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Google constant failure astonish me. How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine

Google constant failure astonish me. How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine? I kept reading news about Google's AI programs, how the hell was Microsoft with OpenAI that came up with the biggest hit in AI? Also, how does Google want people to use their new services if they keep closing them down after their "failure" (a.k.a Google completely forgeting about them and proceeding to close them down).

beached_whale 4y ago
It was a google paper that open ai is based on, no?
- herval 4y ago
  that makes it even worse, doesn't it?
  - beached_whale 4y ago
    The knowledge being out there is better, how we will use it has a not so good history. As for google, maybe it was out of their control and the researchers had explicit rights to publish their work
daydream 4y ago
> How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine? It’s like the curse of oil. Google found a revenue stream early on that was so massive it covered up all their other sins. They dealt with their problems belatedly at best. Now that revenue stream is under attack and they are scrambling. To put it politely.
- jack_riminton 4y ago
  Continuing with the oil analogy, I wonder if they'd have done better if they did something similar to what Norway did with their oil wealth (i.e. only spend a small percentage on the interest earned from oil). Perhaps they could've spent less on all of their moonshots and focussed solely on AI. Hindsight is 20/20 I guess.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    Google absolutely could spend 10-20% of what they currently do and just have absolutely massive margins. The problem is they'd get regulated.
Gustomaximus 4y ago
> so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine? I get the essence of the comment and agree somewhat, but also feel; There are plenty of other areas driving big revenue like adsense, youtube, play store, cloud and pixel. I dont feel its fair to compare revenue to these in the same level of search. Search was a true unicorn business and took over the world, there only so many businesses that will ever reach those heights. If any of these businesses were stand alone they would be impressive. Its like looking at that photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger standing next to Andre the Giant, Arnie is a big guy, but there he doesn't look too significant. I think, the bigger worry is their chrun and burn is going to limit take-up of future products. They need to do something like run new products in a lab type environment, not put the full weight of the weight of the brand behind them til they earn reasonable thresholds, then make them so they can be split out if teams want to take them independent should they decide to close.
- jwestbury 4y ago
  Taking another approach: Google is proof that having great engineering doesn't matter without competent business leadership. For all their failures, this is where Amazon and Microsoft excel -- they both have incredibly talented businesspeople with long-term focus and a focus on delivering real value, rather than pursuing the latest fad passion project.
  - CydeWeys 4y ago
    > For all their failures, this is where Amazon and Microsoft excel Amazon isn't doing all that well recently, though (check $AMZN). And I'd argue that the product design on their biggest product, the e-commerce bit, is terrible. I know so many people, me included, who no longer buy entire categories of goods on Amazon because you simply can't trust the quality/authenticity of the goods anymore.
    - TchoBeer 4y ago
      Amazon's biggest money maker is AWS, so even if the storefront is slowing down in growth they're still doing fine.
ajmurmann 4y ago
I think it all comes down to the culture of rewarding shipping new things, but not maintaining and iterating. If Microsoft was like Google they would have shut down Bing years ago.
londons_explore 4y ago
It's all a shortcoming of management and incentives. They have plenty of smart people, plenty of amazing tech, but they are 100% failing to deploy the right people on building the right products for the right customers.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  They also don't give enough polish to their products. For example, the Nexus 5 (2013!) had a bug - if you took 7 photos in quick succession, it wouldn't save photo 3 and 4. For example, you're photographing someone doing a dance, and you want a photo on each beat, so you tap the shutter to the beat of the music. On a 2022 Pixel 7, 10 years on...... The exact same bug.
  - delfinom 4y ago
    >They also don't give enough polish to their products. Well yea, Google copied old-Microsoft's incentive structure of working on new features for promotions.
  - rurp 4y ago
    In some cases it's even worse and they are outright hostile to certain groups. Google Maps has been crippled for years for anyone using it outside of internet service. One of the most basic features, saving a point on a map, is completely broken. Route finding and offline maps are unreliable in rural areas. I get that people who rarely leave major cities are Google's favorite and most profitable user demographic, but there are still many millions of people outside of that group. Google can get away with sneering at them while they have a profitable monopoly, but once they breaks up they are in deep trouble. Their culture of half-baked and frequently shuttered projects is so ingrained at this point it's going to be enormously difficult to change.
binkHN 4y ago
