11 ms·

I have a different theory about the cause of the decline. Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom,

I have a different theory about the cause of the decline. Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to zero. It turned out hiring great programmers wasn't enough by itself, not many amazing new products were happening. That's what caused Google to change culture toward the corporate norm: the non-normal culture wasn't proving itself. It reminds me of Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night". When you're young, that book is a tragedy of broken love. But when you're a bit older, you realize it's a tragedy of ambition, of a man who dreamed of becoming a famous psychiatrist but it just wasn't working out, year after year after year. And it wears on him, drives him to drinking and divorce. Simple as that.

steve1977 3y ago
I could imagine that one problem with “ideas to win” in general is that companies like Google often attribute their initial success to some skill, which they then try to replicate. But maybe it was just luck.
- herval 3y ago
  I wouldn't say creating something like Google search is purely _luck_, but having the right skill and hitting it at the right timing_is indeed a big component of success
coldtea 3y ago
"The non-normal culture wasn't proving itself." Well, that was what made Google in the first place. That's a hell of a lot of proof. What didn't work out was endless growth for the stockholders and "winning in every market". I'm not sure when companies decided they can't just be fucking happy in their domain (and make the same thing, improve it slightly over time, sell it with a profit, and go on), and have to "win every market" or squeeze that market to death (probably around the time healthy profits became secondary to stock performance and enshitiffication began), but I sure wish we'd go back to before that.
- rezonant 3y ago
  Absolutely. And don't get me started on how M&A has created an absolute monster of technical debt that stares you in the face as a user. Many might disagree, because the trillion dollar veneer Google can throw at things obscures it, but it's there. I used to wonder why Google moves so slow to add features and get literally anything done, but after experiencing the monumental screwup that is Google's underlying unified payments infrastructure, it's become pretty clear. The engineers are spending too much time mucking through the garbage left behind by M&A tech merging and code left behind by hotshot college grads on their way to early retirement at 25. EDIT: M&A
  - hashar 3y ago
    As a non US person, I have a couple questions: * What is P&A tech? * How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?
    - rezonant 3y ago
      Oops, should've been M&A (mergers and acquisitions)
    - coldtea 3y ago
      >How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage? Parent is not talking about Google employees caching on Google stock. They're talking about acquired company founders, getting the acquisition money from Google and retiring (or having the money to do show) through their "exit", while living Google with shitty startup code, created in "startup mode" with no regard to the future, just to ship, patch it to get enough traction, and exit quickly.
    - sweettea 3y ago
      >* How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage? levels.fyi reports a L4 averages $270k/yr at Google. Can sock away a whole lot of that pretty fast.
rezonant 3y ago
Your theory doesn't match the timeline. Under the engineering first strategy, Google became the juggernaut it is today, with products like Gmail, Maps, Street View and of course Search. Unfortunately, the approach doesn't work for all product categories. Product design, usability, simplicity, and sheer style were not the forte of the Google of old. As a result they saw themselves fall behind Facebook in social, failed to stop the tsunami that was iPhone, could not compete with Amazon in e-commerce, and ceded heavy ground to it in home automation. But Google still wanted these things and more, as all exceptionalist mega corps do. So they did the unthinkable. They handed the decision making back to the same product and business overlords that they had once shunned. As someone who has one foot in engineering and one foot in product design, I know how important product experts are in producing well loved, intuitive, and incredibly successful experiences at scale. However, you can feel it in the experience as a user when the product team is given the keys to the kingdom and left unchallenged. The product becomes soulless and vapid. It loses it's charm and abandons it's loyal customers when the wind shifts even slightly. I'm not placing the blame solely on Google's product apparatus, quite the opposite. It's clear that it's engineering apparatus has become so careless, so content with the status quo and the cushy paycheck and perks, that they don't push back anymore. Whenever you use a Google product as a software engineer and you wonder how it's possible that its blatantly obvious failures made it one day in the dev process of a company that apparently prides itself on hiring only the best engineering talent, know that it's not that these people aren't smart, it's that they do not care. It seems likely that Google incentivizes it's engineers not to care. The engineers get the crazy salaries and all the perks, they don't get to decide things. If you want to decide things, get promoted into product. You don't want to do product? You actually enjoy writing code? Then don't complain when your opinions and concerns are deferred. You could have switched to the business side, made less money, and hated your job. Google used to be an amazing engineering company because it promoted an atmosphere where engineers wanted to care about what they were doing. They have been unable to sustain that dynamic as they tried to make the company good at things that were not engineering, and as a result, the engineers just don't care enough to save it anymore and you can feel it every time you use a Google product.
- cousin_it 3y ago
  I think the two viewpoints are compatible. The "PM takeover" was indeed a very distinct event, and the precursor of today's problems. I think the reason that takeover was allowed to happen is because engineers-in-charge wasn't bringing enough results, like I said. Maps and Gmail are good success stories but they happened many years earlier.
Paianni 3y ago
