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At this point, I think issue is not about products Google build, it is about how Google put their incentives in place. - Build new shiny thing -> promoted - S

At this point, I think issue is not about products Google build, it is about how Google put their incentives in place. - Build new shiny thing -> promoted - Support shiny thing -> it's not difficult, everyone can do it This type of culture is influencing future direction of Google products, they put together awesome team, solve problem and get from 0 to 1, then team moves on, others don't have incentive to make 1 to 100. I feel like, if this was a startup which highly depends on the success of product for their existence they could have pivoted or come up better ideas for adoption. Maybe, Magic Leap was that company, or they got too much investment and thought they will exist for a quite while

DonHopkins 4y ago
Just don't put the founder's mistress in charge of marketing, so nobody can criticize or question their outrageous ridiculous decisions or silly "Ok, Glass" slogan without being sacked. https://valleywag.gawker.com/meet-the-google-founders-mistress-1219044247?rev=1377743363 https://valleywag.gawker.com/meet-the-google-founders-mistre...
xorcist 4y ago
> Support shiny thing -> it's not difficult, everyone can do it Sometimes people say those things, but I can't understand for whom it rings true. What's especially hard about new things? Maintenance on the other hand, can be much more tricky. Especially when taking backwards compatibility in mind you really have to think about every step going forward. It's much easier to build a brand new highway than repairing an existing one which is in use without disturbing traffic, if the car analogy can be forgiven. I think the situation here has more to do with Google culture where the are too scared to stop throwing stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
- bruce511 4y ago
  You're right, support is difficult. But there's no "glory" in support. there's glory in making something new, everyone being amazed, world-is-changed-forever. Of course that is pretty much 1% of the journey. Turning that light-bulb moment into an actual product, getting mass market adoption, finding the killer app, that's hard. And anonymous. Keeping customers happy is hard. But again, anonymous. Are you more impressed with a CV that says "invented iphone" or one that says "worked on iphone 2 to make it better than iphone 1"? Or worse yet "accumulated customer feedback to improve iphone 1, worked with team developing iphone 2"? So it's not just google (although magnified there.) It's everywhere. You remember who _invented_ the light-bulb, but you've no idea of the people who developed that into a product, with manufacturing, distribution, sales and developed bulb-connector-standards and so on. In our business it's the same. Here's a new wizz-bang feature. 100% glory. Maintaining feature for the next 20 years, adapting to ever-changing world requirements, keeping customers happy, and using it - anyone can do that. (and nobody wants to - it's too much like hard work.)
  - wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
    Mass adaptation is not even that hard, profitable mass adaptation is.
  - PurpleRamen 4y ago
    > But there's no "glory" in support. there's glory in making something new, everyone being amazed, world-is-changed-forever. Glory is where you place it. And Google, like most of those Companies nowadays, are putting glory on the simple path of new creations, not the hard path of everything else. > Are you more impressed with a CV that says "invented iphone" or one that says "worked on iphone 2 to make it better than iphone 1"? Neither. If you have a speck of competence, you will evaluate actual skill, not the outcome of a whole team's work, of which you were just one screw. But if you know history, or care for your companies future, I would be more interested in the second, because the first iPhone wasn't really that impressive or groundbreaking. The later iterations had more substance for the company.
  - seanf 4y ago
    Taking this opporuntity to link to Charles Proteus Steinmetz[1]. Among the many, many things Steinmetz did, he invented the Metal Halide Lamp which was later refined for mass production decades later. This took the innovation of others less well-known to history[2]. So great example, bringing up the light bulb! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Proteus_Steinmetz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Proteus_Steinmetz [2] https://americanhistory.si.edu/lighting/20thcent/invent20.htm#in2 https://americanhistory.si.edu/lighting/20thcent/invent20.ht...
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > Are you more impressed with a CV that says "invented iphone" or one that says "worked on iphone 2 to make it better than iphone 1"? Or worse yet "accumulated customer feedback to improve iphone 1, worked with team developing iphone 2"? None of those are impressive in isolation, honestly. What's impressive isn't what product you worked on, but how well you worked on the team, how well you technically performed, and whether the skills you were using are relevant to the position you're applying for.