> ...how the hell was Microsoft with OpenAI that came up with the biggest hit in AI? Microsoft is just an investor that got access to a product that OpenAI has been working on for the last 7 years. OpenAI has a single purpose and doesn't have to worry about displaying ads.
- gremlinsinc 4y ago
  If Google's CEO were really visionary he'd invest 10 billion and half his engineers to support Claude and that AI company's trajectory, because deepmind seems a bit lackluster lately, or maybe they just have their own research agendas that aren't in line with industry demands or something.
  - revelio 4y ago
    The latter. DeepMind people have always been highly impressive but their focus was things like winning at video games, protein folding, etc.
gsatic 4y ago
Google is not going anywhere and they will easily replicate anything OpenAI does. Its not that magical. Why they still rely on search/advertising is well known - Replacing a 150 Billion $$$ source of revenue is not a simple thing. Its like trying to replace everything ppl do in a midsized rich country with something else. And compared to Facebook which is still 99% dependent on Ads, Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north of 250 billion). They have cloud, youtube, docs, google play, all the alphabet experiments etc. And most importantly half the worlds online advertising (exchanges/ auctions etc) uses Google ad tech. So Google is not going anywhere. They just look at the world through a very different lens due to their size. I am guessing they dont see the point of keeping businesses that produce a few hundred million in revenue running, cause they really need businesses that produce a few hundred billion to keep all their free stuff (search, email, chat, chrome, android, video, r&d for other stuff etc) afloat.
- philistine 4y ago
  Decrying the imminent death of Google is ridiculous, but what you’re doing is also ridiculous. Google has fragile legs. They are not diversified enough, and a blow to their cash cow could severely hurt them. Losing advertising dollars in search could even hurt the YouTube revenue stream, since it’s the same advertisers for both products. Google could be in deep trouble in five years.
- Angostura 4y ago
  > they will easily replicate anything OpenAI does ... not if it threatens their cash cow they won't. It's not a technical challenge, its a business model challenge
- nickv 4y ago
  >>Why they still rely on search/advertising is well known - Replacing a 150 Billion $$$ source of revenue is not a simple thing. You just described The Innovators Dilemma. You'd hope Google, considering how everyone reveres how well run it is would find ways to avoid it, but they didn't not. You know who used to avoid the Innovators Dilemma amazingly well? Apple. You know who does it really well now? Microsoft. They literally killed their OS revenue to grow the company. That's the equivalent of Google killing their search revenue for something new. It's hard to do, but you have to do it in tech. >>And compared to Facebook which is still 99% dependent on Ads, Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north of 250 billion). They have cloud, youtube, docs, google play, all the alphabet experiments etc. In 2022, Google was 80%+ directly dependent on Ads for revenue, and 10.3% indirectly dependent on it. Sure, Google does a lot of things but 90.3% of the actual money that keeps the lights on is advertising. Their revenue mix is extremely similar to Meta.
bdavisx 4y ago
What makes them "wonderful engineers"? The vast majority are very smart, and obviously can code 'leet code like no tomorrow, but that doesn't make them wonderful. Remember when the person who created homebrew couldn't get a job at google. That person created software used by a lot of people. He saw something that "needed fixing" and he fixed it. He fixed it so well a bunch of other people started using his fix. That's a wonderful engineer. Created a project used (and loved?) by many people. That's the kind of person you want helping to create products at your company. Google puts so much emphasis on (coding) skills that aren't needed for the majority of the work done, and doesn't emphasize selecting for the ability to create things that people want to use. I also find the coding skills selection kind of amusing since they had to create a simplified programming language (Go) because so many of their 'leet coding new graduates couldn't handle C++ correctly. Perhaps being able to 'leet code in your sleep doesn't really make you a "wonderful" engineer either.
- KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
  Ignore the engineers for now, Google is chock full of product manager. What the hell have they been doing?
  - rvnx 4y ago
    Messengers.
  - time_to_smile 4y ago
    Good product people have always been visionary, lead by a strong sense of design and understanding of how to meet the user needs. Product Managers are the modern day bureaucrats created to reduce the individual impact on product and make PMs hot swappable like engineers (who I also think are better when they they have the aforementioned skills). Google should be considered in object lesson in the problems of trying to bureaucratize product creation.
    - jack_riminton 4y ago
      This nails it (I used to be a PM, now I'm an engineer) The PMs job has become so much about process, that any 'product sense' is completely disregarded because it can't be measured objectively. Truly great products e.g. the original iPhone, rarely have PMs
delfinom 4y ago
>How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine? Because they lack product management at the executive level downwards. With no goals set for current and future products, the engineers downstairs are allowed to play....a little too much which means the company as a whole flounders.