Chrome? Chrome OS? Google Docs? Those haven't been successes?
- Zetobal 3y ago
  They were inevitable even my granny would have made those decisions.
  - Paianni 3y ago
    Maybe, but several companies had attempted 'internet appliances' in the past and failed, Chromebooks were a risk.
DeathArrow 3y ago
>I have a different theory about the cause of the decline. What decline are you talking about? They have hundreds of billions revenue and climbing.
- acdha 3y ago
  What successful product have they launched since 2008, when they embraced DoubleClick’s management culture? Ads bring in a lot of revenue, scaling with the general internet-using population growth, but they also seem to have made Google’s management incapable of thinking about products which are not immediately, wildly successful at selling tons of ads or harvesting data for ad targeting. It’s fortunate that they’ve been able to sustain the ad business but the billions they’ve spent developing new products nobody wanted to use had given them the air of decline, our age’s IBM where they have a lot of existing users but few people expect a new success even if the finance guys reliably get fabulous bonuses.
  - DeathArrow 3y ago
    That is from an user perspective. From a shareholder perspective they are doing just fine. Yes, from an user point of view, Google sucks. But it's making money. Probably it's hard for a company to achieve behemoth status and still do nice things.
    - acdha 3y ago
      Your original claim wasn’t scoped to shareholder returns, but even as a shareholder (which I happen to be) throwing away their reputation & goodwill is a concern. Only a few businesses like ISPs have something like a natural monopoly insulating them from the long-term impacts of that loss. Saying it’s doing fine sounds a lot like the people saying it was good to have accountants in charge of IBM in the 90s, who were right until it was too late to recover. The problem isn’t just size but business model: Apple does much better because they have never lost track of the need to have each user actively choose their products. The ad business is different since, say, a Maps user is not who gives Google revenue and that makes it easier not to respect them, with consequences which are not immediately coupled to revenue.
bitcharmer 3y ago
I disagree. To me it looks like the corporateness, the MBA types, KPIs and all that bullshit steered Google off its course and into what it is today.
smrtinsert 3y ago
Absolutely agreed. The mythology of engineer driven innovation only applied to the brief birth of the web and even then it was more product vs programming, yt for example.
Chathamization 3y ago
That's the impression I have. I remember a little over a decade ago when the population at large was completely hyped about all of the world changing technology we were going to see coming from the moonshots at Google X. The excitement over Google Glass, the mystery over the Google barges. Eventually, people started wondering when these hyped up products in development were going to actually become products[1]. Not it seems people have forgotten about it in general, and the exciting stuff is likely to come from other companies. I don't see people commenting on this a lot when they lament the former Google. There seems to be a lot of personal reasons why people prefer how the company used to be run - it was fun, we spent lots of time on side projects, the company had free stuff all over the place, it felt like a fun college and not a job, etc. But little reflection on how productive the company was being. I do wonder sometimes if a Jobs (or maybe an Altman or Musk) is more valuable than people realize. People like to say, "But those people don't even create anything, they're just taking credit for other people's work!" But just letting smart people gather and work on pet projects doesn't seem to work particularly well either. Maybe having a headstrong product oriented person upstairs is useful/necessary. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/technology/they-promised-us-jet-packs-they-promised-the-bosses-profit.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/technology/they-promised-...
- fidotron 3y ago
  I think you could go further - the old Google culture was not great at teamwork, and most definitely not when teams crossed boundaries with third parties, where they would expect to be dictating reality and struggled when this wasn’t possible. (Credit where it is due - certain people in the Android group worked this out and changed their tune, and much money was made as a result). There are limits to how much tiny teams can do and old Google was pushing those limits too often. Part of the function of a Jobs type character is to be the defining asshole in the organization that no one has a chance of defeating alone.
  - vharish 3y ago
    The current Google is no better when it comes to team work. It's likely worse when it comes to cross team work.
DanielHB 3y ago
I think the main problem is because the reward from your innovative ideas being successful was not tied to the team members own rewards. Startup founders get crazy rich or get nothing so they will do their damnest to get their ideas to deliver value and capitalize their value. All the researchers at Google still keep their jobs and salaries if their ideas/projects fail. And if they succeed they might get a promotion and a bonus, maybe, and probably only the top people behind the idea/project.
dolmen 3y ago
Same as Bell Labs. Having great technical talents is not enough to have a great business.
- TheCondor 3y ago
  Odd, it one mention of ‘hunger’ that I’ve seen in this discussion… Bell labs, Watson labs, others all had hungry researchers that were passionate about an area of research and simply needed the resources to realize it. That is all, and guess what, they churn out some pretty damn amazing research. Almost like clockwork. Turning that in to an actual product? A product the market wants? That is a whole different can of worms; that doesn’t diminish the research though, and when it’s really done well the research trickles into many products. A very wise episcopal priest told me once that you should seek discomfort, too much comfort leads to complacency, too much suffering leads to anything that feels like it can end the immediate pain, but just a little discomfort and that’s where you learn, are challenged and grow. I think it is generally true. ESR wrote I the Catherdral and Bizaare that an “itch” is the source of a lot of great software. I’m not disparaging anyone, but you have to wonder when a single “engineer” can earn $120m+ from a company without delivering a product or world changing research. It’s hard to imagine that there is a lot of hunger there, it’s also hard to imagine what some of the really hungry folks that make a lot less than 1% of that think there. Not saying it can’t be fixed, I expect google to be around and make a lot of money for a long time, but it will be different.
