59 ms·

Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company. I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different

Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company. I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether Stadia was a success long term. Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. No serious business or developer is going to trust them. If governments get serious about ad regulation and damage their cash cow, Google is in trouble

akira2501 4y ago
> Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company. People build monopolies for the perceived benefits but this is the price you must always pay. You're no longer competing in a marketplace of customers, as you've flagged, your managers are now just competing in a marketplace of capital expenditure.
- scarface74 4y ago
  You can’t blame this on Google’s size. Neither Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, or Amazon (Disclaimer: I work at AWS) have this problem. Google has never struggled as a company. Amazon barely survived the dot com bust, Apple almost went bankrupt and even Microsoft had to pivot or become the next IBM after Balmer and missing out on mobile. Facebook being still founder led and having the advantage of knowing how fleeting social media networks have been in the past, keeps Zuckerburg paranoid. Google’s ad revenue is covering up a lot of project/program mismanagement.
  - ryanbrunner 4y ago
    It's less size and more lack of competition. As dominant as the companies you listed are, none of them completely capture a market to the degree that Google does with search and ads. Having a golden goose that has very little risk of going away can definitely be a curse.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Google’s “market” isn’t search, it’s “selling ads” and capturing attention (mostly YouTube). Google is under assault in ad selling by Facebook who knows more about you and Amazon (same disclaimer I work at AWS) who knows your buying habits. You also can’t block Amazon and Facebook ads. On the YouTube side, you have TikTok that is becoming more competitive for attention and maybe Twitch (???)
      - pb7 4y ago
        You know this is not a good take, right? This is like saying Amazon's market isn't e-commerce, it's taking payments.
        scarface74 4y ago
        Amazon makes most of its profits from AWS. It’s also making plenty of money these days from advertising. Who gives Google money and what do they give Google money for? When I was working for B2B companies, our “customers” were the IT department and the companies. Our customers weren’t the end users. We tried our best to make the software easy for the end users. But we marketed to the CxOs and made sure they were happy. In the case of Amazon Retail. They (we) have to convince the customer to give us money in exchange for goods and services.
        pb7 4y ago
        >In the case of Amazon Retail. They (we) have to convince the customer to give us money in exchange for goods and services. Right, and Google needs to convince users to love the products and continue using them, so that ads can be shown, and maybe even despite ads being shown. I have noticed a strong sentiment against paying for products even here on HN where the average user probably makes quite a bit of money. People would rather block ads than pay for YouTube Premium, for example. It shows me that ads are actually a pretty good business model because if "wealthy" people won't pay for products, less wealthy people definitely won't.
  - pb7 4y ago
    Microsoft choked their lead in the console market to Sony despite being much larger with bigger pockets. PlayStation 4 and now 5 both outsell Xbox 3:1 or so despite Xbox 360 having outsold PlayStation 3 and had loyal customers. They also choked with Mixer, losing to Google (YouTube), Amazon (Twitch), and Facebook (Gaming). Windows Mobile was a complete failure. It is not a "Google problem". Google (and Apple and Facebook) hate is just trendy on HN.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Microsoft is playing an entirely different game than selling loss leader hardware. They are all about subscriptions and streaming games. Then again, look at the revenue mix of the other companies to see how well they were able to move into new markets - Apple - phones, tablets, watches, computers, accessories, services, and even the AppleTV+ series have been getting rave reviews. Apple Arcade even isn’t in any danger of being cancelled. - Microsoft - Windows, Server software, Azure is a strong second, at least they didn’t cancel XBox and I bet their streaming game service will be around for awhile. - Amazon (same disclaimer I work at AWS): Amazon retail, AWS, Twitch, advertising, Prime Video, the Alexa devices - Facebook - FB proper, WhatsApp, Instagram -yes two of those are acquisitions. But how many acquisitions has Google screwed up completely? And then you have Google. - YouTube is believed to be barely break even from a profit standpoint - it was revealed in the Oracle trial how relatively little Android makes in profit . Yes I realize the numbers are old. But what has changed since then? By the time of the trial, Android already had the dominant market share. Google pays Apple a reported $18 billion a year to be the default search engine. That has to be more than Google is making from Android per year. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-android-generates-31-billion-revenue-oracle-says-ijor8hvt https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-... After all these years, everything that Google has don outside of advertising has been a failure as far as profitability.
      - pb7 4y ago
        >Microsoft is playing an entirely different game than selling loss leader hardware. Same can be said for Google, right? Google is playing an entirely different game than having paid-for-products but instead funneling products into the money-printing Ads machine. >But how many acquisitions has Google screwed up completely? I actually don't know and am very curious, how many? More or less than other similar companies? From my memory it's not many but I could be very wrong. Firebase for example, is alive and strong and rarely gets mentioned. I don't think every company needs to have the same type of business model. Google became popular because it made really great products that were all free* which increased adoption. Maybe some of them (like say, Search) would have never gotten popular if they had charged for it right away. I'm not convinced there's a single right path. >it was revealed in the Oracle trial how relatively little Android makes in profit It makes sense though, right? I don't even know how Android would make money directly (ok, I do know of ways, not sure if that's how it is) but it's a precursor for making money from the Play Store.
  - boppo1 4y ago
    > Facebook being still founder led and having the advantage of knowing how fleeting social media networks have been in the past, keeps Zuckerburg paranoid. Them going all in on the 'metaverse' is basically 'microsoft missing mobile'-tier. I'm interested in it and even still I haven't seen a single impressive thing yet. It seems like a worse product than VR second-life. They're trying to sell an MMO to people who don't play games. The internet is already a 'metaverse', and I think the role of our digital lives will continue to expand with increasing proliferation of consumer electronics, barring a major world war or natural cataclysm. But Meta is just trying to force a paradigm shift and EVERYONE sees right through it.
picsao 4y ago
hbrn 4y ago
This. I'm surprised how often people try to copy Google practices because Google can't be wrong. My bet is that Google is one of the worst places to learn anything, be it product, management or programming. You will only learn how to solve problems the Google way, and that is only applicable at Google. It's like learning to govern from Xi Jinping. Sure, there probably are some interesting experiences to observe. But few will claim that let's say Norway will be better off implementing China's political system.
- scarface74 4y ago
  It’s easy to see from the outside that Google is incompetent when it comes to overall product and program management. Since this is a technical audience, I guess I should clarify that “program management” doesn’t refer to software development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_management