browningstreet 4y ago
Watched the 60 Minutes interview with Pichai last night. He’s really… unimpressive. He shouldn’t be doing MSM interviews if that’s the tenor of his performance. Google is supposed to be a technical firebrand and their cloud isn't dominant, and their AI product and market position got punk'd by Microsoft... and he's out there saying things like AI will be a bigger discovery than fire. Which calls into question: so why isn't Google a leader in AI, or seem to be? It's a bad PR thread for Google, and he lacked any Q factor in those interview clips.
- ur-whale 4y ago
  > He’s really… unimpressive. That's putting it mildly > He shouldn’t be doing interviews He should not be running Google at all, period.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > Google is supposed to be a technical firebrand They used to be, but they haven't been that for a long, long time.
- 0zemp1c 4y ago
  he's a good choice for "Good Times"...when the money is rolling in and you're on top, it is okay to have an inoffensive friendly supportive type in the CEO chair those times are gone though and Google definitely needs someone more proactive and focused
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  I imagine they have some AI solution in reach. I wouldn't want somebody to give presentations as a head of Google. On the contrary, I hate when people produce vapor. Microsoft bought their AI solution. We will see if they can successfully integrate it. I am not yet sure about that. I hardly call that innovation though.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - troyvit 4y ago
simantel 4y ago
Google Cloud revenue (which includes Workspace revenue) was $26B in 2022. That's only 10% of Google's total revenue, but to put it in perspective, all of Salesforce did $31B.
- oldgradstudent 4y ago
  Revenue is nice, but is Google Cloud profitable? I can generate huge revenues selling $100 bills for $95.
jmyeet 4y ago
It's incredibly rare for any company to produce one golden goose. It's even rarer for them to produce more than one. Google is the norm here. Chrome and Gmail are homegrown but Maps, Youtube, Docs/Drive, the display ad business (ie DoubleClick) and Android are all acquisitions. Think of it this way: if your ad business generates $100B/year, how do you justify spending billions on something that will generate a farction of that, particularly to start? How does that effort ever compete for resources internally? And if you are successful it reaches a point where your two efforts can become competing interests.
thrashh 4y ago
Well Google keeps putting out new products. And I hear you get promotions when you release a new product. Good products come through refinement. But every time you use most Google stuff, it feels like it’s still version 1. When compared to competitors’ products that they’ve been improving time after time, it just falls flat.
ugh123 4y ago
Lack of Product sense. Not an engineering problem.
endtime 4y ago
> Google constant failure astonish me. How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine? I have a slightly different answer than most of the other replies, which is that Google just got too big. I worked there for 10 years (left a year ago for a smaller company) and the amount of inefficiency and waste due to having too many layers of middle management with no real visibility into what was going on was just astounding. Over that decade they paid me millions of dollars in total, while canceling whatever I was working on almost exactly every 18 months like clockwork. Typically due to management issues or corporate politics rather than for any real technical or business reason.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  This has been described in many variations on HN, what puzzles me is why the early, loyal, employees didn't point out this dynamic developing. Or if they did internally, why the Board decided to ignore the most loyal and proven. Googler #1 to #1000 were clearly not fools, and by the 2010s they very likely had enough credibility to be taken seriously if several dozen of them said this.
  - inconceivable 4y ago
    all those individual contributor people got rich and left the company.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      I can believe half of them did, or maybe 2/3, but that still leaves hundreds of original Googlers who could speak up.
      - inconceivable 4y ago
        how old are you? have you ever tried to get a group of 10 people, forget about thousands, to do something in a way that you think is "correct"? especially something worth millions and millions of dollars? this is beyond the plane of rationality and the social forces take on a life of their own. it's not a math problem.
joe_the_user 4y ago
Google produces other products than search - Android for example. Waymo is the best self-driving car company (but the problem is self-driving cars won't work for a long time, if ever). The problem is all Google's products use the free-plus-advertising model and this has caused them to drift to serving the advertisers rather than serving the users. And that makes it hard to switch gears to offer more benefits to users. The main problem is Google shifted from making search better for their users
regnull 4y ago
Management. The a company grows, top management becomes risk-averse, and middle management cares more about their carriers than the company future. They will kill anything perceived as even slightly risky coming out of engineering. And guess what, anything good and new will be controversial and risky.