- throwaw12 4y ago
  > What's especially hard about new things? Because it doesn't exist yet, you need to investigate previous approaches/research, come up with architecture/design, evaluate pros/cons, hardware requirements, staffing and so on. When things become clear, it is easy to build it. Support is harder in the sense that it takes a lot of time and digging into the platform to understand how can you solve it, but for a small gain (0.5% users will not see this issue again, unless you introduced new bug). Imagine solving 100 different support tickets, you need to solve at least 10 of them to start seeing the pattern, if there is any, to come up with generic solution. But at the time you solve 100 tickets, someone with experience can build solution which can make your product obsolete. Support vs new has different trade-offs. - Support -> takes more time and persistence, very small incremental improvements (88% -> 88.4%,..). But happy customers - New thing -> takes more time on how to approach the problem, after problem/solution is clear, much faster to build for 85% cases
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    I think there's a personality aspect to it as well. I've noticed that some programmers live for the front-end of a project. When you have a clean slate, are doing design, developing the data structures, approaches, all of that creative stuff. By the time the project is mature and the big problems have been resolved, they tire of it and want to move on to another new thing. But there are others who hate that front-end stuff. They love taking a mature product and maintaining it. Debugging, adding new features, etc. A successful product absolutely requires both kinds of people. A company who devalues one or the other is a company that is shooting itself in the foot.
  - xorcist 4y ago
    Maybe support isn't a great word here. Maintaining software goes way beyond just supporting someone. Staffing and hardware requirements aren't terribly important for greenfield development without any users yet. New products can be brittle and constantly in flux and that's probably ok. Actually scaling the product once it exists and have users, building out new features without disturbing existing workflows, that's the hard work. Which do you think is harder, inventing twitter as the fail whale product, or going from that to a hundred million users without disturbing the customers you got? I can't imagine the difficulties can even compare.
- throwaw12 4y ago
  > It's much easier to build a brand new highway In software world, new highway is not a new thing, it is just a copy/paste. In software new thing is mostly relates to inventing a solution for specific use case, solution itself could be invented long ago, but using in your area could be novel. Even in construction industry, building new highway is not 100% new thing, processes, structures, materials, rules are already defined. You spend time for different type of thinking (where to build, which road to buy,...)
moomin 4y ago
Indeed, and calling it “moving the needle” doesn’t make a difference. You can see these perverse incentives in the sheer number of times Google has launched a different version of the same product.
rightbyte 4y ago
> - Support shiny thing -> it's not difficult, everyone can do it This is not a truism, even though many managers see it like that. Dealing with someone else's mess is way harder than to deal with your own.
- culturestate 4y ago
  > This is not a truism, even though many managers see it like that. Which is, I think, exactly the point that OP is trying to make. Incentives are defined by managers, after all.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    Ye maybe he was paraphrasing.
  - throwaw12 4y ago
    Yes, exactly. Managers are too much focused on new thing, because it is much easier to see impact on new thing. Quantifying impact on support is much difficult and it seems big tech mostly gave up on trying to quantify it, hence people get praise when they are incident commanders, but when you go above and beyond to avoid it from happening at all, you are just doing labor work
danpalmer 4y ago
This is a meme that people love and there's some truth to it, but also a number of ways in which it's inaccurate. Sure you can get promoted for launching a new thing, but you can also get promoted for fixing a first pass implementation, for scaling something from a small user base to a large user base, and so on, as long as you can show the "impact" of the change – whether that's revenue, savings, productivity, improved UX, etc. It's possible that up at the top there's more of a focus on shipping new things, but I don't think that's something that 99% of Googlers need to obsess over, and it doesn't reflect the bulk of the work actually being done.
