact the size that Google has would find itself in a very similar space. (I am an xoogler fwiw)

bushbaba 5y ago
Google DID build things which changed the world. Now of days what have they built that changed the world? Youtube, aquisition. Android, aquisition. Workspaces, aquisition. DoubleClick, aquisition. Waze, aquisition. Feels like it has been roughly a decade since Google changed the world.
- clpm4j 5y ago
  Cloud infrastructure, the Go programming language, Kubernetes. Now of course your definition of "change the world" comes into play here, but it certainly hasn't just been advertising and acquisitions.
  - zeruch 5y ago
    "Now of course your definition of "change the world" comes into play here" Indeed. Cloud Infrastructure = playing catch up to a player that set the stage (and still leads), Go I don't think "changes the world" quite as much as consolidates and improves things that already were available in everything from C to Python, but suited to a specific set of use cases that Google particularly cared about for their own business first and the "world" later. K8s came out in roughly the same window as other orchestration tech (e.g. Mesos) but had/s the benefit of the 'Google' name attached to it. It simplifies some things certainly, but is it really a "world changer"? TBH, more seems to be about changing Googles world more than the broader one, but that goes to your original quote.
    - sterlind 5y ago
      iirc Mesos was inspired by Borg. Google kept Borg secret for quite a long time, eventually releasing K8s when they started failing hard at cloud and needed to keep their foot in the door for developer mind-share. Borg's real win was the insane colocation and oversubscription it enabled, both of which K8s and all major public clouds have failed to replicate because you can't securely share bare metal between customers. and K8s ended up being too little too late, despite beating Mesos and being quite successful, because VMs had won by that point.
- bhawks 5y ago
  A sibling poster points out there is quite a bit of original work but can we discuss acquisitions? Most acquisitions are kind of gigantic re-orgs: they cost a ton and rarely leave things better than when they started - oh and generally execs will always feel they were successful :) Most of the examples you listed are the dream acquisition with exponential improvement. I have a hard time seeing Android on 2 billion devices or YouTube with millions of creators delivering HD content across the world without standing hand-in-hand with the rest of the teams at Google. Similarly Google would not be able to do it either (Google video would have been sunset without YouTube acquisition and no one was building a consumer electronics focused os). Google certainly has screwed the pooch on many acquisitions but to chalk up all those other successes as a given or as pure luck is a naive statement. There was a ton of hard work, huge chance of failure and really impactful results.
  - bushbaba 5y ago
    Sure and the last one was over a decade ago. Youtube acquired in 2006 Android acquired in 2005 Docs acquired in 2012.
- sterlind 5y ago
  I'm reminded of the "what have the Romans ever done for us?" scene from Life of Brian: https://youtu.be/uvPbj9NX0zc https://youtu.be/uvPbj9NX0zc I'm not sure the history with workspaces, but Google Docs etc. were very important. Google also gets points in my book just by scaling YouTube, Maps, Gmail etc. To the degree they've published their work it's been revolutionary to the field. Excellent engineering with terrible/conservative corporate strategy, imo.
gilrain 5y ago
> whether this tends to the good / bad / neutral will take a much longer time to sus out This conveniently implies that nothing should or can be done about Google’s known, current abuses. After all, in the grand arc of time, who’s to say they won’t have had a positive impact by someone’s reckoning?
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  How does the first sentence follow from the second? The possibility that a company does good "in the grand arc of time" is no excuse for not holding them to the law. Now if you're saying "negative effects", then comparing to longrun impacts is fine. But "abuses" is a much stronger claim, and enforcement needn't have anything to do with estimates of longterm benefit.
throwawaygh 5y ago
> whether this tends to the good / bad / neutral will take a much longer time to sus out - and it'll certainly vary on the perspective of the person looking back The only truthful answer is "all of the above". But, I suspect Google's fate is the same as IBM. It fades into obsolesce within a generation. It's already happening. The tell-tale sign is that its search product is becoming absolutely useless as every search category follows the same pattern as the recipe problem (have you googled error messages recently? If even stack trace search results are dominated by useless ad spam, you're done...). It used to be that search was the sacred cow of Google. You could inject a few very obvious and low-screen-real-estate ads into search, but that was it. All sorts of shady shit happened in every other product category, the company shut down services left and right, etc. etc. But search -- search was sacred. Take a reasonable profit, and no more. That mentality is apparently gone. Our children will think of Google like we think of IBM. They'll remember a company that invented the search engine, as well as the "just save everything and then search for stuff" mode of work. The core innovation was an enormously useful and a powerful augmentation to human intelligence, but in the end the innovation factory was burned to the ground by smart people yielding spreadsheets.
exodust 5y ago
So when you didn't find any substance in the article, you filled the void with "Google changed the world"? I wouldn't miss I'm Feeling Lucky if they bin it. What I do miss is the option to show "forum results only". Google removed the option a few years ago. They don't want people going to forums, presumably they can't follow and scrutinize your activity. How dare you login to a service untrackable by the company that changed the world!
hulitu 5y ago
> Google is a company that has built things which have changed the world There are a lot of companies that have built things which have changed the world. Some of them in worse.