- ephemeral-life 3y ago
  The situations are nothing alike. At the time bell labs was making all of its world changing inventions, AT&T was a regulated monopoly that was only allowed to live if they made their research open and not compete in adjacent markets.
DonHopkins 3y ago
Game Helpin' Squad: A Pissed Off Tutorial For Google Wave https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug
amadeuspagel 3y ago
> And… infrastructure projects and unglamorous projects went wanting for people to work on them. They had a half day meeting to review file system projects because…it turns out that many, many top computer scientists evidently dream of writing their own file systems. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/one-smart-guys-frank-take-working-major-tech-companies.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/on...
uoaei 3y ago
The very premise that a single company should have as a goal to "win in every market" is problematic to its core. Can you justify this premise and how it relates to your assessment of Google?
eitland 3y ago
I have another explanation. Lets start with what the article says, but doesn't explain: > And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives. My theory is A/B testing or other research led then to short term optimization after short term optimization: - a new design was tested that made ads more like ordinary links - profit increased (I am not saying this was on purpose to trick people, only I think experiments were made and their results guided the design) - research in some form or another showed that most users reacted positively when search was made less hard core by removing or significantly reducing the effect of search operators like doublequotes - etc etc - meanwhile content farms and more legitimate web sites on the other side were also experimenting - at some points the old engineers started to leave search and indexing and indexing deteriorates Still everything worked for a while: - DuckDuckGo were still worse and did all the same things: didn't prioritize results correctly, ignored search operators etc. - Same goes for Bing until GPT But at some point Google has optimized its result and its workforce to where we are today: - results are as bad as the search engines they replaced - the once clean results have been optimized step by step until most of the page above fold is ads - search operators are gone - and meanwhile Kagi and others have snuck up and snatched us that used to tell people to use Google Google is a sad mess now IMO, but I guess every step on the way to were we are today was a measureable improvement.
- wuschel 3y ago
  While I can’t really objectively comment on the development of the quality of search result over time, one is for sure: the amount of data Google has to process and the amount attempts to influence beforementioned search results have grown a couple of orders of magnitude since Google’s creation.
  - eitland 3y ago
    Yes. But 1. so has their processing power 2. lots of the problem (first page of results filled with ads that looks like content, including spam in the results and not giving us a block option) are not related to scale 3. Smaller (search.marginalia.nu) and larger (kagi.com) competitors keep demonstrating that it is possible to implement doublequotes correctly and not include results I didn't ask for - even in 2024.
throwaw12 3y ago
> hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened There are 2 dimensions in this equations (1) best programmers (2) management. They might have hired best engineers, but not the best management. Maybe the management ruined them, by putting profits above everything else. Keep in mind, some of those management/MBA people have tendency to put promotion above anything else.
dec0dedab0de 3y ago
From the outside it seemed like Google 20-25 years ago cared more about making good things than they cared about making money. Which counter-intuitively is why they made so much money, people trusted google. Somewhere around the doubleclick merger or the IPO that changed. When google launched Gmail people were paying for invites on ebay. Changing your email address is the biggest pain in the ass in digital life and Google had people paying for the chance to do it before their friends. That would not happen if they launched something new right now. After a decade or two of trading goodwill for short term gains no one trusts google, and pretty much only use it because they think they have to.
ksec 3y ago
>the non-normal culture wasn't proving itself. Remember the big fuss about no managers? >not many amazing new products were happening. And, one of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards for the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it. And I made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. - Steve Jobs To me Google is simply a technology company, and are constantly innovating with Technology and looking for uses cases with the new tech they have. Apple, or at least Steve Jobs' Apple because the current Apple is looking more and more like Google. Are a consumer company that identify a problem and work backwards to look for a technology solution. Unfortunately, it turns out Technology, Business, and Consumer understanding is an extremely rare set of combination.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
m463 3y ago
> When you're young, ... But when you're a bit older, ... I remember when I was really young I thought batman (the original series) was an adventure show, but watching years later as an adult... lol, it was a comedy!!
8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
I might be weird, but I want to fix bugs and reduce tech debt, but the company actively discourages me from doing so. Yes, I wouldn't be producing amazing new products but I think that's better than building something and killing it a year later. I'd rather have fewer products of higher quality, but no one gets promoted that way.