  - samstave 4y ago
    This. And when you refer to pm-Ing in this way I’m reminded of the guy in San Francisco that did all the management for a huge eve online guild and he didn’t play the game he managed all their affects in a spreadsheet and whatever they were using to chat…. And he was making a boatload of human money a month… I wonder where he is now…
  - moandcompany 4y ago
    As a Xoogler, Google is an "engineering-first" company and in practice doesn't consider "product/program management" to be part of engineering. Ironically, the origin of formal methods used in program management come from operations research and engineering management -- they are part of engineering, but not seen that way at Google. Engineering leadership is not judged for their acumen in these areas, as they are separate job ladders, and thus to no surprise there is little cultivation of this knowledge or skill.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      The only BigTech company that I’ve worked for is Amazon and there are plenty of articles about how features and products get approved at Amazon. How does this even happen at any company that isn’t a conglomerate based on acquisitions? https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo-hangouts-talk-messaging-mess-timeline https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo...
enumjorge 4y ago
The thing that baffles me is that this has been a known issue for a long time, and yet there doesn't seem to be any significant moves to improve this. Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? That's a genuine question. He doesn't seem to be solving existing issues related to culture and incentives. And the company hasn't landed any big wins recently. I mostly see increased monetization of products from 10-15 years ago. I know I'm only seeing this from the outside looking in though. There must be a reason why one of the world's biggest companies has him at the helm, but it's not obvious to me what that is.
- snek_case 4y ago
  It seems likely here that since revenue numbers keep going up, they don't really realize that there is a problem. Why rock the boat and change anything with the culture when you can just keep collecting your bonuses?
- tmpz22 4y ago
  The goal of a CEO is to bring value to shareholders. There's a lot of wiggle room as long as you're doing that. I doubt Stadia was more then a proving ground for a lot of related product verticals, and Stadia's legacy will continue to drive value to those. If you cant understand the incentives to a thing, the incentives were never for you in the first place.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  The actual big goals appear to be to get GCP out of third place and to do something nebulously magic with AI. Both of these have made progress, but not in a way that actually makes the company money. Other than that I agree with you, there doesn't seem to be any sort of coherent product vision other than "ads in search/youtube" and "keep building the handful of actually popular products we've had for ages." It is definitely hard as hell to develop another business the size of ads alongside it, but it really doesn't seem like there's a clear idea here.
  - tomp 4y ago
    "GCP is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great servers to the platform."
taurath 4y ago
I agree wholeheartedly - I’m currently using google fi which hasn’t had an improvement of any real impact in over 3 years, and it still barely works on my iPhone. I suspect it will be shutting down soon - which is a shame, it was a fantastic idea but they launched and then promptly did nothing but let it slowly rot.
- Applejinx 4y ago
  Hope not. I use that to barely have a cellphone service and not have to pay much when I don't really use it :)
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    As far as barely having service goes, Ting is half the price. $10/month + $5/GB
- coryrc 4y ago
  Don't worry too much, Google Voice had been in that state for at least a decade and I'm still using it. (Not official statement, just long-time GV user, if your font is large enough to read in GV app it's because I complained internally and that was the only user-facing thing I ever got to improve).
samstave 4y ago
There is literally only one service I use from google and I’m actively sunsetting that use : Gmail. I never go there for search and I can’t think of another tool of theirs I use…
- schlauerfox 4y ago
  If you go on any website that uses adsense, Google's real customers are using their services on you. The rest is just to feed the beast. I got suckered, I loved my very early invite only Gmail account. Not sure my protonmail isn't just more of the same performative 'i'm a techie and using the fashionable thing" but can I ever escape that?
  - samstave 4y ago
    Such a brilliant comment. (seriously) -- Same on gmail early invite... and totally same on *IF* i trust protonmail... which is HQ Swiss... and if you know anything about swiss history, they are not to be trusted. (this may piss ppl off, but its true) -- however, I do trust (currently) protonmail. but yes, we need to avoid being naive to "technically arrogant"
subsubzero 4y ago
Take away that search monopoly and you have one one of the most dysfunctional and slowest moving companies in tech. Which is incredibly surprising as they hire really bright people but their leadership and product direction is not good at all.
meltyness 4y ago
Once it is realized the ads are mostly harmful this is inevitable
freeopinion 4y ago
It's curious to me that there hasn't been an evolution in re-exit strategies. You want to get bought by Google, then sold by Google. Why don't we hear about something getting sold off by Google instead of just shut down? Is it just a given that if Google can't make it work, nobody can?
- foobiekr 4y ago
  Dependencies on google-only stack plus many of the things they build aren’t actually financially viable.
- layer8 4y ago
  Selling it off incurs the risk of strengthening a potential competitor. Also, in many cases at least half of the value is in the team of developers, which probably don’t want leave Google and which conversely Google doesn’t want to lose.
  - bornfreddy 4y ago
    It also signals to the would-be customers of their other products that the service they want to sign for has a chance of surviving. At this stage I wouldn't touch any new Google service.
- murderfs 4y ago
  It's practically impossible to spin stuff out of Google because of interdependencies with the rest of google3 (the monorepo), not to mention assumptions about infrastructure. You might as well completely rebuild the entire thing from scratch.
  - otabdeveloper4 4y ago
    Will there ever be a google4?
    - compiler-guy 4y ago
      No. The google3 path itself is baked into so many things that it would be a monumental task to move. There was an attempt in maybe 2010 or so but it was quickly abandoned. Things are 1000x worse now. What Google does now is just not rev the version in any repo paths. This is true of several projects that previously had versions included in the path. Now all versioning is handled separately.
weinzierl 4y ago
In that sense Google is the Anti-Microsoft. Microsoft makes the scrappiest products but as long as they are not total failures MS is committed to them in a way that is borderline ridiculous. Google makes good products but seems to have the attention span of three year old toddler.
- booi 4y ago
  Stadia is 2 years and 10 months old hah
- Peanuts99 4y ago
  And it's that property that means Microsoft always has an edge with its b2b customers.
- Morgawr 4y ago
  How is Stadia any different from something like Mixer which Microsoft shut down at a record pace since its release?
outside1234 4y ago
Yup, he was promoted to VP before moving on to Fitbit.
danielmarkbruce 4y ago
I was at Google 2014-2018. It appeared that Larry & Sergey didn't understand incentives, despite otherwise being very smart guys. They just didn't seem to get it. At all. There were lots of smart, motivated people but the incentive structure was completely set up to reward launching products and moving on. Some of the Stadia folks were insanely good at playing the promo game. There was talk about the need to "land" rather than just launch but it never got baked into the promo process (or if it did, it certainly didn't appear that way to people below VP level...). My understanding is it's still that way.
