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Part of me is actually happy that Google lost its shine. A part of this is certainly schadenfreude, for which I am obviously ashamed, but there is another side

Part of me is actually happy that Google lost its shine. A part of this is certainly schadenfreude, for which I am obviously ashamed, but there is another side to it. I remember the awe/respect with which people thought of Google back in the mid-'oughts. Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today (maybe OpenAI). All these amazing engineers went to work there and everyone was jealous of them. Then they always seemed to end up spending their time on Google+ or Play Store or some other application which was not as glamorous or interesting as you were expecting. It felt like a huge disconnect between the perception and reality. I don't mean to say it was a waste of talent, because clearly some of these things were a huge success. I am glad though that these days people may judge the idea of a big-tech career more objectively.

bluetomcat 3y ago
> I don't mean to say it was a waste of talent, because clearly some of these things were a huge success. Nothing apart from search, ads, maps, Gmail, Chrome and Android was a huge success. They essentially created their own monocultural ecosystem. Most of everything else was a short-lived fad. Plus, Wave, Reader, Chat and Glass, to mention a few.
- AlexCoventry 3y ago
  The AI research wasn't a commercial success, but it did have a huge impact.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Yep, the parent comment is the part of the iceberg "above the surface", but there is also a bunch of influential stuff "below the surface", like their AI research, and things like colossus, borg, bigtable, mapreduce, and a few others.
    - _bohm 3y ago
      Would add: Go and protobuf/gRPC
- baud147258 3y ago
  I'd add Youtube as a huge success, even if I don't think if ever brought in much money
  - squarefoot 3y ago
    Google acquired YouTube, they didn't make it, just like Android. At the time Google had Google Video which was terrible in comparison, and although Google was already the most used general purpose search engine, YouTube was so much better that it had already become the standard for publishing and/or searching videos.
    - nostrademons 3y ago
      They also acquired Android, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and many of the precursors of Maps & Ads. There's value in scale. The YouTube founders themselves said they couldn't have grown YouTube without help from Google infrastructure and other business functions. In the mid-00s people were just figuring out how to run an Internet business with billions of daily users; this is a service now externalized through Cloud providers (including Google), but back then "not falling over when you got Slashdotted" was a key competency that Google had but many of the thousands of other Internet startups did not.
  - chpatrick 3y ago
    YouTube made $8 billion in ad revenue in Q3 2023, that's more than 10%: https://www.shacknews.com/article/137516/google-googl-q3-2023-youtube-ad-revenue https://www.shacknews.com/article/137516/google-googl-q3-202...
  - EasyMark 3y ago
    With all these other video services adding frequent commercial breaks, consuming youtube premium is looking better every day. I absolutely hate-hate-hate commercials while I'm engrossed in a movie, may as well just watch short content on youtube premium.
- wyclif 3y ago
  I felt like Wave had potential, but they killed it too soon.
- _bohm 3y ago
  GCP started turning a profit last year.
- fancyfredbot 3y ago
  "Apart from all the many succesful products, everything they did was a failure" is an empty statement which can be applied to any company. So yes, you can say that about Alphabet. You can also mention that they have a market cap of $1.8 trillion and are the fourth most valuable company in the world.