steve1977 3y ago

I could imagine that one problem with “ideas to win” in general is that companies like Google often attribute their initial success to some skill, which they then try to replicate. But maybe it was just luck.

herval 3y ago
I wouldn't say creating something like Google search is purely _luck_, but having the right skill and hitting it at the right timing_is indeed a big component of success

coldtea 3y ago

"The non-normal culture wasn't proving itself." Well, that was what made Google in the first place. That's a hell of a lot of proof. What didn't work out was endless growth for the stockholders and "winning in every market". I'm not sure when companies decided they can't just be fucking happy in their domain (and make the same thing, improve it slightly over time, sell it with a profit, and go on), and have to "win every market" or squeeze that market to death (probably around the time healthy profits became secondary to stock performance and enshitiffication began), but I sure wish we'd go back to before that.

rezonant 3y ago
Absolutely. And don't get me started on how M&A has created an absolute monster of technical debt that stares you in the face as a user. Many might disagree, because the trillion dollar veneer Google can throw at things obscures it, but it's there. I used to wonder why Google moves so slow to add features and get literally anything done, but after experiencing the monumental screwup that is Google's underlying unified payments infrastructure, it's become pretty clear. The engineers are spending too much time mucking through the garbage left behind by M&A tech merging and code left behind by hotshot college grads on their way to early retirement at 25. EDIT: M&A
- hashar 3y ago
  As a non US person, I have a couple questions: * What is P&A tech? * How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?
  - rezonant 3y ago
    Oops, should've been M&A (mergers and acquisitions)
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage? Parent is not talking about Google employees caching on Google stock. They're talking about acquired company founders, getting the acquisition money from Google and retiring (or having the money to do show) through their "exit", while living Google with shitty startup code, created in "startup mode" with no regard to the future, just to ship, patch it to get enough traction, and exit quickly.
  - sweettea 3y ago
    >* How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage? levels.fyi reports a L4 averages $270k/yr at Google. Can sock away a whole lot of that pretty fast.