- moandcompany 4y ago
  I wrote a description of the actual incentives Googlers see here a couple weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32844740#32845704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32844740#32845704
  - lrem 4y ago
    What if I told you that perf has been abolished in the meantime? It's even public: https://buildyourfuture.withgoogle.com/programs/grad https://buildyourfuture.withgoogle.com/programs/grad
    - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
      This sounds like a re-brand...
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - Morgawr 4y ago
        From the point of view of an IC so far at least it's *significantly* different from how perf worked. I have yet to see the results though.
        4y ago
ferminaut 4y ago
Google kind of reminds me of IBM in the early 90s before Lou Gerstner. IBM built segments of its business around the fact mainframe money would keep pouring in.
that_guy_iain 4y ago
> Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. The thing with x amount of products failing is true. Doesn't matter if you're an indie hacker or Google. It's been shown by giant after giant releasing products and them failing. Doesn't matter what industry they're in either. That's why so many corporations just buy new products lines. They get a product that is in demand. That's why it made sense for Adobe to buy Figma. Building a competitor would have been probably rather expensive and risky. Where instead they just buy it and have the product and the market share. why Amazon has been buying products like Ring and the robot hover. They're in demand and Amazon just needs to put some cash behind it and it's going to generate tons more cash. If you're wanting to build the next big thing, you've got to try building lots of things until one catches off.
- bornfreddy 4y ago
  Meh. There is a reason you don't hear about MS shutting down services, or Apple, or Facebook... Failing or not, you can still pivot them until they succeed. It is just Google that is shutting down everything that doesn't grow huge fast.
  - that_guy_iain 4y ago
    Facebook hasn't really created any new products have they? MS shut down products all the time. And Apple? They are very good at hiding their failures.
scifibestfi 4y ago
It's as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in. (said about twitter, but fits here)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nonethewiser 4y ago
I'm not sure how bad this is. I think it's good that they like to try new things. They couldn't do that if they committed to supporting everything they start indefinitely.
- ren_engineer 4y ago
  try new things under a different brand name that doesn't taint everything related to Google if you want to experiment Google shutting down consumer products hurts Google Cloud in many developer's minds. Doesn't help that Google Cloud itself just as frivolously deprecates products or APIs that people build their businesses on. And customer support is equally terrible across the company
  - forgetfulness 4y ago
    Examples of Google Cloud sunsetting products? As far as I know it's very rare that they do that. Killing consumer products, and quite possibly launching products that flop in the first place, or their failure to make their consumer products appealing over time, really rubs off on Google Cloud though, you have to keep repeating to yourself that Google rarely kills its Enterprise offerings Edit: not to say anything about Workspace, you can be essentially shut down for nothing. But there's a wider problem of major email providers behaving like a cartel in basically only accepting email from one another.
    - ren_engineer 4y ago
      Their IoT platform last month - https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/17/google-cloud-will-shutter-its-iot-core-service-next-year/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/17/google-cloud-will-shutter-... several other examples as well, but the worst thing they do is very frequent breaking API changes which force companies to do maintenance work to adjust to Google
      - forgetfulness 4y ago
        I believe you when you say they play fast and loose with the APIs. I've mostly suffered from the lacking documentation for the SDKs, they are often autogenerated and just plopped out there, with mutually contradictory sets of documentation scattered around the web.
JJMcJ 4y ago
> governments get serious about ad regulation Or companies pull back on Internet advertising. The unknown unknown is the creation of a new advertising method. I doubt that any newspaper in 1990 thought that this thing called the Internet was going to all but destroy their ad business within twenty years.
- otabdeveloper4 4y ago
  Internet advertising isn't going anywhere. Google's ad product, however, is truly horrendous and exists only because it's perceived as "too big to fail".
  - evouga 4y ago
    The World Wide Web is more or less dead and Google Search is increasingly useless as traffic moves to TikTok, Twitch, Discord, and other siloed ecosystems. It's possible that purchasing a Google ad still provides higher ROI than alternative options, but I'd certainly not bet on that remaining true in 5-10 years. Google's empire is built on a foundation of sand and the fact that the company seems incapable of launching new, lasting, innovative products should have its leaders and investors quaking in their boots.
htrp 4y ago
working with the core ads platform, feels like one of the worst designed systems i have ever seen in my life. definitely no innovation in that side of the business
- julienfr112 4y ago
  don't fix what ain't broken.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
People have this idea that Google hasn't ever done anything successful beside search. Google experiments constantly and shuts down bad experiments. Experiments that probably aren't going anywhere for a long time: 1. Gmail 2. Maps (acquisition, but did not have a web interface and was not remotely popular prior) 3. Android (literally bought before the first launched devices) 4. Play Store 5. Cloud 6. Google Pay / Wallet Most of these businesses are larger than most public companies in the world... Google will likely continue to experiment. People should think of Google's new products as startups - because that's exactly how Google thinks of them. Enterprises don't want to rely on some startup like Snowflake when their 1-2 years old. Google does a very good job of distancing the Google and Android brands from things like Stadia. All of us on here know Google owned Stadia. We're also all smart enough to know that we can keep using Gmail & YouTube without worrying about Google shutting them down.
- fortuna86 4y ago
  YouTube..
  - travismark 4y ago
    an acquisition
    - pb7 4y ago
      An acquisition in its infancy. Acquisitions happen all the time and later get turned down when they don't flourish. Many stories get posted often with negative sentiment right here on HN.
      - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
        YouTube was one of the 10 most visited websites on the Internet when Google bought it (IIRC, #4)
        fortuna86 4y ago
appleflaxen 4y ago
Can an argument be made that antitrust action a decade ago could have saved them billions on now-shut-down projects? If I were an investor I would want brutal focus from the top on search search search and nothing that didn't directly create value in search.
jraph 4y ago
> Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company No no, please don't restructure, wreck the company, that's fine. Or more realistically, the worst offenders are not going anywhere and Google is going to be okay (Search, Maps, Play, Ads, Analytics, Fonts, Chrome, YouTube, ReCAPTCHA…). Stadia, I don't care either way.
giancarlostoro 4y ago
I've given up trusting anything new they make. They've shut down otherwise perfectly fine products that they could of charged some money for and I would of gladly payed. Google Talk was perfect, the UI was stale but I could log on via Pidgin. Everything that followed Google Talk was a regression is what it felt like.