- avereveard 4y ago
  > as long as you can show the "impact" of the change Which is far easier if the thing is brand new and didn't exist yesterday, then attribution is straightforward, and we're to square one.
  - danpalmer 4y ago
    Maybe, maybe not. Again I'm not thinking so much about the very top of the company as almost everyone is not in that position and never will be. For me, it's not necessarily true that showing impact on a completely new feature is easier than showing impact in improving an existing one. It's a lot more work to measure new things as we don't have the tools to measure them yet, or as you have to introduce new measurements to colleagues and get buy-in that they are the right thing to be measuring. On the other hand, saying that I reduced an existing error rate by half is very easy to communicate, understand, prioritise, and even reward.
- largepeepee 4y ago
  Exactly why google sucks at it. You get promoted for launching hot new products, quickly scaling it or fixing obviously broken ones. The boring grind in-between them is much harder to show value so few teams are motivated to work on it.
  - danpalmer 4y ago
nikanj 4y ago
The same mindset can be seen everywhere, even in opensource: -Build shiny new replacement -> HN front page, exposure, kudos -Fix bugs in existing thing -> No recognition Rewriting is so much more fun than hunting after obscure issues
- realharo 4y ago
  In open source, it's more that you get to make all the decisions in your own project, and don't have to spend time trying to convince someone who may ultimately disagree with a proposed change.
- brookst 4y ago
  That’s true, but in theory a professionally-managed company like Google should not be motivated by HN front pages and kudos; it should be about maximizing long term profits. That’s exactly the meme/complaint: Google seems to value innovation more than success.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ilyt 4y ago
Also, just making a profit isn't enough, the profit margin per person supporting it must be huge or they can it. What could be just fine small company doing their product is canned and engineers are moved to look for another big thing or to support other big thing
mft_ 4y ago
I think you’re spot on, except it’s simpler: - Support shiny thing -> it’s not incentivised, valued, or promotion-worthy I don’t think it’s a necessarily a value judgement on support or maintenance being easy (it’s not, necessarily) - it’s just not Google’s current culture/process to value this work. If Google switched to incentivising (something like) cumulative user engagement or happiness, it would both incentivise longer-term thinking (as growth in users and also growth in engagement over time would be valued) and also probably help solve their reputation for poor customer service.
snickerbockers 4y ago
Unfortunately it's not just a Google problem.
bla3 4y ago
I think this is both obsolete and subtly wrong. Big corps want products with global impact. When a product is new, it's evaluated for its potential. When it's been around for a while, it's evaluated on how well its growth is matching the estimated impact. Eventually, growth has stopped. If the product lands at an active base of a billion users or so, it's a success and people definitely can make a career out of maintaining and improving it. And to make working on new stuff a bit less incentivized, promotions to higher levels need to see at least some realized growth and not just getting v0 out these days as far as I know.
- wslh 4y ago
  We can analyze another course of action from companies such as Microsoft. Not saying that is better or worse but showing an alternative in big corporations. Microsoft launched similar initiatives every time for decades even failing at prior tries. In the UI front they "play" with Silverlight, WFP, Windows Forms, MFC and a lot more. Try and retry. I also think that these issues are worse when you are dealing with hardware: do they open the codebase to continue playing with the devices? I am on the European side of not only repairing youself but opening "dead" code or somethink like that. It is just an idea.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Microsoft is suffering form the reality that Azure is the OS that matters, WinDev seems to be getting new devs without much background on how Windows used to be, and wiht constrained resources versus anything Azure. Also note that DevTools is no longer .NET only, rather any language that has tier 1 support on Azure.
- lumost 4y ago
  Problem with promoting on potential is that it’s rife for nepotism and poor judgement. People want to get promoted, managers want their people promoted. Inflating impact can quickly become the name of the game.
- throwaw12 4y ago
