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Why Does Google Kill So Many Products?

56 points by rckrd 3y ago

bigbacaloa 3y ago
Maybe they have understood the sunk cost fallacy and actually taken steps to avoid it.
- loudmax 3y ago
  If that's the case, they've overshot the mark. Sometimes it's better to lose money on a failed product to reassure potential customers that you can be relied on as a long term business partner.
Hnaomyiph 3y ago
Promotions being highly dependent on shipping new products rather than long term support of existing products. You don’t climb that type-a ladder by improving the code of the 30th chat app. Their desperate desire to find another money printing machine to replace their soon to be regulated to death ads monopoly. If it’s not instantly printing money, they don’t want to continue to support it. Ruth and Sundar need to be fired or else Google/Alphabet will suffer the same exact fate as every other company that focuses on cost cutting over innovation and supporting future innovations.
- asdajksah2123 3y ago
  Similar actions preceded either Sundar Pichai or Ruth Porat. It doesn't seem like they're the primary drivers, even if they are the executors of this vision because they happen to be in the C positions that would execute this.
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  >as every other company that focuses on cost cutting over innovation and supporting future innovations. Not every company needs to innovate. Some companies do the opposite, they are late movers with outstanding marketing. We grew up with Google being the cutting edge, but that is far more expensive and risky than hiring a bunch of psychologists and marketers to figure out how to monetize old product at bigger profits. They are doing this with their Pixel series as a prime example. They originally made the best budget smart phone with ~0 marketing, word of mouth made the Nexus great. Today, they have removed some hardware, charged literally 7x, and have ads running. There is a happy fantasy of capitalism where each company innovates and competes for the best product. The reality is that plenty of companies are fine with producing a low quality product, selling it at a high price, and having the marketers find some niche that makes the product appear high quality so customers can rationalize their decision. I genuinely hope that Marketing/Psychology is 'canceled' before I die. Its a horrible thing for humans.
- juujian 3y ago
  Hmmmm, did they ever expect domain service to become a money printing machine? I thought that was just a spiel to gain more customers for google workspace?
  - shapefrog 3y ago
    It just printed a cheque for 180mil. I am sure there are a few small time domain registrars who have have seen their theoretical paper net worth go from $2.50 to 20mil.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  It's an even worse form of the "we need new features" culture at most mature companies. Adding new features all the time is one thing, but always building new products is overly ambitious. > Ruth and Sundar need to be fired or else Google/Alphabet will suffer the same exact fate as every other company that focuses on cost cutting over innovation and supporting future innovations. Although I wouldn't be sad to see them go, I'm not sure it will make a difference anyway. The vast majority of companies, especially those that built themselves on the foundation of being "innovative", will see an inevitable decline. The greater the rise, the sooner the fall. The reason is that successful businesses reach what I call the "cash cow" phase where enough individuals depend on the business's cash flow that risk-tolerance goes out the window. It's nearly impossible to do a rewind from the cash cow phase without firing almost everybody, and especially those at the C-level; even then, the chances of replicating former glory are not good if all the original founders are long gone and not coming back. The Google will of course always be in business, but it is on the fast track of being the IBM of the Zoomer generation.
  - bushbaba 3y ago
    Investors would also prefer cash be returned so the investor can decide which bets in highly under valued areas to make.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    I wonder if building new products is preferably over always building new features. Some products are done from a user perspective, but keep getting tinkered with because it's growth or death and eventually the beloved product is unrecognizable. Maybe the ideal scenario is to put those products into maintenance mode instead and move investment to new products. Google's problem is that they are so extreme on only investing in new products and don't make incremental improvements. Is bizarre that this and how it's tight to the way they do promotions has even evident to people outside Google for years and nothing changes.
    - ravenstine 3y ago
      That philosophy may have emerged in The Google initially because new products are far less entangled with existing tech debt than new features. There's certainly a logic to it when you're a startup or even mid-size company. On the other hand, I struggle to imagine how it can be sustainable alongside the growth mindset at a very large firm.
- bushbaba 3y ago
  The issue isn’t Ruth. The issue is sundar and urs. Both need replacing. Urs leads the SWE charter and pushes down technical complexity for promos. Sundar for the lackluster vision and continual not delivering
- Dwolb 3y ago
  I remember my friend's story about interviewing as a PM at Google back in the day. During some exploratory exercises on the future of entertainment, they kept pushing him to come up with "planet-scale solutions". After some hesitation, he started pitching them on "Space Basketball" and the opportunities for a league on Mars. He got the on-site interview after that.
- hinkley 3y ago
  If you’ve never worked at a company that referred to R&D as a “cost center” then you have lived a blessed life. Yes, making things people want to buy costs money. Most successful companies spend a certain fraction of their money on making what they sell. Making it cheaper just makes it cheaper. Which is definitely a choice one can make but few people respect the bargain brand. Oddly the people who understand this the least also seem to care a lot about prestige, so I don’t understand how their brains work.
- gautamdivgi 3y ago
  For any large company I think you overestimate the amount of control that CEO’s and HR heads have. I mean they make broad policy decisions based on some cost & growth numbers. I think the whole project killing long precedes Sundar or Ruth. In fact chrome (which Sundar handled product for I believe) is something that has endured.
  - toast0 3y ago