dgs_sgd 4y ago
Something I'm still hung up on about the "promotion then bounce" strategy is wouldn't having a history of launches followed by fizzle-outs actually look bad on your resume? Sure, they launched Stadia and then went somewhere else before it failed. So the strategy works at least in the first transition. But wouldn't this become a barrier to further growth, when people can see that they have been leading failed projects?
partiallypro 4y ago
To be fair, Stadia was an astoundingly stupid idea for Google to get into, the fact that it was ever green lit is crazy to me. It fits nothing in their business model. At least the Google Pixel showcases Android and digs deep into their AI, etc. Stadia literally didn't do anything, but maybe use GCP in some way...but they didn't do it in the way Microsoft is, which is to lure gaming companies to use the cloud for their own development. It was dead before it ever launched.
- Ecstatify 4y ago
  The whole point was to diversify their business model. The tech behind Stadia is very impressive, I could play Cyberpunk 2077 on my TV/Mobile/iPAD/Mac with no lag in 4K. Stadia integrated into YouTube could have been a Twitch competitor. With Covid it could have been the perfect time to really launch the product when no one could buy a PS5/XBOX. Google didn't invest in games, closed down their own game studio. It's reminiscent of Windows Phone having no apps.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    > The tech behind Stadia is very impressive, I could play Cyberpunk 2077 on my TV/Mobile/iPAD/Mac with no lag in 4K. Could they actually do that? Or more importantly, could the average user - not someone next door to the datacenter - get that kind of performance?
    - Ecstatify 4y ago
      35 Mbps or greater for 4K. Internet performance in Europe has improved dramatically over the past year and a half. Average fixed line download speeds have increased by more than half (+51.9 percent), from 68 Megabits per second (Mbps) in March 2020 to 103.3 Mbps in June 2021.
      - Manuel_D 4y ago
        It's not just throughput, but also latency. I'm getting 20-30 ms ping to google, which is 2 frames latency. For something like an RPG, or among us, that's probably fine. But for an FPS or a fighting game, that's a huge difference. And I live in a city center with good internet.
timcavel 4y ago
lupire 4y ago
I doubt the Stadia leadership killed their own division. The problem was someone higher up. Harrison is still the lead of Stadia.
bongoman37 4y ago
I think ads are the equivalent of resource curse [1] for Google. It is so successful that it is kind of like oil gushing from the ground funding all sorts of inefficiencies that otherwise would be unsustainable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
enos_feedler 4y ago
I know some of the leads. One key guy I know bounced from Google completely right after Stadia went live. This is classic Google cool tech bad business/product
iroh2727 4y ago
Well, we also gotta look at Google's outside incentives, those of being a monopoly. At the end of the day, it's not the most efficient use of resources to innovate internally at a monopoly (better uses include M&A, competitor sabotage, and sales/marketing, which they've of course also done). Anyways, Google I think has been trying to maintain a semblance of its early culture of innovation so as to attract talent/applicants, to not cause too much internal turmoil, and to make investors think it is still an "innovation" company. Also, because growth comes with bloat and bureaucracy, so may as well have that bloat come up with new products. Google will never be fixed internally to be its former self or a company centered on innovation because that's just not how monopolies work... Maybe once they capsize (which hopefully they do because monopolies are toxic and anti-competitive), they can once again become an innovator, like with Apple's early capsizing which led to them bringing Steve Jobs back.
johnnyanmac 4y ago
> I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether Stadia was a success long term. apparently the product manager was Phill Harrison. He's been active in games for a few decades, so I'm not sure if this is just a pivoting move to focus the product or his exit strategy. Time will tell.
nvarsj 4y ago
I wonder if Google even realises, like at Pichai level, how much this hurts them. I’m fairly sure it’s at least one important piece as to why GCP is struggling to gain market share. Who in their right mind would depend on a Google product for critical business functions at this point.
- endgame 4y ago
  https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec... makes exactly this argument.
tlogan 4y ago
Google is NOT in trouble. Our perception that Google is not an ad company is in trouble.
jesuscript 4y ago
They are silo’d and it appears to be so bad that their organizational structure is now appearing in the actual products. Amazon and Apple (obviously more so Apple) don’t do silo’d product releases, they do product releases veiled within the shroud of the “ecosystem”. What ecosystem is Stadia in? They couldn’t brand it right and veil it through YouTube or Google Play? You’d never shut down YouTube or Google Play, you’d just let that, you know, that “Google Play Live (Stadia)” feature quietly enter maintenance mode. Apple won’t shut down Apple News. They’d never announce it. It’s just some product that’s interweaved into iOS. If it ain’t a hit, it quietly fades. Google+, weave that shit in with Gchat. But no, no, it’s … yeah, it’s its own special thing. Special things get their own very special shut down. I’m not wise like that, but if you want to try stuff to see what sticks, lay low and quietly try things. That way you can quietly cut it short if necessary. If you enter loud, you exit loud. And if you don’t exit loud, people remember you left quietly and laugh that you entered loud.
mtgx 4y ago
Sundar Pichai has been destroying the company from inside out since he took over as CEO. But all of that has been masked by the fact that he's been aggressively pushing the ad team to keep increasing the revenue each quarter - and he's been "successful" in that. But all of that is killing the company both directly (too many damn ads in Google products these days), as well as indirectly (not having a good vision for all of the other products, destroying the "don't be evil culture" that make Google great and beloved, and so on). Of course by the time this is obvious to Google's board, Pichai will already be a billionaire himself if he isn't already, so who cares what happens afterward, right?
epa 4y ago
Android has not shut down yet :-)
WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
There are 2 sides of the same company working against each other. There's the side that wants to create new products and then there's the side that wants to tighten costs and improve earnings. New products will always be a cost and not being able to show a profit or fast growth will mark it for closure. I suspect that starting a new project inside google is comfortable enough that the thirst to grow and show a profit is muted. Also, I bet, the politics between departments makes it hard to do what's need to succeed. Google should consider extracting companies into their own entities rather than closing them. Or creating an incubator where they keep a big percentage of the company and let the companies grow or die as the market dictates. Google's primary job should be to provide resources to scale up business models that are working like they did with YouTube.
skohan 4y ago
The crazy thing is if they delivered on promise it would have been huge. If you made games a part of the internet the way videos are they would have nothing but advantages.
cm277 4y ago
Genuine question to the Googlers here: how do OKRs factor in the misaligned incentives internally? in other words, are OKRs a good idea badly executed, or just ineffective period?
spookierookie 4y ago
>> I have no doubt whoever launched [project name] got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether [project name] was a success long term. Same story in every company I've worked in. It's like the time horizon only goes as far as the next quarter.