rezonant 3y ago

Your theory doesn't match the timeline. Under the engineering first strategy, Google became the juggernaut it is today, with products like Gmail, Maps, Street View and of course Search. Unfortunately, the approach doesn't work for all product categories. Product design, usability, simplicity, and sheer style were not the forte of the Google of old. As a result they saw themselves fall behind Facebook in social, failed to stop the tsunami that was iPhone, could not compete with Amazon in e-commerce, and ceded heavy ground to it in home automation. But Google still wanted these things and more, as all exceptionalist mega corps do. So they did the unthinkable. They handed the decision making back to the same product and business overlords that they had once shunned. As someone who has one foot in engineering and one foot in product design, I know how important product experts are in producing well loved, intuitive, and incredibly successful experiences at scale. However, you can feel it in the experience as a user when the product team is given the keys to the kingdom and left unchallenged. The product becomes soulless and vapid. It loses it's charm and abandons it's loyal customers when the wind shifts even slightly. I'm not placing the blame solely on Google's product apparatus, quite the opposite. It's clear that it's engineering apparatus has become so careless, so content with the status quo and the cushy paycheck and perks, that they don't push back anymore. Whenever you use a Google product as a software engineer and you wonder how it's possible that its blatantly obvious failures made it one day in the dev process of a company that apparently prides itself on hiring only the best engineering talent, know that it's not that these people aren't smart, it's that they do not care. It seems likely that Google incentivizes it's engineers not to care. The engineers get the crazy salaries and all the perks, they don't get to decide things. If you want to decide things, get promoted into product. You don't want to do product? You actually enjoy writing code? Then don't complain when your opinions and concerns are deferred. You could have switched to the business side, made less money, and hated your job. Google used to be an amazing engineering company because it promoted an atmosphere where engineers wanted to care about what they were doing. They have been unable to sustain that dynamic as they tried to make the company good at things that were not engineering, and as a result, the engineers just don't care enough to save it anymore and you can feel it every time you use a Google product.

cousin_it 3y ago
I think the two viewpoints are compatible. The "PM takeover" was indeed a very distinct event, and the precursor of today's problems. I think the reason that takeover was allowed to happen is because engineers-in-charge wasn't bringing enough results, like I said. Maps and Gmail are good success stories but they happened many years earlier.

Paianni 3y ago

Chrome? Chrome OS? Google Docs? Those haven't been successes?

Zetobal 3y ago
They were inevitable even my granny would have made those decisions.
- Paianni 3y ago
  Maybe, but several companies had attempted 'internet appliances' in the past and failed, Chromebooks were a risk.

DeathArrow 3y ago

>I have a different theory about the cause of the decline. What decline are you talking about? They have hundreds of billions revenue and climbing.

acdha 3y ago
What successful product have they launched since 2008, when they embraced DoubleClick’s management culture? Ads bring in a lot of revenue, scaling with the general internet-using population growth, but they also seem to have made Google’s management incapable of thinking about products which are not immediately, wildly successful at selling tons of ads or harvesting data for ad targeting. It’s fortunate that they’ve been able to sustain the ad business but the billions they’ve spent developing new products nobody wanted to use had given them the air of decline, our age’s IBM where they have a lot of existing users but few people expect a new success even if the finance guys reliably get fabulous bonuses.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  That is from an user perspective. From a shareholder perspective they are doing just fine. Yes, from an user point of view, Google sucks. But it's making money. Probably it's hard for a company to achieve behemoth status and still do nice things.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Your original claim wasn’t scoped to shareholder returns, but even as a shareholder (which I happen to be) throwing away their reputation & goodwill is a concern. Only a few businesses like ISPs have something like a natural monopoly insulating them from the long-term impacts of that loss. Saying it’s doing fine sounds a lot like the people saying it was good to have accountants in charge of IBM in the 90s, who were right until it was too late to recover. The problem isn’t just size but business model: Apple does much better because they have never lost track of the need to have each user actively choose their products. The ad business is different since, say, a Maps user is not who gives Google revenue and that makes it easier not to respect them, with consequences which are not immediately coupled to revenue.