    Top down management is limited, but they set the criteria for promotions and bonuses, and the layers underneath at least pay lip service to the criteria, and employees respond to incentives for the most part. If you reward new products and don't reward continuing support on products without enough revenue/growth, that looks a lot like Google.
  - vineyardmike 3y ago
    > I think you overestimate the amount of control that CEO’s and HR heads have. As an example, if I was CEO… Killing any public facing product requires CEO approval. Boom instant oversight and change in behavior. Quickly raises the cost of killing something and the CEO can decide the brand damage and financials. If I was Ruth… All promotions should show the employee has an understanding of long term value, and understands how to help maintain a big system. At places I’ve worked in the past promos expect to see on-call success wins and bug fixes and similar as part of a well rounded packet. Seems like an easy add.
- LatteLazy 3y ago
  How many actual companies manage to find a SECOND money printing opportunity that is not basically just their first one expanded a little? Amazon maybe because AWS is not retail/logistics etc. Maybe Sony because they have (had) a decent sized film studio? Pretty much no one else. No one wants to admit it, but economically a company with a decent position (like google) SHOULD ruthlessly cost cut, pump out dividends and leave research/innovation to nimble start ups. From a purely Dollar point of view, that is the correct approach...
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    Apple had multiple money printers. Disney with parks in addition to movies. Netflix switched from dominating with envelopes to pioneering streaming. Intel famously switched from memory to CPUs. I agree though that returning cash to shareholders should be more common when there are no good investment opportunities for the company. The book The Outsiders goes into several super successful CEOs who have the common thread of treating their business like an investment portfolio. I'd strongly suggest stock buybacks over dividends though because that gives control to the shareholders about when the taxable event occurs and will typically lead to lower taxes. It's somehow frowned upon by the general public, but it's very similar in what it does to dividends but more efficient at it.
  - rcme 3y ago
    Microsoft has office, Windows, games, and maybe OpenAI.
  - Hnaomyiph 3y ago
    I don’t agree with their, or any company’s search for a second money printing machine. I don’t think companies should strive for parabolic growth, it is inherently unsustainable in almost ever imaginable facet, but that is what the market seems to want/expect, which then drives companies to their own downfall and they desperately try to cling onto the same growth they’ve seen in previous years. Greed is the ultimate killer of innovation and sustainable business practices. But the board/c-suite doesn’t care unless it’s the one holding the bag at the end.
- loudmax 3y ago
  As someone who admired the old Google, I totally agree. It's terribly disappointing to see so much potential go to waste under the current leadership. OpenAI was supposed to be a hedge against Google's monopoly of artificial intelligence. It's clear now that even if Google is sitting on the most powerful AI model on the planet, they have no idea what to do with it. They call it caution, but in fact it's indolence.
- flashgordon 3y ago
  Ah yes how many times have I heard the launching vs landing discussion in perf and promo discussions. So fun fact - at FAANGs (at least) introduction of new vernacular is very important to show that you are the objective (tm). Eg we will now reward landing instead of just launching. All well and good. How did that translate to in practice? Well X had impact by helping, supporting across many broad projects that needed legacy support. And X was a junior eng who went above and beyond in doing so - some times showing ownership and accountability at level + 1. So X should be ready for a promo yes? Yes but - "Focussing broadly meant low - more objective sound verbiage - focussed technical complexity is not enough". Translation - "you didn't build a complex shiny thing".
pinewurst 3y ago
Because most weren't very good to begin with, only created to get the originators promoted (usually far past their level of competence).
paulgb 3y ago
> Separate enterprise from consumer more clearly (Gsuite/Google Cloud). Yes, this. I'm great with experimentation, but please give us an indication of what services are experiments vs. what we can rely on as critical infrastructure. A lot of us were blindsided by Google Domains because of this!
brycewray 3y ago
(2022)
MangoCoffee 3y ago
Microsoft VB6 apps still run on Windows 11/10
- devoutsalsa 3y ago
  I'm surprised it ever ran on Windows 1.1
  - nradov 3y ago
    Ha ha, but technically it might even sort of work. Microsoft actually released an MS-DOS edition of Visual Basic 1.0. So you might be able to run it in a DOS box under Windows 1.0.
LarsAlereon 3y ago
I think the biggest issue is that other organizations signal the impending death of a product long before they shut it down. You stop seeing updates or hearing them talk about the product and eventually start to consider other options, and they usually wait to actually kill it until there's almost no one left. It seems like Google actively maintains and tries to attract users right up until they announce the servers are going dark in 30 days.
DistractionRect 3y ago
It seems to be a self fulfilling prophecy now. Between the expectation that products won't last, and the possibility of getting randomly locked out of one's account with no recourse (other than screaming loudly on Twitter or HN), Google services seem to be considered a major liability. I've also said this on before on HN, but I typically don't hear about new Google services until they're shuttering - for an advertising I've always found it ironic how poorly they advertise most of their products.
harrid 3y ago
Another side of the coin: Why does Google create so many products?
uberman 3y ago
My view is that many/most of these products would be successes at smaller companies but at Alphabet they are not hockey stick style game changes. When your product is lost in accounting rounding errors it can be hard to justify it to the bean counters. For years now, I just have assumed that these products are black swan attempts to find a new needle mover and that nothing they productize paid or free should be relied on.
ddkto 3y ago