akira2501 4y ago

> Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company. People build monopolies for the perceived benefits but this is the price you must always pay. You're no longer competing in a marketplace of customers, as you've flagged, your managers are now just competing in a marketplace of capital expenditure.

scarface74 4y ago
You can’t blame this on Google’s size. Neither Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, or Amazon (Disclaimer: I work at AWS) have this problem. Google has never struggled as a company. Amazon barely survived the dot com bust, Apple almost went bankrupt and even Microsoft had to pivot or become the next IBM after Balmer and missing out on mobile. Facebook being still founder led and having the advantage of knowing how fleeting social media networks have been in the past, keeps Zuckerburg paranoid. Google’s ad revenue is covering up a lot of project/program mismanagement.
- ryanbrunner 4y ago
  It's less size and more lack of competition. As dominant as the companies you listed are, none of them completely capture a market to the degree that Google does with search and ads. Having a golden goose that has very little risk of going away can definitely be a curse.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Google’s “market” isn’t search, it’s “selling ads” and capturing attention (mostly YouTube). Google is under assault in ad selling by Facebook who knows more about you and Amazon (same disclaimer I work at AWS) who knows your buying habits. You also can’t block Amazon and Facebook ads. On the YouTube side, you have TikTok that is becoming more competitive for attention and maybe Twitch (???)
    - pb7 4y ago
      You know this is not a good take, right? This is like saying Amazon's market isn't e-commerce, it's taking payments.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        Amazon makes most of its profits from AWS. It’s also making plenty of money these days from advertising. Who gives Google money and what do they give Google money for? When I was working for B2B companies, our “customers” were the IT department and the companies. Our customers weren’t the end users. We tried our best to make the software easy for the end users. But we marketed to the CxOs and made sure they were happy. In the case of Amazon Retail. They (we) have to convince the customer to give us money in exchange for goods and services.
        pb7 4y ago
        >In the case of Amazon Retail. They (we) have to convince the customer to give us money in exchange for goods and services. Right, and Google needs to convince users to love the products and continue using them, so that ads can be shown, and maybe even despite ads being shown. I have noticed a strong sentiment against paying for products even here on HN where the average user probably makes quite a bit of money. People would rather block ads than pay for YouTube Premium, for example. It shows me that ads are actually a pretty good business model because if "wealthy" people won't pay for products, less wealthy people definitely won't.
- pb7 4y ago
  Microsoft choked their lead in the console market to Sony despite being much larger with bigger pockets. PlayStation 4 and now 5 both outsell Xbox 3:1 or so despite Xbox 360 having outsold PlayStation 3 and had loyal customers. They also choked with Mixer, losing to Google (YouTube), Amazon (Twitch), and Facebook (Gaming). Windows Mobile was a complete failure. It is not a "Google problem". Google (and Apple and Facebook) hate is just trendy on HN.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Microsoft is playing an entirely different game than selling loss leader hardware. They are all about subscriptions and streaming games. Then again, look at the revenue mix of the other companies to see how well they were able to move into new markets - Apple - phones, tablets, watches, computers, accessories, services, and even the AppleTV+ series have been getting rave reviews. Apple Arcade even isn’t in any danger of being cancelled. - Microsoft - Windows, Server software, Azure is a strong second, at least they didn’t cancel XBox and I bet their streaming game service will be around for awhile. - Amazon (same disclaimer I work at AWS): Amazon retail, AWS, Twitch, advertising, Prime Video, the Alexa devices - Facebook - FB proper, WhatsApp, Instagram -yes two of those are acquisitions. But how many acquisitions has Google screwed up completely? And then you have Google. - YouTube is believed to be barely break even from a profit standpoint - it was revealed in the Oracle trial how relatively little Android makes in profit . Yes I realize the numbers are old. But what has changed since then? By the time of the trial, Android already had the dominant market share. Google pays Apple a reported $18 billion a year to be the default search engine. That has to be more than Google is making from Android per year. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-android-generates-31-billion-revenue-oracle-says-ijor8hvt https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-... After all these years, everything that Google has don outside of advertising has been a failure as far as profitability.
    - pb7 4y ago
      >Microsoft is playing an entirely different game than selling loss leader hardware. Same can be said for Google, right? Google is playing an entirely different game than having paid-for-products but instead funneling products into the money-printing Ads machine. >But how many acquisitions has Google screwed up completely? I actually don't know and am very curious, how many? More or less than other similar companies? From my memory it's not many but I could be very wrong. Firebase for example, is alive and strong and rarely gets mentioned. I don't think every company needs to have the same type of business model. Google became popular because it made really great products that were all free* which increased adoption. Maybe some of them (like say, Search) would have never gotten popular if they had charged for it right away. I'm not convinced there's a single right path. >it was revealed in the Oracle trial how relatively little Android makes in profit It makes sense though, right? I don't even know how Android would make money directly (ok, I do know of ways, not sure if that's how it is) but it's a precursor for making money from the Play Store.
- boppo1 4y ago
  > Facebook being still founder led and having the advantage of knowing how fleeting social media networks have been in the past, keeps Zuckerburg paranoid. Them going all in on the 'metaverse' is basically 'microsoft missing mobile'-tier. I'm interested in it and even still I haven't seen a single impressive thing yet. It seems like a worse product than VR second-life. They're trying to sell an MMO to people who don't play games. The internet is already a 'metaverse', and I think the role of our digital lives will continue to expand with increasing proliferation of consumer electronics, barring a major world war or natural cataclysm. But Meta is just trying to force a paradigm shift and EVERYONE sees right through it.

picsao 4y ago

hbrn 4y ago

This. I'm surprised how often people try to copy Google practices because Google can't be wrong. My bet is that Google is one of the worst places to learn anything, be it product, management or programming. You will only learn how to solve problems the Google way, and that is only applicable at Google. It's like learning to govern from Xi Jinping. Sure, there probably are some interesting experiences to observe. But few will claim that let's say Norway will be better off implementing China's political system.

