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This is a good reflection, but I do disagree with the view of honest efforts from Google to improve the world being met with unnecessary external criticism. Pe

by Osmose 3y ago

This is a good reflection, but I do disagree with the view of honest efforts from Google to improve the world being met with unnecessary external criticism. People outside Google don't have the benefit of thinking of any particular project as being run only by the individuals currently working on it—those particular people may leave the company or change teams or move on to other projects. It's Google that's making it, and Google who will run it in the future, and we have to account for what Google might do with it 5, 10, 20 years from now. No amount of the original Chrome team being excellent, well-intentioned, skilled, thoughtful makers can stop today's Chrome from cornering the market into an effective monopoly and leveraging that to try and benefit Google's ad products. That's one of the things you have to pay for when working for a large company—the support and knowledge and compensation are great boons but you don't get to just be yourself anymore, you're _Google_, your own work is always at risk of getting co-opted by others, and external people will view and criticize your work accordingly.

dazzlefruit 3y ago
The Chrome versions of the first few years were so nice to use. It was the _lightest_ major browser for a time. It's insane how it has drifted since then.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Has it drifted? I don't see it. I think all the other browsers just had to become light and fast too. Even Microsoft was forced to say goodbye to IE, and instead based Edge on Chromium. And tech people were eventually able to switch back to Firefox because it got much faster too. Google wanted a world where all browsers were light and fast in order to efficiently run complex webapps -- and they achieved that. Kudos.
  - dazzlefruit 3y ago
    Chrome is often criticized for overusing RAM. Personally I stopped using it a couple years ago, but when I stopped, it was very far from light; I remember it freezing for a few seconds for lack of RAM in a way other browsers (Firefox with multiprocessing, Edge before it got rebuilt over Chromium) didn't. The original Chrome just felt like a barebones window to the Internet. Though I agree that Firefox et al. became much less sluggish over time. (Is that only their performance improvements or did hardware get better faster than they grew?) Also maybe "light" and "fast" shouldn't be lumped together. Chrome can definitely be fast when it has enough resources. That and sandboxing seem to make it much _heavier_ in RAM.
    - eric-hu 3y ago
      As a web developer I also have to tell you that my industry has gotten more cavalier about using resources. Unless your benchmark is browsing sites that you know have not changed in 15 years, the heaviness you feel could be from development teams using shiny new frameworks.
    - dmazzoni 3y ago
      Chrome isn't using all that RAM. The web pages you visit are.
- dmazzoni 3y ago
  Did it really? Because browsers got good, the web got orders of magnitude more complex. If you try loading a modern web page in an old version of Chrome, you'll see just how much faster Chrome has gotten. Or alternatively, try viewing an old webpage in new Chrome. It's still super light and zippy.
  - callalex 3y ago
    Yes, feature creep has happened in a really big way because there is an obvious profit incentive to Google if every last bit of computing happens in-browser. Glossing over the thorny topics like “my browser shouldn’t care what hardware I run it on”, the Web* set of standards hasn’t stopped ballooning since the release of chrome. WebRTC made sense. But WebUSB? WebGPU? WebAssembly? etc. etc. Each can have interesting use cases individually, but in aggregate they have become a whole second operating system filled with compromise and bloat.
- Andrew_nenakhov 3y ago
  It also looked much nicer. These thick curved tab decorations, unnecessary ovals everywhere, yuck.
raincole 3y ago
That's the beauty of mega coporations. 99% of employees can be genuinely trying to improve the lives of others and it still does evil as a whole.
kelnos 3y ago
Yup, agreed. My view is that the people on the inside often can't see the forest for the trees. They look at their immediate team/group, love the autonomy/transparency/"don't be evil"-mandate/etc. that they have and follow, and look around and see some of that in other groups, and think, "wow, this company is great, doesn't care about all that big-bad-company stuff". But people outside can look at a company that gets most of its revenue from advertising on the web, see that they're also building a web browser, and be rightly concerned about what is inevitably going to happen there. Even if the browser team initially has a mandate to do what's best for the user, and to not care about what's best for that company, there's no way that will be a sustainable long-term strategy. (And a cynical person might believe that the browser team was told this specifically so they'd be excited about the project, and of course management knows that when you're bootstrapping a new project/product, you need to get users fast, and the best way to get users is to do what's best for the user... at least for now.) It is absolutely unsurprising to me that this browser team couldn't see any of this at the time. And now we have people on the Chrome team earnestly pushing things like Web Environment Integrity, and somehow telling people that this is what users want and need, and that this is good for the web. I don't know if they are brainwashed, or are just very good liars. Again: completely unsurprising result.
- mepiethree 3y ago