  - bluetomcat 3y ago
    Their successful products are vertically-integrated to provide a walled "convenient" experience to users. You use an Android smartphone to open their browser, searching for stuff and viewing ads, using Maps to find the location of businesses appearing in the ads. The rest of their contributions are welcome side-effects that have enabled running that software and hardware infrastructure.
    - Apocryphon 3y ago
      Amazon, Apple, Meta, heck Microsoft and IBM in their heydays all do this. All of tech does this.
      - EasyMark 3y ago
        Meta doesn't really belong in there, not much vertical integration there, it's very horizontal with instagram, whatsapp, facebook, threads (lol!) serving similar and sometimes overlapping audiences. They don't really provide a service beyond social media (unless you count the OSS / free software they release for devs)
    - parthdesai 3y ago
      > Their successful products are vertically-integrated to provide a walled "convenient" experience to users Isn't that a selling point of Apple ecosystem as well? Everything just works
herval 3y ago
> Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today It also was allegedly a "special" place, where you had autonomy as an engineer, yada yada. From what I hear about openai, that doesn't really apply there. Are there any small-but-large-ish companies (100-1k employees) out there today that have a culture similar to the early google?
- rezonant 3y ago
  We should all endeavor to emulate it if we can.
  - herval 3y ago
    Rule number one: never emulate anything google does
- fnikacevic 3y ago
  The perception of autonomy at Google was somewhat marketing. In reality the company was extremely rigorous and top down. They used the perception to hire the creative genius types they wanted. Eric Schmidt (Former CEO of Google) discusses it here: https://youtu.be/hcRxFRgNpns?t=2154 https://youtu.be/hcRxFRgNpns?t=2154
gumballindie 3y ago
> Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today (maybe OpenAI). Outside the bubble of openai workers, openai is not seen as a particularily great place to be at. Even here on HN that company is increasingly dreaded. Their CEO promotes theft and the workers cheer. If anything, openai is the very opposite of what google was.
- rm_-rf_slash 3y ago
  Google never stole? That’s a memory hole if I’ve ever seen one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Googl....
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Openai's entire business model and product offerings are based on theft. Google's no saint, but the scale and scope are rather different. Furthermore, openai's shills spamming forums to defend the practice is unseen in intensity.
    - ecshafer 3y ago
      Training models is fair use, and i think the courts will agree with that. Saying its based on theft is not so cut and dry as youre making it out.
      - gumballindie 3y ago
        Those would have to be some rather corrupt courts to agree to such theft. What's next? Agreeing that if you are out on the street it's fair game to be robbed?
        nkohari 3y ago
        Your definition of theft doesn't necessarily match the legal definition. It still remains to be seen whether training foundation models is fair use or not, and it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
mattgreenrocks 3y ago
It still happens. Dev culture today is way more steeped in external status indicators than it used to be. It’s just naïveté and a need for some sort of hierarchy for engineering competence. Actually assessing it is hard and costly, so it gets outsourced. Everyone seems to conveniently ignore regression to the mean when it comes to the lionized companies because that would break their mental model, and potentially their end goal.