bitcharmer 3y ago

I disagree. To me it looks like the corporateness, the MBA types, KPIs and all that bullshit steered Google off its course and into what it is today.

smrtinsert 3y ago

Absolutely agreed. The mythology of engineer driven innovation only applied to the brief birth of the web and even then it was more product vs programming, yt for example.

Chathamization 3y ago

That's the impression I have. I remember a little over a decade ago when the population at large was completely hyped about all of the world changing technology we were going to see coming from the moonshots at Google X. The excitement over Google Glass, the mystery over the Google barges. Eventually, people started wondering when these hyped up products in development were going to actually become products[1]. Not it seems people have forgotten about it in general, and the exciting stuff is likely to come from other companies. I don't see people commenting on this a lot when they lament the former Google. There seems to be a lot of personal reasons why people prefer how the company used to be run - it was fun, we spent lots of time on side projects, the company had free stuff all over the place, it felt like a fun college and not a job, etc. But little reflection on how productive the company was being. I do wonder sometimes if a Jobs (or maybe an Altman or Musk) is more valuable than people realize. People like to say, "But those people don't even create anything, they're just taking credit for other people's work!" But just letting smart people gather and work on pet projects doesn't seem to work particularly well either. Maybe having a headstrong product oriented person upstairs is useful/necessary. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/technology/they-promised-us-jet-packs-they-promised-the-bosses-profit.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/technology/they-promised-...

fidotron 3y ago
I think you could go further - the old Google culture was not great at teamwork, and most definitely not when teams crossed boundaries with third parties, where they would expect to be dictating reality and struggled when this wasn’t possible. (Credit where it is due - certain people in the Android group worked this out and changed their tune, and much money was made as a result). There are limits to how much tiny teams can do and old Google was pushing those limits too often. Part of the function of a Jobs type character is to be the defining asshole in the organization that no one has a chance of defeating alone.
- vharish 3y ago
  The current Google is no better when it comes to team work. It's likely worse when it comes to cross team work.

DanielHB 3y ago

I think the main problem is because the reward from your innovative ideas being successful was not tied to the team members own rewards. Startup founders get crazy rich or get nothing so they will do their damnest to get their ideas to deliver value and capitalize their value. All the researchers at Google still keep their jobs and salaries if their ideas/projects fail. And if they succeed they might get a promotion and a bonus, maybe, and probably only the top people behind the idea/project.

dolmen 3y ago

Same as Bell Labs. Having great technical talents is not enough to have a great business.

TheCondor 3y ago
Odd, it one mention of ‘hunger’ that I’ve seen in this discussion… Bell labs, Watson labs, others all had hungry researchers that were passionate about an area of research and simply needed the resources to realize it. That is all, and guess what, they churn out some pretty damn amazing research. Almost like clockwork. Turning that in to an actual product? A product the market wants? That is a whole different can of worms; that doesn’t diminish the research though, and when it’s really done well the research trickles into many products. A very wise episcopal priest told me once that you should seek discomfort, too much comfort leads to complacency, too much suffering leads to anything that feels like it can end the immediate pain, but just a little discomfort and that’s where you learn, are challenged and grow. I think it is generally true. ESR wrote I the Catherdral and Bizaare that an “itch” is the source of a lot of great software. I’m not disparaging anyone, but you have to wonder when a single “engineer” can earn $120m+ from a company without delivering a product or world changing research. It’s hard to imagine that there is a lot of hunger there, it’s also hard to imagine what some of the really hungry folks that make a lot less than 1% of that think there. Not saying it can’t be fixed, I expect google to be around and make a lot of money for a long time, but it will be different.
ephemeral-life 3y ago
The situations are nothing alike. At the time bell labs was making all of its world changing inventions, AT&T was a regulated monopoly that was only allowed to live if they made their research open and not compete in adjacent markets.