  > I think this is both obsolete and subtly wrong Maybe you are right, not sure. But this is my impression from working at Big tech. New thing is easy to measure, compare these: "launched X in region Y" vs "prevented possible incident X from happening" (your manager would ask, how do you know if that incident will happen? maybe you spent too much time for over optimizing the solution?)
is_true 4y ago
I think Google should create Google Spinner. A division whose only purpose is to spin off projects
- hobo_mark 4y ago
  It sort of exists: Area 120. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_120 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_120 https://area120.google.com https://area120.google.com
  - coolandsmartrr 4y ago
    I am a millennial, but I feel old when I remember Google Labs. They started GMail and Google Calendar there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Labs Area 120 may try to revitalize that, but it seems to feature more Press Releases than actual demos.
  - jnwatson 4y ago
    Area 120 is almost completely dead as of the layoff.
abirch 4y ago
I was an ardent Google fan boy, but I'm not longer going to buy their stuff. Your comment articulates why, before I only had a vague feeling.
wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
Are we being too hard on Google, or did the company change? When it comes to launching new products, whether innovative or not, they seem to have launched some of the most used products out there: Gmail, Google Calender, Analytics Google Play, Chrome etc. They also did their fair share of copying: Galaxy, Cloud etc. Software wise they've launched Go, Angular, Kubernetes, probably some more. They've succesfully launched more products than any other corp out there. Even though nothing rivals their search revenue. Although of lately they've been getting a bad rep with killing projects. Startups we often push to move fast and break things, but from Google we seem to expect more. Regarding Stadia they handled it nicely, got a full refund after using it for almost a year (except for the subscription which is fair)
- tbyehl 4y ago
  Google Analytics was an acquisition (Urchin)
  - wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
    I mean with Nest you might argue the success was already there but with tools as anlytics, maps etc. it was really Google's quality and push that made it.
    - tbyehl 4y ago
      Maps was indistinguishable from magic at launch. Analytics was indistinguishable from Urchin On-Demand at launch. They took a successful $500/m service and made it free w/ an AdSense/AdWords account.
- throwaw12 4y ago
  Let's say 3B unique people use 100 Google products. Their biggest apps get largest amount of users, but there are disjoint number of users using other products, e.g. 100M using Google Reader, 10M using Stadia and so on. For Google, independently it might feel like "only 10M users" will be impacted by deprecation, but in total 500M people might get impacted by deprecating 50 smaller products. Google might think, it is less than 1% of our user base, but in reality they impacted 16% of their user base. 1 out 6 people will know that new google product will be killed in 3-4 years. They tell about it to others, eventually it becomes a meme.
swatcoder 4y ago
Far from being different than startups, Google’s product development ecosystem actually mirrors the VC/startup ecosystem quite well. The idea behind both is that you pursue a lot of varied opportunities simultaneously and then cull the ones that aren’t delivering dramatically outsized success. A startups founding team, like a Google product team, may be committed to their product and want to pivot and keep taking fresh angles on adoption, but they can’t do that without money and the money works by different. Your favorite startups evaporate for the same reason. That said, this approach seems to chip away at Google’s reputation and doesn’t seem to be yielding a lot of standout successes, so it might not be a great idea for them.
- papito 4y ago
  Google refuses to see through products that do not go supernova like their search did back in the day. Search/ads give them a business with Pablo Escobar margins. They will never go "legit" with a regular product, they will never have something close to their main cash cow, so why not just stop making DOA products and stick to what they actually want to do? That will save people a lot of time and money.
joshhart 4y ago
I don't have a good solution for this. The reality is a lot of people can't be the quarterback to build new shiny things so promoting those who can is reasonable. But at the same time, it does incentivize this path more than needed and there are more people who CAN build shiny new things than the number of shiny new things that NEED to be built. It's easy to separate those who can do this from those who don't in promo review committees. In promotion reviews it's harder to separate those who are excellent at maintenance vs OK.
kleene_op 4y ago
I think this is true not just for google but for everyone as well. How many times have people just given up on doing the extra mile? I know I did.