  > and of course management knows that when you're bootstrapping a new project/product, you need to get users fast, and the best way to get users is to do what's best for the user... at least for now This is pretty explicitly said at a lot of companies, and I think that it's funny that many engineers care so little about business that they stop listening after the "do what's best for user" part and then get surprised when the "at least for now" part kicks in.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  In the end it's still a management problem. I do not think it is rank-and-file employees' duty to think about long term strategies or outside perspectives on the company or anything like that. It should be the management's responsibility to clarify this to the outside world. Again Google's management completely fails at that.
poszlem 3y ago
It's the old: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
- foobar_______ 3y ago
  Yeah seems pretty straight forward to me. Guy has been getting GOOG RSUs for 15 years straight and is now a multi-millionaire. Why would he rock his own boat? It is much easier to ignore any wrongdoing of the hand that feeds.
zelphirkalt 3y ago
Unless of course you manage to get your work inside that company released under an appropriate license, meaning free/libre copyleft ... which they did not do.
titzer 3y ago
When there is such a huge scale difference between the entity that causes harm and the person/group harmed, it just doesn't register. E.g. if you wanted down the sidewalk and inadvertently stepped on a cockroach because you were thinking about something else, you'd probably not even notice. If the cockroach's relatives confronted you as a horrible, evil entity hell-bent on destruction, you'd probably not have even conceived of any damage you were doing; you feel innocent, maybe even offended. And you were busy with something huger and way more important! You were on your phone negotiating a really important business deal, what the heck is a cockroach to you? Big companies steamroll people all the time. Least of all their worries is the privacy and security of people they don't make money from.
- OnACoffeeBreak 3y ago
  "No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." - Stanisław J. Lec
aeturnum 3y ago
Parts of this reminded me of Daniel Ellsberg's admonition to Henry Kissinger about security clearances[1]: "[...]You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t....and that all those other people are fools." [1] https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg-limitations-knowledge/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe...
fragmede 3y ago
5, 10, 20 years from now, an unproven startup that doesn't manage to find product-market will equally be gone and unavailable to customers. Why does, eg Monday.com not get the same "oh no, what if they shut down" scaries that stops people from using their product the way, say, Google keep does? Fair or not, it's some quirk of human psychology that unfortunately Google has tapped into.
- sib 3y ago
  Hypothesis: With Monday.com or other startups, while there is risk that the company will shut down and the tool that you are depending upon will go away, the typical assumption is that they are doing their best to stay in business and deliver and improve that tool. It's all they have. So your incentives are credibly aligned. Whereas with Google, unless the product you're talking about is "Ads" (or Search or Android or YouTube), it's very easy to imagine them waking up one day and saying, "oops, our bad, what were we thinking, let's kill this thing" and going on their merry way without noticing an impact to their bottom line.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  I do think a lot of companies have some second thoughts before completely relying on the services of startups. Personally I've seen companies (or teams) explicitly rejecting the use of Airtable and Notion (in separate instances) because they aren't mature enough and people are worried about shutting down even if the product itself is compelling. But the main difference with Google is that Google shuts so many things down that talking about Google shutting something else down is just a meme, even if a tired and deeply unfunny meme. I seriously think anything Google launches in the future should not carry the name Google, should not be hosted on google.com, and should be owned by a subsidiary of Google LLC with ownership obscured.
- andromeduck 3y ago
  Because shuttering the business would be an existential threat while Google routinely shutters what would otherwise be successful business like domains/inbox/travel/reader/cloud print/code/podcasts, or otherwise refuses to treat with the level of seriousness/vision required to long term success like stadia/Chrome OS/Nest/plus/news etc.
SNosTrAnDbLe 3y ago
you're _Google_, your own work is always at risk of getting co-opted by others, and external people will view and criticize your work accordingly. This rang so true to me and it probably applies for all large tech companies. I have realized that getting attached to a particular project is bad for my mental health.
dekhn 3y ago
There is one member of the original chrome team who could stop Chrome from becoming a banal evil: Sundar. But as this article lays out, Sundar has no interest in stopping Chrome from continuing to be an engine of Google growth. That would be like ascribing feelings to a lawnmower, or in Sundar's case, a soft noodle.
kuchenbecker 3y ago
I'm friends with a dude on chrome team and used to work at Google. I describe this as a random walk of good intentioned people but where a decision will harm Google someone come out of the woodwork to block or slow it down.
dmazzoni 3y ago
> No amount of the original Chrome team being excellent, well-intentioned, skilled, thoughtful makers can stop today's Chrome from cornering the market into an effective monopoly and leveraging that to try and benefit Google's ad products Except for the fact that the original team open-sourced 99% of the browser, when they didn't have to. That has led to tons of other companies being able to build potential Chrome competitors. It also led to products nobody anticipated, like Electron. I sincerely believe that once one of the alternative browsers gets enough better, or Chrome gets bad enough, Chrome will lose its lead. Remember, people thought Internet Explorer would dominate forever.

