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It shouldn't baffle you. Google ads make so much money with no real competitors that there is no motivation to innovate anything else. Blizzard has the same pro

It shouldn't baffle you. Google ads make so much money with no real competitors that there is no motivation to innovate anything else. Blizzard has the same problem. World of Warcraft makes so much money that it kills everything else. Valve makes so much money being the only real PC gaming platform that they stopped making games. These companies become victims of their own successes and eventually become hollow money machines that are preyed upon by professional executives. The culture dies and all the good people leave except a small cadre of highly paid early employees who have worked on core services for decades. Google's problems are so pervasive and famous because they don't care. Why fix hiring? That requires effort and time for a questionable payoff. Why fix promotions? Same problem. Why fix customer service? That's just a cost. Why enforce stable APIs that are well documented for cloud services? Not my problem. At the end of the day, a small core of people will keep ads going and everyone else will decorate their resumes for their next jobs.

hintymad 4y ago
Peter Drucker is so wise for urging companies to "kill your cash cow". The unfortunate constraint is that it requires extraordinary leaders and amazing luck to execute such killing successfully.
andybak 4y ago
> Valve makes so much money being the only real PC gaming platform that they stopped making games. The Steam Deck is an incredible device. And Alyx is one of the truly great games made for VR (which they pioneered generally). It might not be much but I'm not writing off Valve entirely.
- akmarinov 4y ago
  Both are nice, but very niche. Now if they do Half Life 3 - that’ll be a mainstream blockbuster, but they won’t, as they’re not the company that can pull that off anymore.
  - almenon 4y ago
    Nitpick: niche, sure, but the deck isn't very niche. The mobile gaming market is a established market open to all sorts of gamers. I agree with you on VR though, that's very nice atm.
    - akmarinov 4y ago
      Yeah, I was saying niche because the Steamdeck experience isn't as plug and play as other consoles. For example if you want to play Batman Arkham Asylum, you need to go into desktop mode, download a different Proton version then go back to the console mode, switch the used Proton version and then you can play. There's a whole bunch of other games where you have to tweak settings, maybe use the CLI to tweak things. And then add on top of that of managing settings to get optimal FPS and battery life. That's a lot to throw at kids or non-technical people. It's quite a different experience than a Switch where you just download it and it works at optimal for the device resolution/fps.
  - giobox 4y ago
    VR absolutely niche, but Steam Deck has delivered on its promise far more than I expected, and this seems to be being reflected in impressive sales. I'd happily place a bet today on there being a family of Steam Deck devices forming a material part of the PC games industry in 5 years or earlier. Much of the implementation such as the store experience is already leagues ahead of the garbage Nintendo get away with on the Switch. When they inevitably release a second one with an OLED display and more performance and battery life, its going to be massively compelling. Sure we can all point to failures like the Steam Boxes, but from those failures came Proton which has been directly responsible for the Deck concept working so successfully.
    - balefrost 4y ago
      It's unclear whether Valve is playing the long game or simply hedging their bets. My recollection is that their investment in Linux was expressly stated to be a hedge against a future where Microsoft put Windows in a walled garden, like iOS. On the other hand, I know that a bunch of people are unhappy that the Steam Controller has been discontinued. Secondhand prices are through the roof.
- schlauerfox 4y ago
  Alyx was the result of an acquisition (campo santo) and it killed their work a non-franchise game "Valley of the Gods" after "firewatch".
  - Cyph0n 4y ago
    Citation needed. Wikipedia at least says that they were acquired while Alyx was in development and that they just joined the overall dev team.
    - schlauerfox 4y ago
      It's an opinion comment on the internet, not a dissertation, but I base it on talking with one person who worked at valve hardware for a time and public information from the ex campo santo people's blogs and things. I could be very wrong and would love to hear from them, but I have a strong "what could have been" for 'valley of the gods.'.
      - Cyph0n 4y ago
        Thanks for explaining. You made a claim outside of your personal experience, so expect to be asked to back it up. I’m not sure why you’re surprised.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Killed their podcasts too, which were good even if they were inveterate hipsters who played the video games you’d imagine Portland hipsters to play[0] and couldn’t pronounce Japanese names. [0] Earthbound inspired platformers about how it’s okay to feel sad sometimes
- robertsdionne 4y ago
  St(r)eam.
antonymy 4y ago
Valve's issue is pretty much just a lack of serious competition against Steam. They do occasionally put out something new, just at their own pace. They aren't in any rush since their core business is virtually unassailable at this point. They have less to fear about "professional executives" worming their way in because Valve is not a publicly traded company, unlike the other examples you mentioned. It's private, Gabe Newell calls the shots at the end of the day. There's no real avenue for people to buy their way onto a board of directors and exert influence on the company from on high, or oust its historic leadership. Valve's pretty well protected from that. But it can't protect itself from sloth induced by a lack of competition.
- giobox 4y ago
  Realistically how does this end though? Unless technology is created to immortalize Gabe in a machine, at some point he presumably will want to sell or die. Does it just become a bozo filled public-company at that point, chasing quarterly numbers? I think it's the biggest risk to Valve, speaking as a customer who loves their products/services today. I would not at all be surprised to see it end in a Microsoft acquisition or joint venture of some kind, given their current appetites.
  - mywittyname 4y ago
    > I would not at all be surprised to see it end in a Microsoft acquisition or joint venture of some kind, given their current appetites. This is absolutely what will happen.
  - zen_1 4y ago
    >Unless technology is created to immortalize Gabe in a machine. Who knows, this could be how the Machine God is made.
  - sph 4y ago
    Can't Gabe name a successor among the people he really trusts? Not all companies have to go public and become cash cows for investors.
x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
>... World of Warcraft makes so much money that it kills everything else This fact reminds me of the resource curse.
mrazomor 4y ago
My impression is that Google actively tries to hedge. They are aware of the fragility of the ads business. But it's difficult to set up a business when your baseline is "Google Ads". I thought they have it with Cloud. I'm still puzzled how it went wrong.
- oefnak 4y ago
  Their cloud is better, or at least I like their interface better, but how do you know they won't just shut it off? Azure or Amazon are safer choices.
  - pas 4y ago
    they won't, it makes a lot of money, it's b2b, etc. gcp has a lot of business continuity guarantees. still, I don't recommend them. because google acts like a dangerous savant at this point.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- obviouslynotme 4y ago
  People only put up with GCP because AWS is owned by Amazon, a notoriously ruthless company. AWS is better from the perspectives of API stability, customer support, and third party support, aka the primary things cloud customers care about. Now that Microsoft has Azure, they are going to crush GCP into the ground and there is nothing Google can do to stop it even though Google invented most modern cloud technology.
  - mr_toad 4y ago
    Azure has been around for > 10 years. If they’re planning on crushing GCP then they’re taking their sweet time about it.
    - chillfox 4y ago
      Sure, but they have only really been on the radar of traditional IT teams for the last 3 or so years.
alasdair_ 4y ago
>Blizzard has the same problem. World of Warcraft makes so much money that it kills everything else. $15 x 6 million players is good money but it's peanuts to something like Google. I wouldn't be surprised if Google spent that much just on Stadia itself in some years.
- darth_aardvark 4y ago
  I was formerly at Google on a team tangentially related to Stadia. A VP told us it was at least a billion dollar investment.
  - Auracle 4y ago
    They could have paid me a million dollars to tell them it was a bad idea and saved the other 999 million. Oh well.
    - markdestouches 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure there are teams out there that could have developed a successful product for that money, if you don't include the infrastructure costs.
tjpnz 4y ago
>become hollow money machines that are preyed upon by professional executives I've long struggled to find a way of expressing this sentiment in a few words, but this approaches perfect. Thank you!