DonHopkins 4y ago

Just don't put the founder's mistress in charge of marketing, so nobody can criticize or question their outrageous ridiculous decisions or silly "Ok, Glass" slogan without being sacked. https://valleywag.gawker.com/meet-the-google-founders-mistress-1219044247?rev=1377743363 https://valleywag.gawker.com/meet-the-google-founders-mistre...

xorcist 4y ago

> Support shiny thing -> it's not difficult, everyone can do it Sometimes people say those things, but I can't understand for whom it rings true. What's especially hard about new things? Maintenance on the other hand, can be much more tricky. Especially when taking backwards compatibility in mind you really have to think about every step going forward. It's much easier to build a brand new highway than repairing an existing one which is in use without disturbing traffic, if the car analogy can be forgiven. I think the situation here has more to do with Google culture where the are too scared to stop throwing stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

bruce511 4y ago
You're right, support is difficult. But there's no "glory" in support. there's glory in making something new, everyone being amazed, world-is-changed-forever. Of course that is pretty much 1% of the journey. Turning that light-bulb moment into an actual product, getting mass market adoption, finding the killer app, that's hard. And anonymous. Keeping customers happy is hard. But again, anonymous. Are you more impressed with a CV that says "invented iphone" or one that says "worked on iphone 2 to make it better than iphone 1"? Or worse yet "accumulated customer feedback to improve iphone 1, worked with team developing iphone 2"? So it's not just google (although magnified there.) It's everywhere. You remember who _invented_ the light-bulb, but you've no idea of the people who developed that into a product, with manufacturing, distribution, sales and developed bulb-connector-standards and so on. In our business it's the same. Here's a new wizz-bang feature. 100% glory. Maintaining feature for the next 20 years, adapting to ever-changing world requirements, keeping customers happy, and using it - anyone can do that. (and nobody wants to - it's too much like hard work.)
- wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
  Mass adaptation is not even that hard, profitable mass adaptation is.
- PurpleRamen 4y ago
  > But there's no "glory" in support. there's glory in making something new, everyone being amazed, world-is-changed-forever. Glory is where you place it. And Google, like most of those Companies nowadays, are putting glory on the simple path of new creations, not the hard path of everything else. > Are you more impressed with a CV that says "invented iphone" or one that says "worked on iphone 2 to make it better than iphone 1"? Neither. If you have a speck of competence, you will evaluate actual skill, not the outcome of a whole team's work, of which you were just one screw. But if you know history, or care for your companies future, I would be more interested in the second, because the first iPhone wasn't really that impressive or groundbreaking. The later iterations had more substance for the company.
- seanf 4y ago
  Taking this opporuntity to link to Charles Proteus Steinmetz[1]. Among the many, many things Steinmetz did, he invented the Metal Halide Lamp which was later refined for mass production decades later. This took the innovation of others less well-known to history[2]. So great example, bringing up the light bulb! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Proteus_Steinmetz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Proteus_Steinmetz [2] https://americanhistory.si.edu/lighting/20thcent/invent20.htm#in2 https://americanhistory.si.edu/lighting/20thcent/invent20.ht...
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > Are you more impressed with a CV that says "invented iphone" or one that says "worked on iphone 2 to make it better than iphone 1"? Or worse yet "accumulated customer feedback to improve iphone 1, worked with team developing iphone 2"? None of those are impressive in isolation, honestly. What's impressive isn't what product you worked on, but how well you worked on the team, how well you technically performed, and whether the skills you were using are relevant to the position you're applying for.
throwaw12 4y ago
> What's especially hard about new things? Because it doesn't exist yet, you need to investigate previous approaches/research, come up with architecture/design, evaluate pros/cons, hardware requirements, staffing and so on. When things become clear, it is easy to build it. Support is harder in the sense that it takes a lot of time and digging into the platform to understand how can you solve it, but for a small gain (0.5% users will not see this issue again, unless you introduced new bug). Imagine solving 100 different support tickets, you need to solve at least 10 of them to start seeing the pattern, if there is any, to come up with generic solution. But at the time you solve 100 tickets, someone with experience can build solution which can make your product obsolete. Support vs new has different trade-offs. - Support -> takes more time and persistence, very small incremental improvements (88% -> 88.4%,..). But happy customers - New thing -> takes more time on how to approach the problem, after problem/solution is clear, much faster to build for 85% cases
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I think there's a personality aspect to it as well. I've noticed that some programmers live for the front-end of a project. When you have a clean slate, are doing design, developing the data structures, approaches, all of that creative stuff. By the time the project is mature and the big problems have been resolved, they tire of it and want to move on to another new thing. But there are others who hate that front-end stuff. They love taking a mature product and maintaining it. Debugging, adding new features, etc. A successful product absolutely requires both kinds of people. A company who devalues one or the other is a company that is shooting itself in the foot.
- xorcist 4y ago
  Maybe support isn't a great word here. Maintaining software goes way beyond just supporting someone. Staffing and hardware requirements aren't terribly important for greenfield development without any users yet. New products can be brittle and constantly in flux and that's probably ok. Actually scaling the product once it exists and have users, building out new features without disturbing existing workflows, that's the hard work. Which do you think is harder, inventing twitter as the fail whale product, or going from that to a hundred million users without disturbing the customers you got? I can't imagine the difficulties can even compare.
throwaw12 4y ago
> It's much easier to build a brand new highway In software world, new highway is not a new thing, it is just a copy/paste. In software new thing is mostly relates to inventing a solution for specific use case, solution itself could be invented long ago, but using in your area could be novel. Even in construction industry, building new highway is not 100% new thing, processes, structures, materials, rules are already defined. You spend time for different type of thinking (where to build, which road to buy,...)

moomin 4y ago

Indeed, and calling it “moving the needle” doesn’t make a difference. You can see these perverse incentives in the sheer number of times Google has launched a different version of the same product.

rightbyte 4y ago

> - Support shiny thing -> it's not difficult, everyone can do it This is not a truism, even though many managers see it like that. Dealing with someone else's mess is way harder than to deal with your own.