scarface74 4y ago
It’s easy to see from the outside that Google is incompetent when it comes to overall product and program management. Since this is a technical audience, I guess I should clarify that “program management” doesn’t refer to software development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_management
- samstave 4y ago
  This. And when you refer to pm-Ing in this way I’m reminded of the guy in San Francisco that did all the management for a huge eve online guild and he didn’t play the game he managed all their affects in a spreadsheet and whatever they were using to chat…. And he was making a boatload of human money a month… I wonder where he is now…
- moandcompany 4y ago
  As a Xoogler, Google is an "engineering-first" company and in practice doesn't consider "product/program management" to be part of engineering. Ironically, the origin of formal methods used in program management come from operations research and engineering management -- they are part of engineering, but not seen that way at Google. Engineering leadership is not judged for their acumen in these areas, as they are separate job ladders, and thus to no surprise there is little cultivation of this knowledge or skill.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    The only BigTech company that I’ve worked for is Amazon and there are plenty of articles about how features and products get approved at Amazon. How does this even happen at any company that isn’t a conglomerate based on acquisitions? https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo-hangouts-talk-messaging-mess-timeline https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo...

enumjorge 4y ago

The thing that baffles me is that this has been a known issue for a long time, and yet there doesn't seem to be any significant moves to improve this. Can someone please explain what Sundar Pichai's big goals as a CEO are? That's a genuine question. He doesn't seem to be solving existing issues related to culture and incentives. And the company hasn't landed any big wins recently. I mostly see increased monetization of products from 10-15 years ago. I know I'm only seeing this from the outside looking in though. There must be a reason why one of the world's biggest companies has him at the helm, but it's not obvious to me what that is.

snek_case 4y ago
It seems likely here that since revenue numbers keep going up, they don't really realize that there is a problem. Why rock the boat and change anything with the culture when you can just keep collecting your bonuses?
tmpz22 4y ago
The goal of a CEO is to bring value to shareholders. There's a lot of wiggle room as long as you're doing that. I doubt Stadia was more then a proving ground for a lot of related product verticals, and Stadia's legacy will continue to drive value to those. If you cant understand the incentives to a thing, the incentives were never for you in the first place.
UncleMeat 4y ago
The actual big goals appear to be to get GCP out of third place and to do something nebulously magic with AI. Both of these have made progress, but not in a way that actually makes the company money. Other than that I agree with you, there doesn't seem to be any sort of coherent product vision other than "ads in search/youtube" and "keep building the handful of actually popular products we've had for ages." It is definitely hard as hell to develop another business the size of ads alongside it, but it really doesn't seem like there's a clear idea here.
- tomp 4y ago
  "GCP is not shutting down. Rest assured we're always working on bringing more great servers to the platform."

taurath 4y ago

I agree wholeheartedly - I’m currently using google fi which hasn’t had an improvement of any real impact in over 3 years, and it still barely works on my iPhone. I suspect it will be shutting down soon - which is a shame, it was a fantastic idea but they launched and then promptly did nothing but let it slowly rot.

Applejinx 4y ago
Hope not. I use that to barely have a cellphone service and not have to pay much when I don't really use it :)
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  As far as barely having service goes, Ting is half the price. $10/month + $5/GB
coryrc 4y ago
Don't worry too much, Google Voice had been in that state for at least a decade and I'm still using it. (Not official statement, just long-time GV user, if your font is large enough to read in GV app it's because I complained internally and that was the only user-facing thing I ever got to improve).

samstave 4y ago

There is literally only one service I use from google and I’m actively sunsetting that use : Gmail. I never go there for search and I can’t think of another tool of theirs I use…

schlauerfox 4y ago
If you go on any website that uses adsense, Google's real customers are using their services on you. The rest is just to feed the beast. I got suckered, I loved my very early invite only Gmail account. Not sure my protonmail isn't just more of the same performative 'i'm a techie and using the fashionable thing" but can I ever escape that?
- samstave 4y ago
  Such a brilliant comment. (seriously) -- Same on gmail early invite... and totally same on *IF* i trust protonmail... which is HQ Swiss... and if you know anything about swiss history, they are not to be trusted. (this may piss ppl off, but its true) -- however, I do trust (currently) protonmail. but yes, we need to avoid being naive to "technically arrogant"

subsubzero 4y ago

Take away that search monopoly and you have one one of the most dysfunctional and slowest moving companies in tech. Which is incredibly surprising as they hire really bright people but their leadership and product direction is not good at all.

meltyness 4y ago

Once it is realized the ads are mostly harmful this is inevitable

freeopinion 4y ago

It's curious to me that there hasn't been an evolution in re-exit strategies. You want to get bought by Google, then sold by Google. Why don't we hear about something getting sold off by Google instead of just shut down? Is it just a given that if Google can't make it work, nobody can?

foobiekr 4y ago
Dependencies on google-only stack plus many of the things they build aren’t actually financially viable.
layer8 4y ago
Selling it off incurs the risk of strengthening a potential competitor. Also, in many cases at least half of the value is in the team of developers, which probably don’t want leave Google and which conversely Google doesn’t want to lose.
- bornfreddy 4y ago
  It also signals to the would-be customers of their other products that the service they want to sign for has a chance of surviving. At this stage I wouldn't touch any new Google service.
murderfs 4y ago
It's practically impossible to spin stuff out of Google because of interdependencies with the rest of google3 (the monorepo), not to mention assumptions about infrastructure. You might as well completely rebuild the entire thing from scratch.
- otabdeveloper4 4y ago
  Will there ever be a google4?
  - compiler-guy 4y ago
    No. The google3 path itself is baked into so many things that it would be a monumental task to move. There was an attempt in maybe 2010 or so but it was quickly abandoned. Things are 1000x worse now. What Google does now is just not rev the version in any repo paths. This is true of several projects that previously had versions included in the path. Now all versioning is handled separately.

weinzierl 4y ago

In that sense Google is the Anti-Microsoft. Microsoft makes the scrappiest products but as long as they are not total failures MS is committed to them in a way that is borderline ridiculous. Google makes good products but seems to have the attention span of three year old toddler.

booi 4y ago
Stadia is 2 years and 10 months old hah
Peanuts99 4y ago
And it's that property that means Microsoft always has an edge with its b2b customers.
Morgawr 4y ago
How is Stadia any different from something like Mixer which Microsoft shut down at a record pace since its release?

outside1234 4y ago

Yup, he was promoted to VP before moving on to Fitbit.

danielmarkbruce 4y ago

I was at Google 2014-2018. It appeared that Larry & Sergey didn't understand incentives, despite otherwise being very smart guys. They just didn't seem to get it. At all. There were lots of smart, motivated people but the incentive structure was completely set up to reward launching products and moving on. Some of the Stadia folks were insanely good at playing the promo game. There was talk about the need to "land" rather than just launch but it never got baked into the promo process (or if it did, it certainly didn't appear that way to people below VP level...). My understanding is it's still that way.