It is interesting to consider this from a Stage-Gate vs Lean Startup perspective. These two product development processes can be seen as antithetical, but if you read the original sources (Winning at New Products and The Lean Startup), you find that they are both trying to achieve the exact same thing: delivering successful new products to market at minimal cost. The differences between the two processes is a function of their environment. If you are working in a company with separate functional departments and a strong, existing brand, you need a step by step process to align everyone and get customer insight before launch. Stage-Gate answers this need and products that get killed die before they are formally launched (thus protecting the brand). If you are a small team doing everything with an unknown brand, the most reliable way to get market feedback earlier is to just put something on the market. The Lean Startup comes from this perspective - if there isn’t enough traction, kill the product and invent a new brand. (Of course, these processes can be adapted to other environments, but these are their native soil, so to speak.) Google seems to be managing its product initiative like startups: they incentivize new product launches, and don’t hesitate to kill products that are already on the market. Perhaps we are better off adjust our expectation of the google brand: it’s just a VC brand (like a16z), not a product brand.
- loudmax 3y ago
  I think that is a reasonably analogy, but an important difference is that a startup has a strong incentive to be committed to their product. A startup may not stay in business for long, but we have an expectation that they'll support their product for as long as they can. After all, this product is a big bet for them and they really need it to succeed. I don't see that those incentives even exist at Google. A well managed company would introduce new products that match the rest of the company's portfolio. When a product fails to gain interest, they would revise it and try to figure out how to provide customer value. There's nothing about Google's behavior in the past ten years that suggests that's what is going on there. From an outsider's perspective, there's nothing to indicate that Google is making any effort to follow through to make sure new products are successful.
  - ddkto 3y ago
    exactly - Google is acting like a VC, not a company. A VC isn't too worried if a large percentage of their investments go under, so long a few make it big. It's like Google has the worst of both worlds: the upper management has the detachment of a VC firm, and the product teams have the detachment of being incentivized to start something new. At least in an actual startup, the team is committed to success.
purerandomness 3y ago
Hustle culture. They ship little bets and see what sticks.
etchalon 3y ago
Short answer - Google pretends they're a company they're not. When they release products in new markets, often markets their culture isn't aligned to, the products struggle. That struggle gives leadership a reason to kill the product. I'm personally amazed Pixel phones haven't been killed yet and can't shake the feeling that will happen any day now.
- fineIllregister 3y ago
  Pixel phones are partnerships with phone manufacturers. They sold off their in-house phone unit years ago.
  - sowbug 3y ago
    Your understanding is about 8 years out of date. The Nexus line followed the JDM model you describe, ending with the 2015 Nexus 6P designed by Huawei. Starting with the Pixel in 2016, Google has been the designer and seller of record for all their phones, accelerating with the acquisition of HTC's phone team in 2017. The 2021 Pixel 6, moreover, used Google's in-house SoC ("Tensor"), which had been under development for years, rather than a Qualcomm chipset. That was a significant milestone.
    - fineIllregister 3y ago
      I did miss that. Thanks for the info.
AbrahamParangi 3y ago
Microsoft and Apple are platform companies. Each product is intended to reinforce and expand the platform, and you see this reflected in that both companies have a diverse mixture of revenue sources. I think we can understand these companies as fundamentally having a strategy where the goal is to reinforce the value prop of "building on Microsoft" or "living on Apple". Google, however, is much more of a one-hit-wonder from a revenue perspective. While Google has had many societally impactful products, they mostly do not move the needle on revenue. Google's revenue is 80% ads and 75% of that ad revenue is from search ads. I think the implication of this is that because Google doesn't make money from their interlocking services but rather from their near-monopoly on search ads, the incentives for them to actually behave like Microsoft and Apple (where you can trust long term support) just aren't there.
- MangoCoffee 3y ago
  Google have Android. is Android not a platform like Windows/IOS ? its used on phone expand to tablet and Chromebook. "Android has an incredible 97 percent market share in India". https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/androids-new-oem-rules-in-india-swap-requirements-with-revenue-sharing/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/androids-new-oem-rul...
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Android is strange. Google and the phone vendors only take on half the responsibility of publishing an operating system as you are pretty lucky if you get software updates never mind the kind of major updates an iOS device gets. It is exhausting to explain to people how to scan a QR code on Android because the built in camera app doesn’t do it so they have to go to the app store and download some free QR reader that looks like spamscam and have a slightly different name every time you try it. (And no giving them a QR code to get the app.) That’s the inattention to detail that pervades the platform and it is made worse by the outright vandalism of Samsung or Verizon filling up your home screen with lots of twisty little app icons that all look alike and certainly don’t lead anywhere you’d want to go. Google doesn’t get paid for Android, Asian companies in corrupt economies seem to lose money making Android phones but there is some social status to be had by being a leader in 21st century technology so they do it anyway. Apple probably profits more from Android because Android keeps them out of trouble with antitrust regulators but Android is a ‘spoiler’ that keeps any real competitive OS out of the market. Hypothetically Android keeps mobile safe for advertising but it is possible Google could be selling as many ads on somebody else’s OS without the expense and moral hazard of keeping a zombie OS ‘alive’.
steelegbr 3y ago
It's a real problem they need to get on top of as an organisation. Unceremoniously pulling the plug on services like IoT Core on tight timescales doesn't scream "reliable, sustainable platform I can pitch to my bosses". Even with sizeable discounts and professional services funds for migration, I wouldn't consider a move to Google Cloud until they calm this down. This is coming from someone that once worked for a Google Cloud Partner.