DrBenCarson 4y ago
Their search engine doesn’t make money. Ads do.
g9yuayon 4y ago
> I kept reading news about Google's AI programs Technology is not a product. A product that uses technology to solve a number of clearly defined real problems is a product. When Google was saying AI this AI that, I had yet to see any product.
potatolicious 4y ago
This is a pet topic of mine to think about - so my (probably over-long) two cents below... For context, I worked at Google for ~4 years, and have also been at two other FAANGs, as well as done time at VC-funded startups. I'd like to think I have a good gamut of experiences to compare against both in the realm of smaller companies and massive megacorps. Google's problems are (from most severe IMO to least severe): - Poor senior management. Other posts touch on the middle-manager-heavy ranks of Google, but IMO that misses the forest for the trees. A bloated middle management layer is but a symptom of a sclerotic upper management. To add some color to this: - Google has a fundamental ethos that I haven't seen described in other writings and lacks a good term for it. In my head I call it the hypothesis of the free-range engineer. The foundational belief is that upper management's job is to get out of the way of the top talent they've hired. Product ideas should come from the bottom of the company - and even more importantly, they should succeed through intra-company competition. This is probably the singular most impactful organizational cultural belief at Google, and it informs how the entire company is structured. My position: the entire hypothesis is crap, and is a huge part of what holds the company back. - The net result of Google's culture is that upper management sets very little product direction, in favor of letting individual teams set their own priorities and ship independently. This means a lot of duplicative products and a lot of products that don't integrate with each other (see: Workspace account sign-in and... literally everything). Upper management has a light touch and is extremely loathe to mandate standards, resulting in a really mind-blowing level of product fragmentation. Much of this seems to be a deathly allergy that the company developed after the total and utter failure of Google+, where upper management did exert direct influence over product. The lesson they took from G+'s failure wasn't "have a better top-down product strategy next time" and was instead "top-down product strategy bad". - Upper management turnover is excessive. All big companies suffer from re-orgs, but Google practically makes re-orgs a sport. In addition to upper management being extremely loathe to give product direction, upper management (by this I mean Director-and-up) rotates alarmingly often, and each time it's accompanied with a re-org where projects are killed or deprioritized. I don't think in my entire time at Google I ever saw a multi-year roadmap actually executed to completion - each and every time some senior leader is replaced and the entire roadmap and strategy rewritten. - Google has poor product strategy overall. The company tends to swing for a lot of home-runs but structures these endeavors poorly. There are a lot of ambitious PMs advocating for huge multi-year megaprojects that end up being total failures. Upper management is credulous and doesn't demand proof of viability prior to sinking a ton of resources over multiple years into a thing (this feeds the turnover problem above - where inevitably when a multi-year thing flops heads roll, when the real problem is that upper management did not exert scrutiny over the project sooner). Big, ambitious goals are good - but viability needs to be validated quickly and continuously throughout the development process so that requirements can change (and yes, so that the project can be killed expediently if the fundamentals aren't there). Again, a failure of Google's upper management. - Continuing on that theme, Google's upper management is naive and credulous when it comes to product forecasts. PMs seeking to have their projects approved (especially big megaprojects) will make up absolutely bonkers projections for fundamental success metrics, and are often not seriously challenged on them. Senior leadership is ready to believe numbers that are facially absurd, and then are surprised when the product fails to live up to the unrealistic expectations. This phenomenon also drives the turnover/re-org problem above - since when the product whiffs the metrics by a mile somebody has to get the boot - but the real problem was believing the bad projections to begin with! - Promotion-driven development is a problem. But unlike most prognostications about Google I don't think it's their main problem. Leadership is at the core of Google's problems and promo-driven development is just an exacerbating factor IMO. But there is a serious problem with how Google structures incentives for ICs and middle management. The biggest concrete effect of this is that after launching, engineering teams empty out rapidly as people sense that no promos are forthcoming for working on the product, and look for greener pastures. This exacerbates the effects from above, where -- through an array of leadership failures -- the product was already on thin ice. The collapse of the engineering teams on it further buries the product and sends it on a death spiral. Anyway, this is already running way too long. At this point I think there needs to be a fundamental change to how Google pursues product if they hope to turn this boat around.
deleted 4y ago
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beached_whale 4y ago

