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Speculation but: there will be a huge amount of institutional inertia around this. It sure suits a large number of Google employees that "paying for a service"

Speculation but: there will be a huge amount of institutional inertia around this. It sure suits a large number of Google employees that "paying for a service" will fail. Newspapers, tv, and music, are counter-examples to the assertion that people won't pay for things - even when they've previously been free. Google's main product focus now should be Cloud, the ad debate is long-term done.

UncleMeat 4y ago
> It sure suits a large number of Google employees that "paying for a service" will fail. Let me get this straight. The idea is that Google has deliberately constructed several different systems over the years to enable micropayments or subscriptions to replace ads with the plan of them failing so they can use this as evidence that the ad model is unstoppable and that people shouldn't try to replace it? And this was done despite knowing that an alternative would make Google more money? And not a single person who was involved in this deliberate sabotage has ever spoken about it? Come on. > Newspapers, tv, and music, are counter-examples to the assertion that people won't pay for things - even when they've previously been free. Newspapers are a dying industry and are filled with ads. TV is filled with ads. Even paid streaming services like Hulu (and soon maybe Netflix) are ad supported. Spotify has an ad-driven free service. > Google's main product focus now should be Cloud, the ad debate is long-term done. Ad revenue continues to grow every quarter. Yes, Google obviously wants another similarly sized revenue stream and there are very few domains that can generate that kind of revenue. But "the ad debate is long-term done" is just not based in facts.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Hulu has an ad free plan and Netflix is offering an cheaper ad tier.
- Hasu 4y ago
  I don't think there needs to be a conspiracy. From what I've read about Google (I have never and will never work there), ICs are incentivized to build and ship new stuff, even if it isn't successful, so Google ends up building a bunch of stuff that isn't successful. It's not at all hard for me to believe that a company that has built, shipped, and killed multiple chat apps has also built and killed multiple subscription and micropayments systems. Then, the employees who are pushing adtech can use those failures as evidence that adtech is the only way.
  - joshuamorton 4y ago
    But it isn't the adtech people, it's the contributor people, who are willing to say it's an unviable consumer model.
    - Hasu 4y ago
      The same incentive system explains that too, though. The incentive is to ship. Once you've shipped the system, improving it isn't rewarded, so if it isn't immediately viable, who cares, you got your promotion and you can say, "Well we tried".
      - joshuamorton 4y ago
        That uhhh... Won't get you promo.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    > From what I've read about Google (I have never and will never work there), ICs are incentivized to build and ship new stuff, even if it isn't successful, so Google ends up building a bunch of stuff that isn't successful. I work at Google. What you say here is not true. Yes, Google is indeed often very bad at long term product strategy and has rebooted its chat offerings an embarrassing number of times. But "it shipped, fuck it if it works" is not actually a sufficient justification for promotions.
    - Hasu 4y ago
      Interesting, this is not what I've heard, but my sources are obviously secondhand. I'll update my priors in that direction, although it makes whatever Google is doing make even less sense to me.
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
        I think a big problem is that "Google bad" is a very engaging blog post and that, by virtue of being enormous, there are plenty of people who leave the company with bad feelings who are willing to write about it. This leads to a lot of highly visible writing about flaws within Google but largely from the perspective of people who were unhappy. There are people who struggle to get promoted and leave. A very coarse piece of failed promo feedback is "not enough impact" and people sometimes interpret this as "you must launch new stuff." For actual data, the Core Developer organization has historically had one of the higher promo rates in the company despite being primarily focused on internal tooling, maintenance, and iterative improvements like refactoring and optimization. I have my own hunches for why Google seems to have such terrible product strategy as a company. There are a few cases where I've seen the actual root cause and, while still being stupid at the end of the day, had nothing to do with promotion or career advancement.

UncleMeat 4y ago

> It sure suits a large number of Google employees that "paying for a service" will fail. Let me get this straight. The idea is that Google has deliberately constructed several different systems over the years to enable micropayments or subscriptions to replace ads with the plan of them failing so they can use this as evidence that the ad model is unstoppable and that people shouldn't try to replace it? And this was done despite knowing that an alternative would make Google more money? And not a single person who was involved in this deliberate sabotage has ever spoken about it? Come on. > Newspapers, tv, and music, are counter-examples to the assertion that people won't pay for things - even when they've previously been free. Newspapers are a dying industry and are filled with ads. TV is filled with ads. Even paid streaming services like Hulu (and soon maybe Netflix) are ad supported. Spotify has an ad-driven free service. > Google's main product focus now should be Cloud, the ad debate is long-term done. Ad revenue continues to grow every quarter. Yes, Google obviously wants another similarly sized revenue stream and there are very few domains that can generate that kind of revenue. But "the ad debate is long-term done" is just not based in facts.

scarface74 4y ago
Hulu has an ad free plan and Netflix is offering an cheaper ad tier.
Hasu 4y ago
I don't think there needs to be a conspiracy. From what I've read about Google (I have never and will never work there), ICs are incentivized to build and ship new stuff, even if it isn't successful, so Google ends up building a bunch of stuff that isn't successful. It's not at all hard for me to believe that a company that has built, shipped, and killed multiple chat apps has also built and killed multiple subscription and micropayments systems. Then, the employees who are pushing adtech can use those failures as evidence that adtech is the only way.
- joshuamorton 4y ago
  But it isn't the adtech people, it's the contributor people, who are willing to say it's an unviable consumer model.
  - Hasu 4y ago
    The same incentive system explains that too, though. The incentive is to ship. Once you've shipped the system, improving it isn't rewarded, so if it isn't immediately viable, who cares, you got your promotion and you can say, "Well we tried".
    - joshuamorton 4y ago
      That uhhh... Won't get you promo.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  > From what I've read about Google (I have never and will never work there), ICs are incentivized to build and ship new stuff, even if it isn't successful, so Google ends up building a bunch of stuff that isn't successful. I work at Google. What you say here is not true. Yes, Google is indeed often very bad at long term product strategy and has rebooted its chat offerings an embarrassing number of times. But "it shipped, fuck it if it works" is not actually a sufficient justification for promotions.
  - Hasu 4y ago
    Interesting, this is not what I've heard, but my sources are obviously secondhand. I'll update my priors in that direction, although it makes whatever Google is doing make even less sense to me.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      I think a big problem is that "Google bad" is a very engaging blog post and that, by virtue of being enormous, there are plenty of people who leave the company with bad feelings who are willing to write about it. This leads to a lot of highly visible writing about flaws within Google but largely from the perspective of people who were unhappy. There are people who struggle to get promoted and leave. A very coarse piece of failed promo feedback is "not enough impact" and people sometimes interpret this as "you must launch new stuff." For actual data, the Core Developer organization has historically had one of the higher promo rates in the company despite being primarily focused on internal tooling, maintenance, and iterative improvements like refactoring and optimization. I have my own hunches for why Google seems to have such terrible product strategy as a company. There are a few cases where I've seen the actual root cause and, while still being stupid at the end of the day, had nothing to do with promotion or career advancement.