culturestate 4y ago
> This is not a truism, even though many managers see it like that. Which is, I think, exactly the point that OP is trying to make. Incentives are defined by managers, after all.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  Ye maybe he was paraphrasing.
- throwaw12 4y ago
  Yes, exactly. Managers are too much focused on new thing, because it is much easier to see impact on new thing. Quantifying impact on support is much difficult and it seems big tech mostly gave up on trying to quantify it, hence people get praise when they are incident commanders, but when you go above and beyond to avoid it from happening at all, you are just doing labor work

danpalmer 4y ago

This is a meme that people love and there's some truth to it, but also a number of ways in which it's inaccurate. Sure you can get promoted for launching a new thing, but you can also get promoted for fixing a first pass implementation, for scaling something from a small user base to a large user base, and so on, as long as you can show the "impact" of the change – whether that's revenue, savings, productivity, improved UX, etc. It's possible that up at the top there's more of a focus on shipping new things, but I don't think that's something that 99% of Googlers need to obsess over, and it doesn't reflect the bulk of the work actually being done.

avereveard 4y ago
> as long as you can show the "impact" of the change Which is far easier if the thing is brand new and didn't exist yesterday, then attribution is straightforward, and we're to square one.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  Maybe, maybe not. Again I'm not thinking so much about the very top of the company as almost everyone is not in that position and never will be. For me, it's not necessarily true that showing impact on a completely new feature is easier than showing impact in improving an existing one. It's a lot more work to measure new things as we don't have the tools to measure them yet, or as you have to introduce new measurements to colleagues and get buy-in that they are the right thing to be measuring. On the other hand, saying that I reduced an existing error rate by half is very easy to communicate, understand, prioritise, and even reward.
largepeepee 4y ago
Exactly why google sucks at it. You get promoted for launching hot new products, quickly scaling it or fixing obviously broken ones. The boring grind in-between them is much harder to show value so few teams are motivated to work on it.
- danpalmer 4y ago

nikanj 4y ago

The same mindset can be seen everywhere, even in opensource: -Build shiny new replacement -> HN front page, exposure, kudos -Fix bugs in existing thing -> No recognition Rewriting is so much more fun than hunting after obscure issues

realharo 4y ago
In open source, it's more that you get to make all the decisions in your own project, and don't have to spend time trying to convince someone who may ultimately disagree with a proposed change.
brookst 4y ago
That’s true, but in theory a professionally-managed company like Google should not be motivated by HN front pages and kudos; it should be about maximizing long term profits. That’s exactly the meme/complaint: Google seems to value innovation more than success.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ilyt 4y ago

Also, just making a profit isn't enough, the profit margin per person supporting it must be huge or they can it. What could be just fine small company doing their product is canned and engineers are moved to look for another big thing or to support other big thing

mft_ 4y ago

I think you’re spot on, except it’s simpler: - Support shiny thing -> it’s not incentivised, valued, or promotion-worthy I don’t think it’s a necessarily a value judgement on support or maintenance being easy (it’s not, necessarily) - it’s just not Google’s current culture/process to value this work. If Google switched to incentivising (something like) cumulative user engagement or happiness, it would both incentivise longer-term thinking (as growth in users and also growth in engagement over time would be valued) and also probably help solve their reputation for poor customer service.

snickerbockers 4y ago

Unfortunately it's not just a Google problem.

bla3 4y ago

I think this is both obsolete and subtly wrong. Big corps want products with global impact. When a product is new, it's evaluated for its potential. When it's been around for a while, it's evaluated on how well its growth is matching the estimated impact. Eventually, growth has stopped. If the product lands at an active base of a billion users or so, it's a success and people definitely can make a career out of maintaining and improving it. And to make working on new stuff a bit less incentivized, promotions to higher levels need to see at least some realized growth and not just getting v0 out these days as far as I know.

wslh 4y ago
We can analyze another course of action from companies such as Microsoft. Not saying that is better or worse but showing an alternative in big corporations. Microsoft launched similar initiatives every time for decades even failing at prior tries. In the UI front they "play" with Silverlight, WFP, Windows Forms, MFC and a lot more. Try and retry. I also think that these issues are worse when you are dealing with hardware: do they open the codebase to continue playing with the devices? I am on the European side of not only repairing youself but opening "dead" code or somethink like that. It is just an idea.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Microsoft is suffering form the reality that Azure is the OS that matters, WinDev seems to be getting new devs without much background on how Windows used to be, and wiht constrained resources versus anything Azure. Also note that DevTools is no longer .NET only, rather any language that has tier 1 support on Azure.
lumost 4y ago
Problem with promoting on potential is that it’s rife for nepotism and poor judgement. People want to get promoted, managers want their people promoted. Inflating impact can quickly become the name of the game.
throwaw12 4y ago
> I think this is both obsolete and subtly wrong Maybe you are right, not sure. But this is my impression from working at Big tech. New thing is easy to measure, compare these: "launched X in region Y" vs "prevented possible incident X from happening" (your manager would ask, how do you know if that incident will happen? maybe you spent too much time for over optimizing the solution?)

