4 ms·
> they're doing a very poor job of maintaining their core, legacy products. My guess is that great PMs and engineers are not into incremental changes or mainta
by hintymad 4y ago
> they're doing a very poor job of maintaining their core, legacy products.
My guess is that great PMs and engineers are not into incremental changes or maintaining a mature system. As a result, the sharpest minds for building product would have left the search org over the years, therefore the quality of search deteriorates over time. I'm not saying search org does not have great talent, but I guess their talent is about rearchitecting search infra for the 101 times for no groundbreaking gain.
- alephnerd 4y agoA lot of the allstar PMs and Engs who helped actually GTM a lot of great Google products like Maps, Docs, Ads, etc left in the 2010s to start their own startups (eg. Jens Rasmussen - founded Google Maps and then left to found Where2), become execs at other companies (eg. Niklesh Arora @ PANW, Lars Rasmussen @ FB, Bret Taylor @ FB+Salesforce), become VCs (eg. Bret Taylor, Niklesh Arora), or (re)enter Academia (eg. John DeNero @ Cal). There also was a change in how PMs began getting hired at Google in the 2010s when they brought a senior ex-McK TMT consultant to lead and revamp the Product team after Marissa Mayer left to become CEO of Yahoo.
- ertian 4y agoThis is part of it. It's also well understood within Google that the way to get promo and move up (and secure your job...lack of 'upward momentum' means you'll be first on the chopping block) is to launch. Getting 'stuck' doing maintenance and incremental improvements is a death knell for your career. Thus the pattern of big flashy product launch, followed by stagnation and eventual cancellation.
- pasttense01 4y agoInstead, my guess is that they are optimizing the system for maximum ad revenue--and that the products only have to be good enough so users won't switch to Bing, etc.