It was a google paper that open ai is based on, no?

herval 4y ago
that makes it even worse, doesn't it?
- beached_whale 4y ago
  The knowledge being out there is better, how we will use it has a not so good history. As for google, maybe it was out of their control and the researchers had explicit rights to publish their work

daydream 4y ago

> How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine? It’s like the curse of oil. Google found a revenue stream early on that was so massive it covered up all their other sins. They dealt with their problems belatedly at best. Now that revenue stream is under attack and they are scrambling. To put it politely.

jack_riminton 4y ago
Continuing with the oil analogy, I wonder if they'd have done better if they did something similar to what Norway did with their oil wealth (i.e. only spend a small percentage on the interest earned from oil). Perhaps they could've spent less on all of their moonshots and focussed solely on AI. Hindsight is 20/20 I guess.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  Google absolutely could spend 10-20% of what they currently do and just have absolutely massive margins. The problem is they'd get regulated.

Gustomaximus 4y ago

> so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine? I get the essence of the comment and agree somewhat, but also feel; There are plenty of other areas driving big revenue like adsense, youtube, play store, cloud and pixel. I dont feel its fair to compare revenue to these in the same level of search. Search was a true unicorn business and took over the world, there only so many businesses that will ever reach those heights. If any of these businesses were stand alone they would be impressive. Its like looking at that photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger standing next to Andre the Giant, Arnie is a big guy, but there he doesn't look too significant. I think, the bigger worry is their chrun and burn is going to limit take-up of future products. They need to do something like run new products in a lab type environment, not put the full weight of the weight of the brand behind them til they earn reasonable thresholds, then make them so they can be split out if teams want to take them independent should they decide to close.

jwestbury 4y ago
Taking another approach: Google is proof that having great engineering doesn't matter without competent business leadership. For all their failures, this is where Amazon and Microsoft excel -- they both have incredibly talented businesspeople with long-term focus and a focus on delivering real value, rather than pursuing the latest fad passion project.
- CydeWeys 4y ago
  > For all their failures, this is where Amazon and Microsoft excel Amazon isn't doing all that well recently, though (check $AMZN). And I'd argue that the product design on their biggest product, the e-commerce bit, is terrible. I know so many people, me included, who no longer buy entire categories of goods on Amazon because you simply can't trust the quality/authenticity of the goods anymore.
  - TchoBeer 4y ago
    Amazon's biggest money maker is AWS, so even if the storefront is slowing down in growth they're still doing fine.

ajmurmann 4y ago

I think it all comes down to the culture of rewarding shipping new things, but not maintaining and iterating. If Microsoft was like Google they would have shut down Bing years ago.

londons_explore 4y ago

It's all a shortcoming of management and incentives. They have plenty of smart people, plenty of amazing tech, but they are 100% failing to deploy the right people on building the right products for the right customers.

londons_explore 4y ago
They also don't give enough polish to their products. For example, the Nexus 5 (2013!) had a bug - if you took 7 photos in quick succession, it wouldn't save photo 3 and 4. For example, you're photographing someone doing a dance, and you want a photo on each beat, so you tap the shutter to the beat of the music. On a 2022 Pixel 7, 10 years on...... The exact same bug.
- delfinom 4y ago
  >They also don't give enough polish to their products. Well yea, Google copied old-Microsoft's incentive structure of working on new features for promotions.
- rurp 4y ago
  In some cases it's even worse and they are outright hostile to certain groups. Google Maps has been crippled for years for anyone using it outside of internet service. One of the most basic features, saving a point on a map, is completely broken. Route finding and offline maps are unreliable in rural areas. I get that people who rarely leave major cities are Google's favorite and most profitable user demographic, but there are still many millions of people outside of that group. Google can get away with sneering at them while they have a profitable monopoly, but once they breaks up they are in deep trouble. Their culture of half-baked and frequently shuttered projects is so ingrained at this point it's going to be enormously difficult to change.

binkHN 4y ago

> ...how the hell was Microsoft with OpenAI that came up with the biggest hit in AI? Microsoft is just an investor that got access to a product that OpenAI has been working on for the last 7 years. OpenAI has a single purpose and doesn't have to worry about displaying ads.