ravenstine 3y ago
Being high on your own supply for well over 15 years tends to do that. Consequently, it also comes from believing you can do everything, which for most companies doesn't work out. Gigantic organizations also devolve into several chains of sucking-up, with multiple levels of people sucking up to each other.
ldehaan 3y ago
[dead]
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
Because fuck you.
luxuryballs 3y ago
to answer the question in the headline frankly, it’s called the shotgun approach, if it doesn’t stick don’t keep shooting it against the wall
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
(2022)
pcurve 3y ago
They don't create many new ones anymore. They're just to big (and expensive) to be doing mass incubation. It's much more cost effective for them to simply buy-up and buy-out others.
neogodless 3y ago
Chapter 6 of The Psychology of Money is called Tails, You Win. Just happen to be reading it. The summary is a variant of "lots of small bets" - some will fail, some will do OK, but it's the very few that do exceptional that will matter to your overall success. Google is no special snowflake in this regard, but they hit it big early, and they still have the resources to keep trying things (and hoping for another big win). Lots of consumer-facing useful things that sometimes get popular, but rarely give Google whatever is it they want. And unless it really matters to their bottom line, they probably aren't going to stand behind it long-term. That being said, it's more than fair as a consumer not to trust their (little) bets.
rewgs 3y ago
Our entire company runs on Google products. I really, really like Google Workspace as a platform for a small-medium non-tech company such as the one I work for, where I'm one of two developers. But them killing Domains (where all our domains are registered, of course) is the last straw for me trusting Google to follow through with anything. Domains is so...boring, I guess?...that I never expected them to pull the rug out from under it. I kinda don't really care where my domains are registered, but the fact that Google already offers a suite of everything meant that going with Google Domains was the obvious choice. As I see it, that's the value proposition: they do it all, and it's all reasonably integrated, so just go all-in on Google services. But that only works if you trust all those services to stay around. With each product that's killed, that value proposition plummets exponentially. The pros of Google Workspace/Cloud: - Everything (for us) can be Google: from general business stuff like email/calendar/etc to storage (Drive and/or Cloud Storage) to automating tons of it via their Cloud API (or Google Apps Script, when that's the right tool for the job). - Everyone at my company, especially the non-technical folks (i.e. the majority of people in my company) "gets" Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Drive, etc. It's ubiquitous, and so selling administration, billing etc on "let's just go all-in on Google" is easy. - We don't need S3 storage, but we do need a lot of (mostly hot) storage, with easy collaboration. Because user accounts pool Drive storage company-wide, we mostly use that for our cloud storage needs. So, 99% of our storage needs are effectively free, because we're paying for those user accounts anyway. This saves us thousands upon thousands of dollars per year, and that's not even accounting for the employee time needed to integrate and work with S3(-compatible) storage. - The Cloud API is pretty solid, the documentation is generally good, and it's language-agnostic, making hiring that much easier as we expand the team and automate more processes. - It's all good enough, and rightly or wrongly, it doesn't have the Microsoft "smell" -- a lot of my non-technical peers are in my experience quite resistant to Microsoft-anything, even though they arguably have a much better track record of not killing products. The cons: - I don't trust Google anymore. I expect them to kill or radically alter any of these core products at a moment's notice. That one con completely obliterates all of the above very compelling pros. There's honestly nothing else quite like Google Workspace. AWS is massively beyond our needs or budget. Microsoft 365 is perfectly fine for mail/calendar/Office/etc but not for the Google Cloud side of things (I sure as hell am not touching Azure, and their 365 API documentation is a mess). The only other option is to roll our own set of modular services, which is something we've looked into quite a bit, but there's always a show-stopper somewhere, not least of which is the thought of someone else eventually inheriting this stuff if/when I move on. At the end of the day, rolling it yourself and maintaining it simply requires more chops and time on the part of the employee(s), and I shudder at the thought of essentially building a cathedral that others allow to rot once I leave, one big reason being that the middle of the venn diagram of "the skillset of people who would find themselves applying for my position" and "Linux sysadmin chops" don't really overlap at all. Philosophically, I prefer moving the monetary cost from closed-source platforms to the salaries of developers collaborating on open-source products; but for our company's particular use-case, we're ultimately not a tech company, we're a media company, with a lot of tech-focus, yes, but not in terms of building products -- rather, we simply do as all companies in 2023 probably should do, and leverage as much automation as possible to keep things efficient, organized, scalable...generally, keep it on the up-and-up. I'm sure that I'm not alone in feeling this way. There is a vast, vast I-dare-say "silent majority" of companies out there that are in this weird middle ground -- too small for AWS, not tech-focused-enough to build it themselves, but still need a solid suite of...everything required to run a business, and the tools to automate processes as needed. I know that Google Workspace is in the "enterprise" side of things and thus is less likely to be killed off, but...also, who knows? Google is so obviously completely aimless that I truly do not trust them anymore, and yet I don't see a truly viable alternative.
sys_64738 3y ago
They killed Google Reader ten years ago which was the last straw for me. GOOG became the devil from that point forward.
rainbowmmm 3y ago
The author mentioned that "Any roads that lead to search (browser, mail, maps, mobile, docs) must be commoditized and owned by Google". Can someone help me understand how mail and docs are the roads that lead to search?