hintymad 4y ago

Peter Drucker is so wise for urging companies to "kill your cash cow". The unfortunate constraint is that it requires extraordinary leaders and amazing luck to execute such killing successfully.

andybak 4y ago

> Valve makes so much money being the only real PC gaming platform that they stopped making games. The Steam Deck is an incredible device. And Alyx is one of the truly great games made for VR (which they pioneered generally). It might not be much but I'm not writing off Valve entirely.

akmarinov 4y ago
Both are nice, but very niche. Now if they do Half Life 3 - that’ll be a mainstream blockbuster, but they won’t, as they’re not the company that can pull that off anymore.
- almenon 4y ago
  Nitpick: niche, sure, but the deck isn't very niche. The mobile gaming market is a established market open to all sorts of gamers. I agree with you on VR though, that's very nice atm.
  - akmarinov 4y ago
    Yeah, I was saying niche because the Steamdeck experience isn't as plug and play as other consoles. For example if you want to play Batman Arkham Asylum, you need to go into desktop mode, download a different Proton version then go back to the console mode, switch the used Proton version and then you can play. There's a whole bunch of other games where you have to tweak settings, maybe use the CLI to tweak things. And then add on top of that of managing settings to get optimal FPS and battery life. That's a lot to throw at kids or non-technical people. It's quite a different experience than a Switch where you just download it and it works at optimal for the device resolution/fps.
- giobox 4y ago
  VR absolutely niche, but Steam Deck has delivered on its promise far more than I expected, and this seems to be being reflected in impressive sales. I'd happily place a bet today on there being a family of Steam Deck devices forming a material part of the PC games industry in 5 years or earlier. Much of the implementation such as the store experience is already leagues ahead of the garbage Nintendo get away with on the Switch. When they inevitably release a second one with an OLED display and more performance and battery life, its going to be massively compelling. Sure we can all point to failures like the Steam Boxes, but from those failures came Proton which has been directly responsible for the Deck concept working so successfully.
  - balefrost 4y ago
    It's unclear whether Valve is playing the long game or simply hedging their bets. My recollection is that their investment in Linux was expressly stated to be a hedge against a future where Microsoft put Windows in a walled garden, like iOS. On the other hand, I know that a bunch of people are unhappy that the Steam Controller has been discontinued. Secondhand prices are through the roof.
schlauerfox 4y ago
Alyx was the result of an acquisition (campo santo) and it killed their work a non-franchise game "Valley of the Gods" after "firewatch".
- Cyph0n 4y ago
  Citation needed. Wikipedia at least says that they were acquired while Alyx was in development and that they just joined the overall dev team.
  - schlauerfox 4y ago
    It's an opinion comment on the internet, not a dissertation, but I base it on talking with one person who worked at valve hardware for a time and public information from the ex campo santo people's blogs and things. I could be very wrong and would love to hear from them, but I have a strong "what could have been" for 'valley of the gods.'.
    - Cyph0n 4y ago
      Thanks for explaining. You made a claim outside of your personal experience, so expect to be asked to back it up. I’m not sure why you’re surprised.
- astrange 4y ago
  Killed their podcasts too, which were good even if they were inveterate hipsters who played the video games you’d imagine Portland hipsters to play[0] and couldn’t pronounce Japanese names. [0] Earthbound inspired platformers about how it’s okay to feel sad sometimes
robertsdionne 4y ago
St(r)eam.