moandcompany 4y ago
I wrote a description of the actual incentives Googlers see here a couple weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32844740#32845704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32844740#32845704
- lrem 4y ago
  What if I told you that perf has been abolished in the meantime? It's even public: https://buildyourfuture.withgoogle.com/programs/grad https://buildyourfuture.withgoogle.com/programs/grad
  - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
    This sounds like a re-brand...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - Morgawr 4y ago
      From the point of view of an IC so far at least it's *significantly* different from how perf worked. I have yet to see the results though.
      - 4y ago

ferminaut 4y ago

Google kind of reminds me of IBM in the early 90s before Lou Gerstner. IBM built segments of its business around the fact mainframe money would keep pouring in.

that_guy_iain 4y ago

> Google's ad money printer masks the rot underneath, Google is literally a meme at this point for shutting down products. The thing with x amount of products failing is true. Doesn't matter if you're an indie hacker or Google. It's been shown by giant after giant releasing products and them failing. Doesn't matter what industry they're in either. That's why so many corporations just buy new products lines. They get a product that is in demand. That's why it made sense for Adobe to buy Figma. Building a competitor would have been probably rather expensive and risky. Where instead they just buy it and have the product and the market share. why Amazon has been buying products like Ring and the robot hover. They're in demand and Amazon just needs to put some cash behind it and it's going to generate tons more cash. If you're wanting to build the next big thing, you've got to try building lots of things until one catches off.

bornfreddy 4y ago
Meh. There is a reason you don't hear about MS shutting down services, or Apple, or Facebook... Failing or not, you can still pivot them until they succeed. It is just Google that is shutting down everything that doesn't grow huge fast.
- that_guy_iain 4y ago
  Facebook hasn't really created any new products have they? MS shut down products all the time. And Apple? They are very good at hiding their failures.

scifibestfi 4y ago

It's as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in. (said about twitter, but fits here)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nonethewiser 4y ago

I'm not sure how bad this is. I think it's good that they like to try new things. They couldn't do that if they committed to supporting everything they start indefinitely.

ren_engineer 4y ago
try new things under a different brand name that doesn't taint everything related to Google if you want to experiment Google shutting down consumer products hurts Google Cloud in many developer's minds. Doesn't help that Google Cloud itself just as frivolously deprecates products or APIs that people build their businesses on. And customer support is equally terrible across the company
- forgetfulness 4y ago
  Examples of Google Cloud sunsetting products? As far as I know it's very rare that they do that. Killing consumer products, and quite possibly launching products that flop in the first place, or their failure to make their consumer products appealing over time, really rubs off on Google Cloud though, you have to keep repeating to yourself that Google rarely kills its Enterprise offerings Edit: not to say anything about Workspace, you can be essentially shut down for nothing. But there's a wider problem of major email providers behaving like a cartel in basically only accepting email from one another.
  - ren_engineer 4y ago
    Their IoT platform last month - https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/17/google-cloud-will-shutter-its-iot-core-service-next-year/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/17/google-cloud-will-shutter-... several other examples as well, but the worst thing they do is very frequent breaking API changes which force companies to do maintenance work to adjust to Google
    - forgetfulness 4y ago
      I believe you when you say they play fast and loose with the APIs. I've mostly suffered from the lacking documentation for the SDKs, they are often autogenerated and just plopped out there, with mutually contradictory sets of documentation scattered around the web.

JJMcJ 4y ago

> governments get serious about ad regulation Or companies pull back on Internet advertising. The unknown unknown is the creation of a new advertising method. I doubt that any newspaper in 1990 thought that this thing called the Internet was going to all but destroy their ad business within twenty years.

otabdeveloper4 4y ago
Internet advertising isn't going anywhere. Google's ad product, however, is truly horrendous and exists only because it's perceived as "too big to fail".
- evouga 4y ago
  The World Wide Web is more or less dead and Google Search is increasingly useless as traffic moves to TikTok, Twitch, Discord, and other siloed ecosystems. It's possible that purchasing a Google ad still provides higher ROI than alternative options, but I'd certainly not bet on that remaining true in 5-10 years. Google's empire is built on a foundation of sand and the fact that the company seems incapable of launching new, lasting, innovative products should have its leaders and investors quaking in their boots.

htrp 4y ago

working with the core ads platform, feels like one of the worst designed systems i have ever seen in my life. definitely no innovation in that side of the business

julienfr112 4y ago
don't fix what ain't broken.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

People have this idea that Google hasn't ever done anything successful beside search. Google experiments constantly and shuts down bad experiments. Experiments that probably aren't going anywhere for a long time: 1. Gmail 2. Maps (acquisition, but did not have a web interface and was not remotely popular prior) 3. Android (literally bought before the first launched devices) 4. Play Store 5. Cloud 6. Google Pay / Wallet Most of these businesses are larger than most public companies in the world... Google will likely continue to experiment. People should think of Google's new products as startups - because that's exactly how Google thinks of them. Enterprises don't want to rely on some startup like Snowflake when their 1-2 years old. Google does a very good job of distancing the Google and Android brands from things like Stadia. All of us on here know Google owned Stadia. We're also all smart enough to know that we can keep using Gmail & YouTube without worrying about Google shutting them down.

fortuna86 4y ago
YouTube..
- travismark 4y ago
  an acquisition
  - pb7 4y ago
    An acquisition in its infancy. Acquisitions happen all the time and later get turned down when they don't flourish. Many stories get posted often with negative sentiment right here on HN.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
      YouTube was one of the 10 most visited websites on the Internet when Google bought it (IIRC, #4)
      - fortuna86 4y ago

appleflaxen 4y ago

Can an argument be made that antitrust action a decade ago could have saved them billions on now-shut-down projects? If I were an investor I would want brutal focus from the top on search search search and nothing that didn't directly create value in search.

jraph 4y ago

> Google needs to restructure their incentives before it wrecks the company No no, please don't restructure, wreck the company, that's fine. Or more realistically, the worst offenders are not going anywhere and Google is going to be okay (Search, Maps, Play, Ads, Analytics, Fonts, Chrome, YouTube, ReCAPTCHA…). Stadia, I don't care either way.

giancarlostoro 4y ago

I've given up trusting anything new they make. They've shut down otherwise perfectly fine products that they could of charged some money for and I would of gladly payed. Google Talk was perfect, the UI was stale but I could log on via Pidgin. Everything that followed Google Talk was a regression is what it felt like.

dgs_sgd 4y ago

Something I'm still hung up on about the "promotion then bounce" strategy is wouldn't having a history of launches followed by fizzle-outs actually look bad on your resume? Sure, they launched Stadia and then went somewhere else before it failed. So the strategy works at least in the first transition. But wouldn't this become a barrier to further growth, when people can see that they have been leading failed projects?

partiallypro 4y ago

To be fair, Stadia was an astoundingly stupid idea for Google to get into, the fact that it was ever green lit is crazy to me. It fits nothing in their business model. At least the Google Pixel showcases Android and digs deep into their AI, etc. Stadia literally didn't do anything, but maybe use GCP in some way...but they didn't do it in the way Microsoft is, which is to lure gaming companies to use the cloud for their own development. It was dead before it ever launched.