56 points by rckrd 3y ago

bigbacaloa 3y ago

Maybe they have understood the sunk cost fallacy and actually taken steps to avoid it.

loudmax 3y ago
If that's the case, they've overshot the mark. Sometimes it's better to lose money on a failed product to reassure potential customers that you can be relied on as a long term business partner.

Hnaomyiph 3y ago

Promotions being highly dependent on shipping new products rather than long term support of existing products. You don’t climb that type-a ladder by improving the code of the 30th chat app. Their desperate desire to find another money printing machine to replace their soon to be regulated to death ads monopoly. If it’s not instantly printing money, they don’t want to continue to support it. Ruth and Sundar need to be fired or else Google/Alphabet will suffer the same exact fate as every other company that focuses on cost cutting over innovation and supporting future innovations.

asdajksah2123 3y ago
Similar actions preceded either Sundar Pichai or Ruth Porat. It doesn't seem like they're the primary drivers, even if they are the executors of this vision because they happen to be in the C positions that would execute this.
hospitalJail 3y ago
>as every other company that focuses on cost cutting over innovation and supporting future innovations. Not every company needs to innovate. Some companies do the opposite, they are late movers with outstanding marketing. We grew up with Google being the cutting edge, but that is far more expensive and risky than hiring a bunch of psychologists and marketers to figure out how to monetize old product at bigger profits. They are doing this with their Pixel series as a prime example. They originally made the best budget smart phone with ~0 marketing, word of mouth made the Nexus great. Today, they have removed some hardware, charged literally 7x, and have ads running. There is a happy fantasy of capitalism where each company innovates and competes for the best product. The reality is that plenty of companies are fine with producing a low quality product, selling it at a high price, and having the marketers find some niche that makes the product appear high quality so customers can rationalize their decision. I genuinely hope that Marketing/Psychology is 'canceled' before I die. Its a horrible thing for humans.
juujian 3y ago
Hmmmm, did they ever expect domain service to become a money printing machine? I thought that was just a spiel to gain more customers for google workspace?
- shapefrog 3y ago
  It just printed a cheque for 180mil. I am sure there are a few small time domain registrars who have have seen their theoretical paper net worth go from $2.50 to 20mil.
ravenstine 3y ago
It's an even worse form of the "we need new features" culture at most mature companies. Adding new features all the time is one thing, but always building new products is overly ambitious. > Ruth and Sundar need to be fired or else Google/Alphabet will suffer the same exact fate as every other company that focuses on cost cutting over innovation and supporting future innovations. Although I wouldn't be sad to see them go, I'm not sure it will make a difference anyway. The vast majority of companies, especially those that built themselves on the foundation of being "innovative", will see an inevitable decline. The greater the rise, the sooner the fall. The reason is that successful businesses reach what I call the "cash cow" phase where enough individuals depend on the business's cash flow that risk-tolerance goes out the window. It's nearly impossible to do a rewind from the cash cow phase without firing almost everybody, and especially those at the C-level; even then, the chances of replicating former glory are not good if all the original founders are long gone and not coming back. The Google will of course always be in business, but it is on the fast track of being the IBM of the Zoomer generation.
- bushbaba 3y ago
  Investors would also prefer cash be returned so the investor can decide which bets in highly under valued areas to make.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  I wonder if building new products is preferably over always building new features. Some products are done from a user perspective, but keep getting tinkered with because it's growth or death and eventually the beloved product is unrecognizable. Maybe the ideal scenario is to put those products into maintenance mode instead and move investment to new products. Google's problem is that they are so extreme on only investing in new products and don't make incremental improvements. Is bizarre that this and how it's tight to the way they do promotions has even evident to people outside Google for years and nothing changes.
  - ravenstine 3y ago
    That philosophy may have emerged in The Google initially because new products are far less entangled with existing tech debt than new features. There's certainly a logic to it when you're a startup or even mid-size company. On the other hand, I struggle to imagine how it can be sustainable alongside the growth mindset at a very large firm.
bushbaba 3y ago
The issue isn’t Ruth. The issue is sundar and urs. Both need replacing. Urs leads the SWE charter and pushes down technical complexity for promos. Sundar for the lackluster vision and continual not delivering
Dwolb 3y ago
I remember my friend's story about interviewing as a PM at Google back in the day. During some exploratory exercises on the future of entertainment, they kept pushing him to come up with "planet-scale solutions". After some hesitation, he started pitching them on "Space Basketball" and the opportunities for a league on Mars. He got the on-site interview after that.
hinkley 3y ago
If you’ve never worked at a company that referred to R&D as a “cost center” then you have lived a blessed life. Yes, making things people want to buy costs money. Most successful companies spend a certain fraction of their money on making what they sell. Making it cheaper just makes it cheaper. Which is definitely a choice one can make but few people respect the bargain brand. Oddly the people who understand this the least also seem to care a lot about prestige, so I don’t understand how their brains work.
gautamdivgi 3y ago
For any large company I think you overestimate the amount of control that CEO’s and HR heads have. I mean they make broad policy decisions based on some cost & growth numbers. I think the whole project killing long precedes Sundar or Ruth. In fact chrome (which Sundar handled product for I believe) is something that has endured.
- toast0 3y ago
  Top down management is limited, but they set the criteria for promotions and bonuses, and the layers underneath at least pay lip service to the criteria, and employees respond to incentives for the most part. If you reward new products and don't reward continuing support on products without enough revenue/growth, that looks a lot like Google.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  > I think you overestimate the amount of control that CEO’s and HR heads have. As an example, if I was CEO… Killing any public facing product requires CEO approval. Boom instant oversight and change in behavior. Quickly raises the cost of killing something and the CEO can decide the brand damage and financials. If I was Ruth… All promotions should show the employee has an understanding of long term value, and understands how to help maintain a big system. At places I’ve worked in the past promos expect to see on-call success wins and bug fixes and similar as part of a well rounded packet. Seems like an easy add.
LatteLazy 3y ago
How many actual companies manage to find a SECOND money printing opportunity that is not basically just their first one expanded a little? Amazon maybe because AWS is not retail/logistics etc. Maybe Sony because they have (had) a decent sized film studio? Pretty much no one else. No one wants to admit it, but economically a company with a decent position (like google) SHOULD ruthlessly cost cut, pump out dividends and leave research/innovation to nimble start ups. From a purely Dollar point of view, that is the correct approach...
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  Apple had multiple money printers. Disney with parks in addition to movies. Netflix switched from dominating with envelopes to pioneering streaming. Intel famously switched from memory to CPUs. I agree though that returning cash to shareholders should be more common when there are no good investment opportunities for the company. The book The Outsiders goes into several super successful CEOs who have the common thread of treating their business like an investment portfolio. I'd strongly suggest stock buybacks over dividends though because that gives control to the shareholders about when the taxable event occurs and will typically lead to lower taxes. It's somehow frowned upon by the general public, but it's very similar in what it does to dividends but more efficient at it.
- rcme 3y ago
  Microsoft has office, Windows, games, and maybe OpenAI.
- Hnaomyiph 3y ago
  I don’t agree with their, or any company’s search for a second money printing machine. I don’t think companies should strive for parabolic growth, it is inherently unsustainable in almost ever imaginable facet, but that is what the market seems to want/expect, which then drives companies to their own downfall and they desperately try to cling onto the same growth they’ve seen in previous years. Greed is the ultimate killer of innovation and sustainable business practices. But the board/c-suite doesn’t care unless it’s the one holding the bag at the end.
loudmax 3y ago
As someone who admired the old Google, I totally agree. It's terribly disappointing to see so much potential go to waste under the current leadership. OpenAI was supposed to be a hedge against Google's monopoly of artificial intelligence. It's clear now that even if Google is sitting on the most powerful AI model on the planet, they have no idea what to do with it. They call it caution, but in fact it's indolence.
flashgordon 3y ago
Ah yes how many times have I heard the launching vs landing discussion in perf and promo discussions. So fun fact - at FAANGs (at least) introduction of new vernacular is very important to show that you are the objective (tm). Eg we will now reward landing instead of just launching. All well and good. How did that translate to in practice? Well X had impact by helping, supporting across many broad projects that needed legacy support. And X was a junior eng who went above and beyond in doing so - some times showing ownership and accountability at level + 1. So X should be ready for a promo yes? Yes but - "Focussing broadly meant low - more objective sound verbiage - focussed technical complexity is not enough". Translation - "you didn't build a complex shiny thing".