bluetomcat 3y ago

> I don't mean to say it was a waste of talent, because clearly some of these things were a huge success. Nothing apart from search, ads, maps, Gmail, Chrome and Android was a huge success. They essentially created their own monocultural ecosystem. Most of everything else was a short-lived fad. Plus, Wave, Reader, Chat and Glass, to mention a few.

AlexCoventry 3y ago
The AI research wasn't a commercial success, but it did have a huge impact.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Yep, the parent comment is the part of the iceberg "above the surface", but there is also a bunch of influential stuff "below the surface", like their AI research, and things like colossus, borg, bigtable, mapreduce, and a few others.
  - _bohm 3y ago
    Would add: Go and protobuf/gRPC
baud147258 3y ago
I'd add Youtube as a huge success, even if I don't think if ever brought in much money
- squarefoot 3y ago
  Google acquired YouTube, they didn't make it, just like Android. At the time Google had Google Video which was terrible in comparison, and although Google was already the most used general purpose search engine, YouTube was so much better that it had already become the standard for publishing and/or searching videos.
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    They also acquired Android, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and many of the precursors of Maps & Ads. There's value in scale. The YouTube founders themselves said they couldn't have grown YouTube without help from Google infrastructure and other business functions. In the mid-00s people were just figuring out how to run an Internet business with billions of daily users; this is a service now externalized through Cloud providers (including Google), but back then "not falling over when you got Slashdotted" was a key competency that Google had but many of the thousands of other Internet startups did not.
- chpatrick 3y ago
  YouTube made $8 billion in ad revenue in Q3 2023, that's more than 10%: https://www.shacknews.com/article/137516/google-googl-q3-2023-youtube-ad-revenue https://www.shacknews.com/article/137516/google-googl-q3-202...
- EasyMark 3y ago
  With all these other video services adding frequent commercial breaks, consuming youtube premium is looking better every day. I absolutely hate-hate-hate commercials while I'm engrossed in a movie, may as well just watch short content on youtube premium.
wyclif 3y ago
I felt like Wave had potential, but they killed it too soon.
_bohm 3y ago
GCP started turning a profit last year.
fancyfredbot 3y ago
"Apart from all the many succesful products, everything they did was a failure" is an empty statement which can be applied to any company. So yes, you can say that about Alphabet. You can also mention that they have a market cap of $1.8 trillion and are the fourth most valuable company in the world.
- bluetomcat 3y ago
  Their successful products are vertically-integrated to provide a walled "convenient" experience to users. You use an Android smartphone to open their browser, searching for stuff and viewing ads, using Maps to find the location of businesses appearing in the ads. The rest of their contributions are welcome side-effects that have enabled running that software and hardware infrastructure.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    Amazon, Apple, Meta, heck Microsoft and IBM in their heydays all do this. All of tech does this.
    - EasyMark 3y ago
      Meta doesn't really belong in there, not much vertical integration there, it's very horizontal with instagram, whatsapp, facebook, threads (lol!) serving similar and sometimes overlapping audiences. They don't really provide a service beyond social media (unless you count the OSS / free software they release for devs)
  - parthdesai 3y ago
    > Their successful products are vertically-integrated to provide a walled "convenient" experience to users Isn't that a selling point of Apple ecosystem as well? Everything just works

herval 3y ago

> Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today It also was allegedly a "special" place, where you had autonomy as an engineer, yada yada. From what I hear about openai, that doesn't really apply there. Are there any small-but-large-ish companies (100-1k employees) out there today that have a culture similar to the early google?

rezonant 3y ago
We should all endeavor to emulate it if we can.
- herval 3y ago
  Rule number one: never emulate anything google does
fnikacevic 3y ago
The perception of autonomy at Google was somewhat marketing. In reality the company was extremely rigorous and top down. They used the perception to hire the creative genius types they wanted. Eric Schmidt (Former CEO of Google) discusses it here: https://youtu.be/hcRxFRgNpns?t=2154 https://youtu.be/hcRxFRgNpns?t=2154

gumballindie 3y ago

> Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today (maybe OpenAI). Outside the bubble of openai workers, openai is not seen as a particularily great place to be at. Even here on HN that company is increasingly dreaded. Their CEO promotes theft and the workers cheer. If anything, openai is the very opposite of what google was.

rm_-rf_slash 3y ago
Google never stole? That’s a memory hole if I’ve ever seen one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Googl....
- gumballindie 3y ago
  Openai's entire business model and product offerings are based on theft. Google's no saint, but the scale and scope are rather different. Furthermore, openai's shills spamming forums to defend the practice is unseen in intensity.
  - ecshafer 3y ago
    Training models is fair use, and i think the courts will agree with that. Saying its based on theft is not so cut and dry as youre making it out.
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      Those would have to be some rather corrupt courts to agree to such theft. What's next? Agreeing that if you are out on the street it's fair game to be robbed?
      - nkohari 3y ago
        Your definition of theft doesn't necessarily match the legal definition. It still remains to be seen whether training foundation models is fair use or not, and it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

mattgreenrocks 3y ago

It still happens. Dev culture today is way more steeped in external status indicators than it used to be. It’s just naïveté and a need for some sort of hierarchy for engineering competence. Actually assessing it is hard and costly, so it gets outsourced. Everyone seems to conveniently ignore regression to the mean when it comes to the lionized companies because that would break their mental model, and potentially their end goal.