antonymy 4y ago

Valve's issue is pretty much just a lack of serious competition against Steam. They do occasionally put out something new, just at their own pace. They aren't in any rush since their core business is virtually unassailable at this point. They have less to fear about "professional executives" worming their way in because Valve is not a publicly traded company, unlike the other examples you mentioned. It's private, Gabe Newell calls the shots at the end of the day. There's no real avenue for people to buy their way onto a board of directors and exert influence on the company from on high, or oust its historic leadership. Valve's pretty well protected from that. But it can't protect itself from sloth induced by a lack of competition.

giobox 4y ago
Realistically how does this end though? Unless technology is created to immortalize Gabe in a machine, at some point he presumably will want to sell or die. Does it just become a bozo filled public-company at that point, chasing quarterly numbers? I think it's the biggest risk to Valve, speaking as a customer who loves their products/services today. I would not at all be surprised to see it end in a Microsoft acquisition or joint venture of some kind, given their current appetites.
- mywittyname 4y ago
  > I would not at all be surprised to see it end in a Microsoft acquisition or joint venture of some kind, given their current appetites. This is absolutely what will happen.
- zen_1 4y ago
  >Unless technology is created to immortalize Gabe in a machine. Who knows, this could be how the Machine God is made.
- sph 4y ago
  Can't Gabe name a successor among the people he really trusts? Not all companies have to go public and become cash cows for investors.

x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago

>... World of Warcraft makes so much money that it kills everything else This fact reminds me of the resource curse.

mrazomor 4y ago

My impression is that Google actively tries to hedge. They are aware of the fragility of the ads business. But it's difficult to set up a business when your baseline is "Google Ads". I thought they have it with Cloud. I'm still puzzled how it went wrong.

oefnak 4y ago
Their cloud is better, or at least I like their interface better, but how do you know they won't just shut it off? Azure or Amazon are safer choices.
- pas 4y ago
  they won't, it makes a lot of money, it's b2b, etc. gcp has a lot of business continuity guarantees. still, I don't recommend them. because google acts like a dangerous savant at this point.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
obviouslynotme 4y ago
People only put up with GCP because AWS is owned by Amazon, a notoriously ruthless company. AWS is better from the perspectives of API stability, customer support, and third party support, aka the primary things cloud customers care about. Now that Microsoft has Azure, they are going to crush GCP into the ground and there is nothing Google can do to stop it even though Google invented most modern cloud technology.
- mr_toad 4y ago
  Azure has been around for > 10 years. If they’re planning on crushing GCP then they’re taking their sweet time about it.
  - chillfox 4y ago
    Sure, but they have only really been on the radar of traditional IT teams for the last 3 or so years.

alasdair_ 4y ago

>Blizzard has the same problem. World of Warcraft makes so much money that it kills everything else. $15 x 6 million players is good money but it's peanuts to something like Google. I wouldn't be surprised if Google spent that much just on Stadia itself in some years.

darth_aardvark 4y ago
I was formerly at Google on a team tangentially related to Stadia. A VP told us it was at least a billion dollar investment.
- Auracle 4y ago
  They could have paid me a million dollars to tell them it was a bad idea and saved the other 999 million. Oh well.
  - markdestouches 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure there are teams out there that could have developed a successful product for that money, if you don't include the infrastructure costs.

tjpnz 4y ago

>become hollow money machines that are preyed upon by professional executives I've long struggled to find a way of expressing this sentiment in a few words, but this approaches perfect. Thank you!