by Osmose 3y ago

dazzlefruit 3y ago

The Chrome versions of the first few years were so nice to use. It was the _lightest_ major browser for a time. It's insane how it has drifted since then.

crazygringo 3y ago
Has it drifted? I don't see it. I think all the other browsers just had to become light and fast too. Even Microsoft was forced to say goodbye to IE, and instead based Edge on Chromium. And tech people were eventually able to switch back to Firefox because it got much faster too. Google wanted a world where all browsers were light and fast in order to efficiently run complex webapps -- and they achieved that. Kudos.
- dazzlefruit 3y ago
  Chrome is often criticized for overusing RAM. Personally I stopped using it a couple years ago, but when I stopped, it was very far from light; I remember it freezing for a few seconds for lack of RAM in a way other browsers (Firefox with multiprocessing, Edge before it got rebuilt over Chromium) didn't. The original Chrome just felt like a barebones window to the Internet. Though I agree that Firefox et al. became much less sluggish over time. (Is that only their performance improvements or did hardware get better faster than they grew?) Also maybe "light" and "fast" shouldn't be lumped together. Chrome can definitely be fast when it has enough resources. That and sandboxing seem to make it much _heavier_ in RAM.
  - eric-hu 3y ago
    As a web developer I also have to tell you that my industry has gotten more cavalier about using resources. Unless your benchmark is browsing sites that you know have not changed in 15 years, the heaviness you feel could be from development teams using shiny new frameworks.
  - dmazzoni 3y ago
    Chrome isn't using all that RAM. The web pages you visit are.
dmazzoni 3y ago
Did it really? Because browsers got good, the web got orders of magnitude more complex. If you try loading a modern web page in an old version of Chrome, you'll see just how much faster Chrome has gotten. Or alternatively, try viewing an old webpage in new Chrome. It's still super light and zippy.
- callalex 3y ago
  Yes, feature creep has happened in a really big way because there is an obvious profit incentive to Google if every last bit of computing happens in-browser. Glossing over the thorny topics like “my browser shouldn’t care what hardware I run it on”, the Web* set of standards hasn’t stopped ballooning since the release of chrome. WebRTC made sense. But WebUSB? WebGPU? WebAssembly? etc. etc. Each can have interesting use cases individually, but in aggregate they have become a whole second operating system filled with compromise and bloat.
Andrew_nenakhov 3y ago
It also looked much nicer. These thick curved tab decorations, unnecessary ovals everywhere, yuck.

raincole 3y ago

That's the beauty of mega coporations. 99% of employees can be genuinely trying to improve the lives of others and it still does evil as a whole.

kelnos 3y ago

Yup, agreed. My view is that the people on the inside often can't see the forest for the trees. They look at their immediate team/group, love the autonomy/transparency/"don't be evil"-mandate/etc. that they have and follow, and look around and see some of that in other groups, and think, "wow, this company is great, doesn't care about all that big-bad-company stuff". But people outside can look at a company that gets most of its revenue from advertising on the web, see that they're also building a web browser, and be rightly concerned about what is inevitably going to happen there. Even if the browser team initially has a mandate to do what's best for the user, and to not care about what's best for that company, there's no way that will be a sustainable long-term strategy. (And a cynical person might believe that the browser team was told this specifically so they'd be excited about the project, and of course management knows that when you're bootstrapping a new project/product, you need to get users fast, and the best way to get users is to do what's best for the user... at least for now.) It is absolutely unsurprising to me that this browser team couldn't see any of this at the time. And now we have people on the Chrome team earnestly pushing things like Web Environment Integrity, and somehow telling people that this is what users want and need, and that this is good for the web. I don't know if they are brainwashed, or are just very good liars. Again: completely unsurprising result.

mepiethree 3y ago
> and of course management knows that when you're bootstrapping a new project/product, you need to get users fast, and the best way to get users is to do what's best for the user... at least for now This is pretty explicitly said at a lot of companies, and I think that it's funny that many engineers care so little about business that they stop listening after the "do what's best for user" part and then get surprised when the "at least for now" part kicks in.
kccqzy 3y ago
In the end it's still a management problem. I do not think it is rank-and-file employees' duty to think about long term strategies or outside perspectives on the company or anything like that. It should be the management's responsibility to clarify this to the outside world. Again Google's management completely fails at that.