by bhawks 5y ago

bushbaba 5y ago

Google DID build things which changed the world. Now of days what have they built that changed the world? Youtube, aquisition. Android, aquisition. Workspaces, aquisition. DoubleClick, aquisition. Waze, aquisition. Feels like it has been roughly a decade since Google changed the world.

clpm4j 5y ago
Cloud infrastructure, the Go programming language, Kubernetes. Now of course your definition of "change the world" comes into play here, but it certainly hasn't just been advertising and acquisitions.
- zeruch 5y ago
  "Now of course your definition of "change the world" comes into play here" Indeed. Cloud Infrastructure = playing catch up to a player that set the stage (and still leads), Go I don't think "changes the world" quite as much as consolidates and improves things that already were available in everything from C to Python, but suited to a specific set of use cases that Google particularly cared about for their own business first and the "world" later. K8s came out in roughly the same window as other orchestration tech (e.g. Mesos) but had/s the benefit of the 'Google' name attached to it. It simplifies some things certainly, but is it really a "world changer"? TBH, more seems to be about changing Googles world more than the broader one, but that goes to your original quote.
  - sterlind 5y ago
    iirc Mesos was inspired by Borg. Google kept Borg secret for quite a long time, eventually releasing K8s when they started failing hard at cloud and needed to keep their foot in the door for developer mind-share. Borg's real win was the insane colocation and oversubscription it enabled, both of which K8s and all major public clouds have failed to replicate because you can't securely share bare metal between customers. and K8s ended up being too little too late, despite beating Mesos and being quite successful, because VMs had won by that point.
bhawks 5y ago
A sibling poster points out there is quite a bit of original work but can we discuss acquisitions? Most acquisitions are kind of gigantic re-orgs: they cost a ton and rarely leave things better than when they started - oh and generally execs will always feel they were successful :) Most of the examples you listed are the dream acquisition with exponential improvement. I have a hard time seeing Android on 2 billion devices or YouTube with millions of creators delivering HD content across the world without standing hand-in-hand with the rest of the teams at Google. Similarly Google would not be able to do it either (Google video would have been sunset without YouTube acquisition and no one was building a consumer electronics focused os). Google certainly has screwed the pooch on many acquisitions but to chalk up all those other successes as a given or as pure luck is a naive statement. There was a ton of hard work, huge chance of failure and really impactful results.
- bushbaba 5y ago
  Sure and the last one was over a decade ago. Youtube acquired in 2006 Android acquired in 2005 Docs acquired in 2012.
sterlind 5y ago
I'm reminded of the "what have the Romans ever done for us?" scene from Life of Brian: https://youtu.be/uvPbj9NX0zc https://youtu.be/uvPbj9NX0zc I'm not sure the history with workspaces, but Google Docs etc. were very important. Google also gets points in my book just by scaling YouTube, Maps, Gmail etc. To the degree they've published their work it's been revolutionary to the field. Excellent engineering with terrible/conservative corporate strategy, imo.

gilrain 5y ago

> whether this tends to the good / bad / neutral will take a much longer time to sus out This conveniently implies that nothing should or can be done about Google’s known, current abuses. After all, in the grand arc of time, who’s to say they won’t have had a positive impact by someone’s reckoning?

wutbrodo 5y ago
How does the first sentence follow from the second? The possibility that a company does good "in the grand arc of time" is no excuse for not holding them to the law. Now if you're saying "negative effects", then comparing to longrun impacts is fine. But "abuses" is a much stronger claim, and enforcement needn't have anything to do with estimates of longterm benefit.

throwawaygh 5y ago

> whether this tends to the good / bad / neutral will take a much longer time to sus out - and it'll certainly vary on the perspective of the person looking back The only truthful answer is "all of the above". But, I suspect Google's fate is the same as IBM. It fades into obsolesce within a generation. It's already happening. The tell-tale sign is that its search product is becoming absolutely useless as every search category follows the same pattern as the recipe problem (have you googled error messages recently? If even stack trace search results are dominated by useless ad spam, you're done...). It used to be that search was the sacred cow of Google. You could inject a few very obvious and low-screen-real-estate ads into search, but that was it. All sorts of shady shit happened in every other product category, the company shut down services left and right, etc. etc. But search -- search was sacred. Take a reasonable profit, and no more. That mentality is apparently gone. Our children will think of Google like we think of IBM. They'll remember a company that invented the search engine, as well as the "just save everything and then search for stuff" mode of work. The core innovation was an enormously useful and a powerful augmentation to human intelligence, but in the end the innovation factory was burned to the ground by smart people yielding spreadsheets.

exodust 5y ago

So when you didn't find any substance in the article, you filled the void with "Google changed the world"? I wouldn't miss I'm Feeling Lucky if they bin it. What I do miss is the option to show "forum results only". Google removed the option a few years ago. They don't want people going to forums, presumably they can't follow and scrutinize your activity. How dare you login to a service untrackable by the company that changed the world!

hulitu 5y ago

> Google is a company that has built things which have changed the world There are a lot of companies that have built things which have changed the world. Some of them in worse.