Ecstatify 4y ago
The whole point was to diversify their business model. The tech behind Stadia is very impressive, I could play Cyberpunk 2077 on my TV/Mobile/iPAD/Mac with no lag in 4K. Stadia integrated into YouTube could have been a Twitch competitor. With Covid it could have been the perfect time to really launch the product when no one could buy a PS5/XBOX. Google didn't invest in games, closed down their own game studio. It's reminiscent of Windows Phone having no apps.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  > The tech behind Stadia is very impressive, I could play Cyberpunk 2077 on my TV/Mobile/iPAD/Mac with no lag in 4K. Could they actually do that? Or more importantly, could the average user - not someone next door to the datacenter - get that kind of performance?
  - Ecstatify 4y ago
    35 Mbps or greater for 4K. Internet performance in Europe has improved dramatically over the past year and a half. Average fixed line download speeds have increased by more than half (+51.9 percent), from 68 Megabits per second (Mbps) in March 2020 to 103.3 Mbps in June 2021.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      It's not just throughput, but also latency. I'm getting 20-30 ms ping to google, which is 2 frames latency. For something like an RPG, or among us, that's probably fine. But for an FPS or a fighting game, that's a huge difference. And I live in a city center with good internet.

timcavel 4y ago

lupire 4y ago

I doubt the Stadia leadership killed their own division. The problem was someone higher up. Harrison is still the lead of Stadia.

bongoman37 4y ago

I think ads are the equivalent of resource curse [1] for Google. It is so successful that it is kind of like oil gushing from the ground funding all sorts of inefficiencies that otherwise would be unsustainable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

enos_feedler 4y ago

I know some of the leads. One key guy I know bounced from Google completely right after Stadia went live. This is classic Google cool tech bad business/product

iroh2727 4y ago

Well, we also gotta look at Google's outside incentives, those of being a monopoly. At the end of the day, it's not the most efficient use of resources to innovate internally at a monopoly (better uses include M&A, competitor sabotage, and sales/marketing, which they've of course also done). Anyways, Google I think has been trying to maintain a semblance of its early culture of innovation so as to attract talent/applicants, to not cause too much internal turmoil, and to make investors think it is still an "innovation" company. Also, because growth comes with bloat and bureaucracy, so may as well have that bloat come up with new products. Google will never be fixed internally to be its former self or a company centered on innovation because that's just not how monopolies work... Maybe once they capsize (which hopefully they do because monopolies are toxic and anti-competitive), they can once again become an innovator, like with Apple's early capsizing which led to them bringing Steve Jobs back.

johnnyanmac 4y ago

> I have no doubt whoever launched Stadia got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether Stadia was a success long term. apparently the product manager was Phill Harrison. He's been active in games for a few decades, so I'm not sure if this is just a pivoting move to focus the product or his exit strategy. Time will tell.

nvarsj 4y ago

I wonder if Google even realises, like at Pichai level, how much this hurts them. I’m fairly sure it’s at least one important piece as to why GCP is struggling to gain market share. Who in their right mind would depend on a Google product for critical business functions at this point.

endgame 4y ago
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec... makes exactly this argument.

tlogan 4y ago

Google is NOT in trouble. Our perception that Google is not an ad company is in trouble.

jesuscript 4y ago

They are silo’d and it appears to be so bad that their organizational structure is now appearing in the actual products. Amazon and Apple (obviously more so Apple) don’t do silo’d product releases, they do product releases veiled within the shroud of the “ecosystem”. What ecosystem is Stadia in? They couldn’t brand it right and veil it through YouTube or Google Play? You’d never shut down YouTube or Google Play, you’d just let that, you know, that “Google Play Live (Stadia)” feature quietly enter maintenance mode. Apple won’t shut down Apple News. They’d never announce it. It’s just some product that’s interweaved into iOS. If it ain’t a hit, it quietly fades. Google+, weave that shit in with Gchat. But no, no, it’s … yeah, it’s its own special thing. Special things get their own very special shut down. I’m not wise like that, but if you want to try stuff to see what sticks, lay low and quietly try things. That way you can quietly cut it short if necessary. If you enter loud, you exit loud. And if you don’t exit loud, people remember you left quietly and laugh that you entered loud.

mtgx 4y ago

Sundar Pichai has been destroying the company from inside out since he took over as CEO. But all of that has been masked by the fact that he's been aggressively pushing the ad team to keep increasing the revenue each quarter - and he's been "successful" in that. But all of that is killing the company both directly (too many damn ads in Google products these days), as well as indirectly (not having a good vision for all of the other products, destroying the "don't be evil culture" that make Google great and beloved, and so on). Of course by the time this is obvious to Google's board, Pichai will already be a billionaire himself if he isn't already, so who cares what happens afterward, right?

epa 4y ago

Android has not shut down yet :-)

WheelsAtLarge 4y ago

There are 2 sides of the same company working against each other. There's the side that wants to create new products and then there's the side that wants to tighten costs and improve earnings. New products will always be a cost and not being able to show a profit or fast growth will mark it for closure. I suspect that starting a new project inside google is comfortable enough that the thirst to grow and show a profit is muted. Also, I bet, the politics between departments makes it hard to do what's need to succeed. Google should consider extracting companies into their own entities rather than closing them. Or creating an incubator where they keep a big percentage of the company and let the companies grow or die as the market dictates. Google's primary job should be to provide resources to scale up business models that are working like they did with YouTube.

skohan 4y ago

The crazy thing is if they delivered on promise it would have been huge. If you made games a part of the internet the way videos are they would have nothing but advantages.

cm277 4y ago

Genuine question to the Googlers here: how do OKRs factor in the misaligned incentives internally? in other words, are OKRs a good idea badly executed, or just ineffective period?

spookierookie 4y ago

>> I have no doubt whoever launched [project name] got promoted and then bounced to a different product and didn't care about whether [project name] was a success long term. Same story in every company I've worked in. It's like the time horizon only goes as far as the next quarter.