DonHopkins 3y ago

Game Helpin' Squad: A Pissed Off Tutorial For Google Wave https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug

amadeuspagel 3y ago

> And… infrastructure projects and unglamorous projects went wanting for people to work on them. They had a half day meeting to review file system projects because…it turns out that many, many top computer scientists evidently dream of writing their own file systems. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/one-smart-guys-frank-take-working-major-tech-companies.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/on...

uoaei 3y ago

The very premise that a single company should have as a goal to "win in every market" is problematic to its core. Can you justify this premise and how it relates to your assessment of Google?

eitland 3y ago

I have another explanation. Lets start with what the article says, but doesn't explain: > And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives. My theory is A/B testing or other research led then to short term optimization after short term optimization: - a new design was tested that made ads more like ordinary links - profit increased (I am not saying this was on purpose to trick people, only I think experiments were made and their results guided the design) - research in some form or another showed that most users reacted positively when search was made less hard core by removing or significantly reducing the effect of search operators like doublequotes - etc etc - meanwhile content farms and more legitimate web sites on the other side were also experimenting - at some points the old engineers started to leave search and indexing and indexing deteriorates Still everything worked for a while: - DuckDuckGo were still worse and did all the same things: didn't prioritize results correctly, ignored search operators etc. - Same goes for Bing until GPT But at some point Google has optimized its result and its workforce to where we are today: - results are as bad as the search engines they replaced - the once clean results have been optimized step by step until most of the page above fold is ads - search operators are gone - and meanwhile Kagi and others have snuck up and snatched us that used to tell people to use Google Google is a sad mess now IMO, but I guess every step on the way to were we are today was a measureable improvement.

wuschel 3y ago
While I can’t really objectively comment on the development of the quality of search result over time, one is for sure: the amount of data Google has to process and the amount attempts to influence beforementioned search results have grown a couple of orders of magnitude since Google’s creation.
- eitland 3y ago
  Yes. But 1. so has their processing power 2. lots of the problem (first page of results filled with ads that looks like content, including spam in the results and not giving us a block option) are not related to scale 3. Smaller (search.marginalia.nu) and larger (kagi.com) competitors keep demonstrating that it is possible to implement doublequotes correctly and not include results I didn't ask for - even in 2024.

throwaw12 3y ago

> hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened There are 2 dimensions in this equations (1) best programmers (2) management. They might have hired best engineers, but not the best management. Maybe the management ruined them, by putting profits above everything else. Keep in mind, some of those management/MBA people have tendency to put promotion above anything else.

dec0dedab0de 3y ago

From the outside it seemed like Google 20-25 years ago cared more about making good things than they cared about making money. Which counter-intuitively is why they made so much money, people trusted google. Somewhere around the doubleclick merger or the IPO that changed. When google launched Gmail people were paying for invites on ebay. Changing your email address is the biggest pain in the ass in digital life and Google had people paying for the chance to do it before their friends. That would not happen if they launched something new right now. After a decade or two of trading goodwill for short term gains no one trusts google, and pretty much only use it because they think they have to.

ksec 3y ago

>the non-normal culture wasn't proving itself. Remember the big fuss about no managers? >not many amazing new products were happening. And, one of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards for the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it. And I made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. - Steve Jobs To me Google is simply a technology company, and are constantly innovating with Technology and looking for uses cases with the new tech they have. Apple, or at least Steve Jobs' Apple because the current Apple is looking more and more like Google. Are a consumer company that identify a problem and work backwards to look for a technology solution. Unfortunately, it turns out Technology, Business, and Consumer understanding is an extremely rare set of combination.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

m463 3y ago

> When you're young, ... But when you're a bit older, ... I remember when I was really young I thought batman (the original series) was an adventure show, but watching years later as an adult... lol, it was a comedy!!

8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago

I might be weird, but I want to fix bugs and reduce tech debt, but the company actively discourages me from doing so. Yes, I wouldn't be producing amazing new products but I think that's better than building something and killing it a year later. I'd rather have fewer products of higher quality, but no one gets promoted that way.