pinewurst 3y ago

Because most weren't very good to begin with, only created to get the originators promoted (usually far past their level of competence).

paulgb 3y ago

> Separate enterprise from consumer more clearly (Gsuite/Google Cloud). Yes, this. I'm great with experimentation, but please give us an indication of what services are experiments vs. what we can rely on as critical infrastructure. A lot of us were blindsided by Google Domains because of this!

brycewray 3y ago

(2022)

MangoCoffee 3y ago

Microsoft VB6 apps still run on Windows 11/10

devoutsalsa 3y ago
I'm surprised it ever ran on Windows 1.1
- nradov 3y ago
  Ha ha, but technically it might even sort of work. Microsoft actually released an MS-DOS edition of Visual Basic 1.0. So you might be able to run it in a DOS box under Windows 1.0.

LarsAlereon 3y ago

I think the biggest issue is that other organizations signal the impending death of a product long before they shut it down. You stop seeing updates or hearing them talk about the product and eventually start to consider other options, and they usually wait to actually kill it until there's almost no one left. It seems like Google actively maintains and tries to attract users right up until they announce the servers are going dark in 30 days.

DistractionRect 3y ago

It seems to be a self fulfilling prophecy now. Between the expectation that products won't last, and the possibility of getting randomly locked out of one's account with no recourse (other than screaming loudly on Twitter or HN), Google services seem to be considered a major liability. I've also said this on before on HN, but I typically don't hear about new Google services until they're shuttering - for an advertising I've always found it ironic how poorly they advertise most of their products.

harrid 3y ago

Another side of the coin: Why does Google create so many products?

uberman 3y ago

My view is that many/most of these products would be successes at smaller companies but at Alphabet they are not hockey stick style game changes. When your product is lost in accounting rounding errors it can be hard to justify it to the bean counters. For years now, I just have assumed that these products are black swan attempts to find a new needle mover and that nothing they productize paid or free should be relied on.