is_true 4y ago

I think Google should create Google Spinner. A division whose only purpose is to spin off projects

hobo_mark 4y ago
It sort of exists: Area 120. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_120 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_120 https://area120.google.com https://area120.google.com
- coolandsmartrr 4y ago
  I am a millennial, but I feel old when I remember Google Labs. They started GMail and Google Calendar there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Labs Area 120 may try to revitalize that, but it seems to feature more Press Releases than actual demos.
- jnwatson 4y ago
  Area 120 is almost completely dead as of the layoff.

abirch 4y ago

I was an ardent Google fan boy, but I'm not longer going to buy their stuff. Your comment articulates why, before I only had a vague feeling.

wouldbecouldbe 4y ago

Are we being too hard on Google, or did the company change? When it comes to launching new products, whether innovative or not, they seem to have launched some of the most used products out there: Gmail, Google Calender, Analytics Google Play, Chrome etc. They also did their fair share of copying: Galaxy, Cloud etc. Software wise they've launched Go, Angular, Kubernetes, probably some more. They've succesfully launched more products than any other corp out there. Even though nothing rivals their search revenue. Although of lately they've been getting a bad rep with killing projects. Startups we often push to move fast and break things, but from Google we seem to expect more. Regarding Stadia they handled it nicely, got a full refund after using it for almost a year (except for the subscription which is fair)

tbyehl 4y ago
Google Analytics was an acquisition (Urchin)
- wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
  I mean with Nest you might argue the success was already there but with tools as anlytics, maps etc. it was really Google's quality and push that made it.
  - tbyehl 4y ago
    Maps was indistinguishable from magic at launch. Analytics was indistinguishable from Urchin On-Demand at launch. They took a successful $500/m service and made it free w/ an AdSense/AdWords account.
throwaw12 4y ago
Let's say 3B unique people use 100 Google products. Their biggest apps get largest amount of users, but there are disjoint number of users using other products, e.g. 100M using Google Reader, 10M using Stadia and so on. For Google, independently it might feel like "only 10M users" will be impacted by deprecation, but in total 500M people might get impacted by deprecating 50 smaller products. Google might think, it is less than 1% of our user base, but in reality they impacted 16% of their user base. 1 out 6 people will know that new google product will be killed in 3-4 years. They tell about it to others, eventually it becomes a meme.

swatcoder 4y ago

Far from being different than startups, Google’s product development ecosystem actually mirrors the VC/startup ecosystem quite well. The idea behind both is that you pursue a lot of varied opportunities simultaneously and then cull the ones that aren’t delivering dramatically outsized success. A startups founding team, like a Google product team, may be committed to their product and want to pivot and keep taking fresh angles on adoption, but they can’t do that without money and the money works by different. Your favorite startups evaporate for the same reason. That said, this approach seems to chip away at Google’s reputation and doesn’t seem to be yielding a lot of standout successes, so it might not be a great idea for them.

papito 4y ago
Google refuses to see through products that do not go supernova like their search did back in the day. Search/ads give them a business with Pablo Escobar margins. They will never go "legit" with a regular product, they will never have something close to their main cash cow, so why not just stop making DOA products and stick to what they actually want to do? That will save people a lot of time and money.

joshhart 4y ago

I don't have a good solution for this. The reality is a lot of people can't be the quarterback to build new shiny things so promoting those who can is reasonable. But at the same time, it does incentivize this path more than needed and there are more people who CAN build shiny new things than the number of shiny new things that NEED to be built. It's easy to separate those who can do this from those who don't in promo review committees. In promotion reviews it's harder to separate those who are excellent at maintenance vs OK.

kleene_op 4y ago

I think this is true not just for google but for everyone as well. How many times have people just given up on doing the extra mile? I know I did.