gremlinsinc 4y ago
If Google's CEO were really visionary he'd invest 10 billion and half his engineers to support Claude and that AI company's trajectory, because deepmind seems a bit lackluster lately, or maybe they just have their own research agendas that aren't in line with industry demands or something.
- revelio 4y ago
  The latter. DeepMind people have always been highly impressive but their focus was things like winning at video games, protein folding, etc.

gsatic 4y ago

Google is not going anywhere and they will easily replicate anything OpenAI does. Its not that magical. Why they still rely on search/advertising is well known - Replacing a 150 Billion $$$ source of revenue is not a simple thing. Its like trying to replace everything ppl do in a midsized rich country with something else. And compared to Facebook which is still 99% dependent on Ads, Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north of 250 billion). They have cloud, youtube, docs, google play, all the alphabet experiments etc. And most importantly half the worlds online advertising (exchanges/ auctions etc) uses Google ad tech. So Google is not going anywhere. They just look at the world through a very different lens due to their size. I am guessing they dont see the point of keeping businesses that produce a few hundred million in revenue running, cause they really need businesses that produce a few hundred billion to keep all their free stuff (search, email, chat, chrome, android, video, r&d for other stuff etc) afloat.

philistine 4y ago
Decrying the imminent death of Google is ridiculous, but what you’re doing is also ridiculous. Google has fragile legs. They are not diversified enough, and a blow to their cash cow could severely hurt them. Losing advertising dollars in search could even hurt the YouTube revenue stream, since it’s the same advertisers for both products. Google could be in deep trouble in five years.
Angostura 4y ago
> they will easily replicate anything OpenAI does ... not if it threatens their cash cow they won't. It's not a technical challenge, its a business model challenge
nickv 4y ago
>>Why they still rely on search/advertising is well known - Replacing a 150 Billion $$$ source of revenue is not a simple thing. You just described The Innovators Dilemma. You'd hope Google, considering how everyone reveres how well run it is would find ways to avoid it, but they didn't not. You know who used to avoid the Innovators Dilemma amazingly well? Apple. You know who does it really well now? Microsoft. They literally killed their OS revenue to grow the company. That's the equivalent of Google killing their search revenue for something new. It's hard to do, but you have to do it in tech. >>And compared to Facebook which is still 99% dependent on Ads, Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north of 250 billion). They have cloud, youtube, docs, google play, all the alphabet experiments etc. In 2022, Google was 80%+ directly dependent on Ads for revenue, and 10.3% indirectly dependent on it. Sure, Google does a lot of things but 90.3% of the actual money that keeps the lights on is advertising. Their revenue mix is extremely similar to Meta.

bdavisx 4y ago

What makes them "wonderful engineers"? The vast majority are very smart, and obviously can code 'leet code like no tomorrow, but that doesn't make them wonderful. Remember when the person who created homebrew couldn't get a job at google. That person created software used by a lot of people. He saw something that "needed fixing" and he fixed it. He fixed it so well a bunch of other people started using his fix. That's a wonderful engineer. Created a project used (and loved?) by many people. That's the kind of person you want helping to create products at your company. Google puts so much emphasis on (coding) skills that aren't needed for the majority of the work done, and doesn't emphasize selecting for the ability to create things that people want to use. I also find the coding skills selection kind of amusing since they had to create a simplified programming language (Go) because so many of their 'leet coding new graduates couldn't handle C++ correctly. Perhaps being able to 'leet code in your sleep doesn't really make you a "wonderful" engineer either.

KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
Ignore the engineers for now, Google is chock full of product manager. What the hell have they been doing?
- rvnx 4y ago
  Messengers.
- time_to_smile 4y ago
  Good product people have always been visionary, lead by a strong sense of design and understanding of how to meet the user needs. Product Managers are the modern day bureaucrats created to reduce the individual impact on product and make PMs hot swappable like engineers (who I also think are better when they they have the aforementioned skills). Google should be considered in object lesson in the problems of trying to bureaucratize product creation.
  - jack_riminton 4y ago
    This nails it (I used to be a PM, now I'm an engineer) The PMs job has become so much about process, that any 'product sense' is completely disregarded because it can't be measured objectively. Truly great products e.g. the original iPhone, rarely have PMs

delfinom 4y ago

>How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine? Because they lack product management at the executive level downwards. With no goals set for current and future products, the engineers downstairs are allowed to play....a little too much which means the company as a whole flounders.