ddkto 3y ago

It is interesting to consider this from a Stage-Gate vs Lean Startup perspective. These two product development processes can be seen as antithetical, but if you read the original sources (Winning at New Products and The Lean Startup), you find that they are both trying to achieve the exact same thing: delivering successful new products to market at minimal cost. The differences between the two processes is a function of their environment. If you are working in a company with separate functional departments and a strong, existing brand, you need a step by step process to align everyone and get customer insight before launch. Stage-Gate answers this need and products that get killed die before they are formally launched (thus protecting the brand). If you are a small team doing everything with an unknown brand, the most reliable way to get market feedback earlier is to just put something on the market. The Lean Startup comes from this perspective - if there isn’t enough traction, kill the product and invent a new brand. (Of course, these processes can be adapted to other environments, but these are their native soil, so to speak.) Google seems to be managing its product initiative like startups: they incentivize new product launches, and don’t hesitate to kill products that are already on the market. Perhaps we are better off adjust our expectation of the google brand: it’s just a VC brand (like a16z), not a product brand.

loudmax 3y ago
I think that is a reasonably analogy, but an important difference is that a startup has a strong incentive to be committed to their product. A startup may not stay in business for long, but we have an expectation that they'll support their product for as long as they can. After all, this product is a big bet for them and they really need it to succeed. I don't see that those incentives even exist at Google. A well managed company would introduce new products that match the rest of the company's portfolio. When a product fails to gain interest, they would revise it and try to figure out how to provide customer value. There's nothing about Google's behavior in the past ten years that suggests that's what is going on there. From an outsider's perspective, there's nothing to indicate that Google is making any effort to follow through to make sure new products are successful.
- ddkto 3y ago
  exactly - Google is acting like a VC, not a company. A VC isn't too worried if a large percentage of their investments go under, so long a few make it big. It's like Google has the worst of both worlds: the upper management has the detachment of a VC firm, and the product teams have the detachment of being incentivized to start something new. At least in an actual startup, the team is committed to success.

purerandomness 3y ago

Hustle culture. They ship little bets and see what sticks.

etchalon 3y ago

Short answer - Google pretends they're a company they're not. When they release products in new markets, often markets their culture isn't aligned to, the products struggle. That struggle gives leadership a reason to kill the product. I'm personally amazed Pixel phones haven't been killed yet and can't shake the feeling that will happen any day now.

fineIllregister 3y ago
Pixel phones are partnerships with phone manufacturers. They sold off their in-house phone unit years ago.
- sowbug 3y ago
  Your understanding is about 8 years out of date. The Nexus line followed the JDM model you describe, ending with the 2015 Nexus 6P designed by Huawei. Starting with the Pixel in 2016, Google has been the designer and seller of record for all their phones, accelerating with the acquisition of HTC's phone team in 2017. The 2021 Pixel 6, moreover, used Google's in-house SoC ("Tensor"), which had been under development for years, rather than a Qualcomm chipset. That was a significant milestone.
  - fineIllregister 3y ago
    I did miss that. Thanks for the info.

AbrahamParangi 3y ago

Microsoft and Apple are platform companies. Each product is intended to reinforce and expand the platform, and you see this reflected in that both companies have a diverse mixture of revenue sources. I think we can understand these companies as fundamentally having a strategy where the goal is to reinforce the value prop of "building on Microsoft" or "living on Apple". Google, however, is much more of a one-hit-wonder from a revenue perspective. While Google has had many societally impactful products, they mostly do not move the needle on revenue. Google's revenue is 80% ads and 75% of that ad revenue is from search ads. I think the implication of this is that because Google doesn't make money from their interlocking services but rather from their near-monopoly on search ads, the incentives for them to actually behave like Microsoft and Apple (where you can trust long term support) just aren't there.

MangoCoffee 3y ago
Google have Android. is Android not a platform like Windows/IOS ? its used on phone expand to tablet and Chromebook. "Android has an incredible 97 percent market share in India". https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/androids-new-oem-rules-in-india-swap-requirements-with-revenue-sharing/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/androids-new-oem-rul...
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Android is strange. Google and the phone vendors only take on half the responsibility of publishing an operating system as you are pretty lucky if you get software updates never mind the kind of major updates an iOS device gets. It is exhausting to explain to people how to scan a QR code on Android because the built in camera app doesn’t do it so they have to go to the app store and download some free QR reader that looks like spamscam and have a slightly different name every time you try it. (And no giving them a QR code to get the app.) That’s the inattention to detail that pervades the platform and it is made worse by the outright vandalism of Samsung or Verizon filling up your home screen with lots of twisty little app icons that all look alike and certainly don’t lead anywhere you’d want to go. Google doesn’t get paid for Android, Asian companies in corrupt economies seem to lose money making Android phones but there is some social status to be had by being a leader in 21st century technology so they do it anyway. Apple probably profits more from Android because Android keeps them out of trouble with antitrust regulators but Android is a ‘spoiler’ that keeps any real competitive OS out of the market. Hypothetically Android keeps mobile safe for advertising but it is possible Google could be selling as many ads on somebody else’s OS without the expense and moral hazard of keeping a zombie OS ‘alive’.

steelegbr 3y ago

It's a real problem they need to get on top of as an organisation. Unceremoniously pulling the plug on services like IoT Core on tight timescales doesn't scream "reliable, sustainable platform I can pitch to my bosses". Even with sizeable discounts and professional services funds for migration, I wouldn't consider a move to Google Cloud until they calm this down. This is coming from someone that once worked for a Google Cloud Partner.