poszlem 3y ago

It's the old: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

foobar_______ 3y ago
Yeah seems pretty straight forward to me. Guy has been getting GOOG RSUs for 15 years straight and is now a multi-millionaire. Why would he rock his own boat? It is much easier to ignore any wrongdoing of the hand that feeds.

zelphirkalt 3y ago

Unless of course you manage to get your work inside that company released under an appropriate license, meaning free/libre copyleft ... which they did not do.

titzer 3y ago

When there is such a huge scale difference between the entity that causes harm and the person/group harmed, it just doesn't register. E.g. if you wanted down the sidewalk and inadvertently stepped on a cockroach because you were thinking about something else, you'd probably not even notice. If the cockroach's relatives confronted you as a horrible, evil entity hell-bent on destruction, you'd probably not have even conceived of any damage you were doing; you feel innocent, maybe even offended. And you were busy with something huger and way more important! You were on your phone negotiating a really important business deal, what the heck is a cockroach to you? Big companies steamroll people all the time. Least of all their worries is the privacy and security of people they don't make money from.

OnACoffeeBreak 3y ago
"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." - Stanisław J. Lec

aeturnum 3y ago

Parts of this reminded me of Daniel Ellsberg's admonition to Henry Kissinger about security clearances[1]: "[...]You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t....and that all those other people are fools." [1] https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg-limitations-knowledge/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe...

fragmede 3y ago

5, 10, 20 years from now, an unproven startup that doesn't manage to find product-market will equally be gone and unavailable to customers. Why does, eg Monday.com not get the same "oh no, what if they shut down" scaries that stops people from using their product the way, say, Google keep does? Fair or not, it's some quirk of human psychology that unfortunately Google has tapped into.

sib 3y ago
Hypothesis: With Monday.com or other startups, while there is risk that the company will shut down and the tool that you are depending upon will go away, the typical assumption is that they are doing their best to stay in business and deliver and improve that tool. It's all they have. So your incentives are credibly aligned. Whereas with Google, unless the product you're talking about is "Ads" (or Search or Android or YouTube), it's very easy to imagine them waking up one day and saying, "oops, our bad, what were we thinking, let's kill this thing" and going on their merry way without noticing an impact to their bottom line.
kccqzy 3y ago
I do think a lot of companies have some second thoughts before completely relying on the services of startups. Personally I've seen companies (or teams) explicitly rejecting the use of Airtable and Notion (in separate instances) because they aren't mature enough and people are worried about shutting down even if the product itself is compelling. But the main difference with Google is that Google shuts so many things down that talking about Google shutting something else down is just a meme, even if a tired and deeply unfunny meme. I seriously think anything Google launches in the future should not carry the name Google, should not be hosted on google.com, and should be owned by a subsidiary of Google LLC with ownership obscured.
andromeduck 3y ago
Because shuttering the business would be an existential threat while Google routinely shutters what would otherwise be successful business like domains/inbox/travel/reader/cloud print/code/podcasts, or otherwise refuses to treat with the level of seriousness/vision required to long term success like stadia/Chrome OS/Nest/plus/news etc.

SNosTrAnDbLe 3y ago

you're _Google_, your own work is always at risk of getting co-opted by others, and external people will view and criticize your work accordingly. This rang so true to me and it probably applies for all large tech companies. I have realized that getting attached to a particular project is bad for my mental health.

dekhn 3y ago

There is one member of the original chrome team who could stop Chrome from becoming a banal evil: Sundar. But as this article lays out, Sundar has no interest in stopping Chrome from continuing to be an engine of Google growth. That would be like ascribing feelings to a lawnmower, or in Sundar's case, a soft noodle.

kuchenbecker 3y ago

I'm friends with a dude on chrome team and used to work at Google. I describe this as a random walk of good intentioned people but where a decision will harm Google someone come out of the woodwork to block or slow it down.

dmazzoni 3y ago

> No amount of the original Chrome team being excellent, well-intentioned, skilled, thoughtful makers can stop today's Chrome from cornering the market into an effective monopoly and leveraging that to try and benefit Google's ad products Except for the fact that the original team open-sourced 99% of the browser, when they didn't have to. That has led to tons of other companies being able to build potential Chrome competitors. It also led to products nobody anticipated, like Electron. I sincerely believe that once one of the alternative browsers gets enough better, or Chrome gets bad enough, Chrome will lose its lead. Remember, people thought Internet Explorer would dominate forever.