browningstreet 4y ago

Watched the 60 Minutes interview with Pichai last night. He’s really… unimpressive. He shouldn’t be doing MSM interviews if that’s the tenor of his performance. Google is supposed to be a technical firebrand and their cloud isn't dominant, and their AI product and market position got punk'd by Microsoft... and he's out there saying things like AI will be a bigger discovery than fire. Which calls into question: so why isn't Google a leader in AI, or seem to be? It's a bad PR thread for Google, and he lacked any Q factor in those interview clips.

ur-whale 4y ago
> He’s really… unimpressive. That's putting it mildly > He shouldn’t be doing interviews He should not be running Google at all, period.
JohnFen 4y ago
> Google is supposed to be a technical firebrand They used to be, but they haven't been that for a long, long time.
0zemp1c 4y ago
he's a good choice for "Good Times"...when the money is rolling in and you're on top, it is okay to have an inoffensive friendly supportive type in the CEO chair those times are gone though and Google definitely needs someone more proactive and focused
raxxorraxor 4y ago
I imagine they have some AI solution in reach. I wouldn't want somebody to give presentations as a head of Google. On the contrary, I hate when people produce vapor. Microsoft bought their AI solution. We will see if they can successfully integrate it. I am not yet sure about that. I hardly call that innovation though.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- troyvit 4y ago

simantel 4y ago

Google Cloud revenue (which includes Workspace revenue) was $26B in 2022. That's only 10% of Google's total revenue, but to put it in perspective, all of Salesforce did $31B.

oldgradstudent 4y ago
Revenue is nice, but is Google Cloud profitable? I can generate huge revenues selling $100 bills for $95.

jmyeet 4y ago

It's incredibly rare for any company to produce one golden goose. It's even rarer for them to produce more than one. Google is the norm here. Chrome and Gmail are homegrown but Maps, Youtube, Docs/Drive, the display ad business (ie DoubleClick) and Android are all acquisitions. Think of it this way: if your ad business generates $100B/year, how do you justify spending billions on something that will generate a farction of that, particularly to start? How does that effort ever compete for resources internally? And if you are successful it reaches a point where your two efforts can become competing interests.

thrashh 4y ago

Well Google keeps putting out new products. And I hear you get promotions when you release a new product. Good products come through refinement. But every time you use most Google stuff, it feels like it’s still version 1. When compared to competitors’ products that they’ve been improving time after time, it just falls flat.

ugh123 4y ago

Lack of Product sense. Not an engineering problem.

endtime 4y ago

> Google constant failure astonish me. How a company with so much money, so many wonderful engineers can't produce a source of income other than the search engine? I have a slightly different answer than most of the other replies, which is that Google just got too big. I worked there for 10 years (left a year ago for a smaller company) and the amount of inefficiency and waste due to having too many layers of middle management with no real visibility into what was going on was just astounding. Over that decade they paid me millions of dollars in total, while canceling whatever I was working on almost exactly every 18 months like clockwork. Typically due to management issues or corporate politics rather than for any real technical or business reason.

MichaelZuo 4y ago
This has been described in many variations on HN, what puzzles me is why the early, loyal, employees didn't point out this dynamic developing. Or if they did internally, why the Board decided to ignore the most loyal and proven. Googler #1 to #1000 were clearly not fools, and by the 2010s they very likely had enough credibility to be taken seriously if several dozen of them said this.
- inconceivable 4y ago
  all those individual contributor people got rich and left the company.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    I can believe half of them did, or maybe 2/3, but that still leaves hundreds of original Googlers who could speak up.
    - inconceivable 4y ago
      how old are you? have you ever tried to get a group of 10 people, forget about thousands, to do something in a way that you think is "correct"? especially something worth millions and millions of dollars? this is beyond the plane of rationality and the social forces take on a life of their own. it's not a math problem.

joe_the_user 4y ago

Google produces other products than search - Android for example. Waymo is the best self-driving car company (but the problem is self-driving cars won't work for a long time, if ever). The problem is all Google's products use the free-plus-advertising model and this has caused them to drift to serving the advertisers rather than serving the users. And that makes it hard to switch gears to offer more benefits to users. The main problem is Google shifted from making search better for their users

regnull 4y ago

Management. The a company grows, top management becomes risk-averse, and middle management cares more about their carriers than the company future. They will kill anything perceived as even slightly risky coming out of engineering. And guess what, anything good and new will be controversial and risky.