ravenstine 3y ago

Being high on your own supply for well over 15 years tends to do that. Consequently, it also comes from believing you can do everything, which for most companies doesn't work out. Gigantic organizations also devolve into several chains of sucking-up, with multiple levels of people sucking up to each other.

ldehaan 3y ago

[dead]

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

Because fuck you.

luxuryballs 3y ago

to answer the question in the headline frankly, it’s called the shotgun approach, if it doesn’t stick don’t keep shooting it against the wall

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

(2022)

pcurve 3y ago

They don't create many new ones anymore. They're just to big (and expensive) to be doing mass incubation. It's much more cost effective for them to simply buy-up and buy-out others.

neogodless 3y ago

Chapter 6 of The Psychology of Money is called Tails, You Win. Just happen to be reading it. The summary is a variant of "lots of small bets" - some will fail, some will do OK, but it's the very few that do exceptional that will matter to your overall success. Google is no special snowflake in this regard, but they hit it big early, and they still have the resources to keep trying things (and hoping for another big win). Lots of consumer-facing useful things that sometimes get popular, but rarely give Google whatever is it they want. And unless it really matters to their bottom line, they probably aren't going to stand behind it long-term. That being said, it's more than fair as a consumer not to trust their (little) bets.

rewgs 3y ago

Our entire company runs on Google products. I really, really like Google Workspace as a platform for a small-medium non-tech company such as the one I work for, where I'm one of two developers. But them killing Domains (where all our domains are registered, of course) is the last straw for me trusting Google to follow through with anything. Domains is so...boring, I guess?...that I never expected them to pull the rug out from under it. I kinda don't really care where my domains are registered, but the fact that Google already offers a suite of everything meant that going with Google Domains was the obvious choice. As I see it, that's the value proposition: they do it all, and it's all reasonably integrated, so just go all-in on Google services. But that only works if you trust all those services to stay around. With each product that's killed, that value proposition plummets exponentially. The pros of Google Workspace/Cloud: - Everything (for us) can be Google: from general business stuff like email/calendar/etc to storage (Drive and/or Cloud Storage) to automating tons of it via their Cloud API (or Google Apps Script, when that's the right tool for the job). - Everyone at my company, especially the non-technical folks (i.e. the majority of people in my company) "gets" Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Drive, etc. It's ubiquitous, and so selling administration, billing etc on "let's just go all-in on Google" is easy. - We don't need S3 storage, but we do need a lot of (mostly hot) storage, with easy collaboration. Because user accounts pool Drive storage company-wide, we mostly use that for our cloud storage needs. So, 99% of our storage needs are effectively free, because we're paying for those user accounts anyway. This saves us thousands upon thousands of dollars per year, and that's not even accounting for the employee time needed to integrate and work with S3(-compatible) storage. - The Cloud API is pretty solid, the documentation is generally good, and it's language-agnostic, making hiring that much easier as we expand the team and automate more processes. - It's all good enough, and rightly or wrongly, it doesn't have the Microsoft "smell" -- a lot of my non-technical peers are in my experience quite resistant to Microsoft-anything, even though they arguably have a much better track record of not killing products. The cons: - I don't trust Google anymore. I expect them to kill or radically alter any of these core products at a moment's notice. That one con completely obliterates all of the above very compelling pros. There's honestly nothing else quite like Google Workspace. AWS is massively beyond our needs or budget. Microsoft 365 is perfectly fine for mail/calendar/Office/etc but not for the Google Cloud side of things (I sure as hell am not touching Azure, and their 365 API documentation is a mess). The only other option is to roll our own set of modular services, which is something we've looked into quite a bit, but there's always a show-stopper somewhere, not least of which is the thought of someone else eventually inheriting this stuff if/when I move on. At the end of the day, rolling it yourself and maintaining it simply requires more chops and time on the part of the employee(s), and I shudder at the thought of essentially building a cathedral that others allow to rot once I leave, one big reason being that the middle of the venn diagram of "the skillset of people who would find themselves applying for my position" and "Linux sysadmin chops" don't really overlap at all. Philosophically, I prefer moving the monetary cost from closed-source platforms to the salaries of developers collaborating on open-source products; but for our company's particular use-case, we're ultimately not a tech company, we're a media company, with a lot of tech-focus, yes, but not in terms of building products -- rather, we simply do as all companies in 2023 probably should do, and leverage as much automation as possible to keep things efficient, organized, scalable...generally, keep it on the up-and-up. I'm sure that I'm not alone in feeling this way. There is a vast, vast I-dare-say "silent majority" of companies out there that are in this weird middle ground -- too small for AWS, not tech-focused-enough to build it themselves, but still need a solid suite of...everything required to run a business, and the tools to automate processes as needed. I know that Google Workspace is in the "enterprise" side of things and thus is less likely to be killed off, but...also, who knows? Google is so obviously completely aimless that I truly do not trust them anymore, and yet I don't see a truly viable alternative.

sys_64738 3y ago

They killed Google Reader ten years ago which was the last straw for me. GOOG became the devil from that point forward.

rainbowmmm 3y ago

The author mentioned that "Any roads that lead to search (browser, mail, maps, mobile, docs) must be commoditized and owned by Google". Can someone help me understand how mail and docs are the roads that lead to search?