DrBenCarson 4y ago

Their search engine doesn’t make money. Ads do.

g9yuayon 4y ago

> I kept reading news about Google's AI programs Technology is not a product. A product that uses technology to solve a number of clearly defined real problems is a product. When Google was saying AI this AI that, I had yet to see any product.

potatolicious 4y ago

This is a pet topic of mine to think about - so my (probably over-long) two cents below... For context, I worked at Google for ~4 years, and have also been at two other FAANGs, as well as done time at VC-funded startups. I'd like to think I have a good gamut of experiences to compare against both in the realm of smaller companies and massive megacorps. Google's problems are (from most severe IMO to least severe): - Poor senior management. Other posts touch on the middle-manager-heavy ranks of Google, but IMO that misses the forest for the trees. A bloated middle management layer is but a symptom of a sclerotic upper management. To add some color to this: - Google has a fundamental ethos that I haven't seen described in other writings and lacks a good term for it. In my head I call it the hypothesis of the free-range engineer. The foundational belief is that upper management's job is to get out of the way of the top talent they've hired. Product ideas should come from the bottom of the company - and even more importantly, they should succeed through intra-company competition. This is probably the singular most impactful organizational cultural belief at Google, and it informs how the entire company is structured. My position: the entire hypothesis is crap, and is a huge part of what holds the company back. - The net result of Google's culture is that upper management sets very little product direction, in favor of letting individual teams set their own priorities and ship independently. This means a lot of duplicative products and a lot of products that don't integrate with each other (see: Workspace account sign-in and... literally everything). Upper management has a light touch and is extremely loathe to mandate standards, resulting in a really mind-blowing level of product fragmentation. Much of this seems to be a deathly allergy that the company developed after the total and utter failure of Google+, where upper management did exert direct influence over product. The lesson they took from G+'s failure wasn't "have a better top-down product strategy next time" and was instead "top-down product strategy bad". - Upper management turnover is excessive. All big companies suffer from re-orgs, but Google practically makes re-orgs a sport. In addition to upper management being extremely loathe to give product direction, upper management (by this I mean Director-and-up) rotates alarmingly often, and each time it's accompanied with a re-org where projects are killed or deprioritized. I don't think in my entire time at Google I ever saw a multi-year roadmap actually executed to completion - each and every time some senior leader is replaced and the entire roadmap and strategy rewritten. - Google has poor product strategy overall. The company tends to swing for a lot of home-runs but structures these endeavors poorly. There are a lot of ambitious PMs advocating for huge multi-year megaprojects that end up being total failures. Upper management is credulous and doesn't demand proof of viability prior to sinking a ton of resources over multiple years into a thing (this feeds the turnover problem above - where inevitably when a multi-year thing flops heads roll, when the real problem is that upper management did not exert scrutiny over the project sooner). Big, ambitious goals are good - but viability needs to be validated quickly and continuously throughout the development process so that requirements can change (and yes, so that the project can be killed expediently if the fundamentals aren't there). Again, a failure of Google's upper management. - Continuing on that theme, Google's upper management is naive and credulous when it comes to product forecasts. PMs seeking to have their projects approved (especially big megaprojects) will make up absolutely bonkers projections for fundamental success metrics, and are often not seriously challenged on them. Senior leadership is ready to believe numbers that are facially absurd, and then are surprised when the product fails to live up to the unrealistic expectations. This phenomenon also drives the turnover/re-org problem above - since when the product whiffs the metrics by a mile somebody has to get the boot - but the real problem was believing the bad projections to begin with! - Promotion-driven development is a problem. But unlike most prognostications about Google I don't think it's their main problem. Leadership is at the core of Google's problems and promo-driven development is just an exacerbating factor IMO. But there is a serious problem with how Google structures incentives for ICs and middle management. The biggest concrete effect of this is that after launching, engineering teams empty out rapidly as people sense that no promos are forthcoming for working on the product, and look for greener pastures. This exacerbates the effects from above, where -- through an array of leadership failures -- the product was already on thin ice. The collapse of the engineering teams on it further buries the product and sends it on a death spiral. Anyway, this is already running way too long. At this point I think there needs to be a fundamental change to how Google pursues product if they hope to turn this boat around.

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