6 ms·

What is definition of dead? 15 years later they have huge majority of traffic share and lots of revenue.

by maxerickson 3y ago

DanielHB 3y ago
Dead in the same sense that IBM was dead in the late 90s, but it is not quite there yet I would say.
sevagh 3y ago
Number of HN complaints per day posted.
ChuckMcM 3y ago
You know how a chess player will say something like "mate in 6" because their experience of all the options left to their opponent are both easily countered and will not prevent them from losing? Companies, and tech companies in my experience, get into death spirals due to a combination of people, culture, and organization. Pulling out of one of those is possible but requires a unique combination of factors and a strong leadership team to pull off. Something that is very hard to put into place when the existing leadership has overriding voting power. You can look at GE, IBM, and to some extent AT&T as companies that have "re-invented" themselves or at least avoided dissolution into an over marketed brand. I have a strong memory of watching a Jacques Cousteau documentary on sharks and learning that Sharks could become mortally wounded but not realize it because of how their nervous system was structured. As a kid I thought that was funny, as an engineer watching companies in the Bay Area die it was more sobering. If you have read the article, I think Gomes was right and saw search as a product, whereas Raghavan saw it as a tool for shoveling ads. A good friend of mine who worked there until 2020 wouldn't tell me why they left, but acknowledged that it was this that finally "ruined" Google. Their cash cow is dying, I know from running a search engine what sort of revenue you can get from being "just one of the search engine choices" versus the 800lb gorilla. Advertisers are disillusioned, and structurally their company requires growth to support the stock price which supports their salary offerings. There is a nice supportable business for about 5,000 - 8,000 people there, but getting there from where they are? My best guess at the moment is that when they die, "for reals" as they say, their other bets will either be spun off or folded, their search team will get bought by Apple with enough infrastructure to run it, Amazon or someone else buys a bunch of data centers, and one of the media companies buys the youtube assets.
- bane 3y ago
  With Google, I always feel like the side hustles (waymo, X, etc.) Really exist to be sold off in the future to prop up the add/search business and ensure future profitability. Everything not adds/search is on that list, and anything shut down despite being useful isn't seen as future-sellable. Google today is starting to smell of future financial engineering games, like when a car maker earns more through financing than selling core product.
- eitally 3y ago
  fwiw, there are approximately 25,000 FTEs reporting up to Thomas Kurian, and I'm not sure how many thousands of TVCs. That's just for Cloud, and doesn't include the massive numbers of additional, relevant employees directly support Cloud from within TI. Part of Google's problem is that it's so big and so broad, and has always insisted on a monorepo for internal source code, and it's outsourced to vendors as much as possible, that it's nearly impossible to disentangle any one business unit from the next. I predict that if the FTC or the EU seriously try to break up the company, this will be there argument against it.
- iamthirsty 3y ago
  > You know how a chess player will say something like "mate in 6" because their experience of all the options left to their opponent are both easily countered and will not prevent them from losing? As a chess person, saying "Mate in _" means it's a calculated inevitability. There is no mathematical way out of it. It is not nearly equivalent to the outside judgement of a company with so many factors — it's just incomparable.
  - narag 3y ago
    Yes, but there are other positions that do fit the comparison, like a couple of advanced passed pawns that can still be defended against with surgical precision, but most times are lethal.
    - iamthirsty 3y ago
      Again, I think there is a misunderstanding of what the saying is used for. In chess, it's specifically used for saying "even with the best defense possible, you will be mated no mater what in a maximum of X moves." Computers use this definition as well. If Stockfish says # in 6, that means there is an indefensible path to mate available, and with the best play of the opponent will take 6 moves. It's not a "Mate in X, probably."
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
Companies this size die several years before the body hits the floor. They're dead when everyone starts to hate them and someone says "no, look how much money they're making, they're fine." That's the fatal blow, because they think they're fine, and keep doing the things that make everyone hate them. At that point you're just waiting for someone else to offer an alternative. Then people prefer the alternative because the incumbent has been screwing them for so long, and even if they change at that point, it's too late because nobody likes or trusts them anymore, and ships that big can't turn on a dime anyway. You have to address the rot when customers start complaining about it, not after they've already switched to a competitor.
- carlossouza 3y ago
  That also sounds a lot like Blockbuster. Google continues generating profits out of inertia and a lack of a better alternative. It went for “don’t be evil” to “a necessary evil” (just until something a little better appears).
  - nothercastle 3y ago
    I think they are just at attain median levels of evil now.
- eproxus 3y ago
  The bigger the behemoth, the slower the fall.
- samch 3y ago
  I know they aren’t the same scale as Google, but what you wrote really describes Atlassian for me.
  - rurp 3y ago
    While I totally agree that Atlassian products are terrible and steadily getting even worse, I'm not sure they are going anywhere anytime soon given their disconnect between users and customers. Most people who have to suffer their products have no say in the purchasing decision, and the company does a somewhat better job of appealing to the relative small group that does. Atlassian could very well have Oracle-like staying power.
bevekspldnw 3y ago
The majority of that revenue comes from violating data protection law and regulators and litigants are slowly racking up a series of wins which will gut ads margins. There is no Plan B, they are just going to break the law until they can’t and there’s zero clue what happens after that. They sat back and let OpenAI kick their ass precisely because ghouls like Prabakar call the shots and LLM are not a good display ads fit. The best parallel for Google is Kodak.

What is definition of dead? 15 years later they have huge majority of traffic share and lots of revenue.

DanielHB 3y ago

Dead in the same sense that IBM was dead in the late 90s, but it is not quite there yet I would say.

sevagh 3y ago

Number of HN complaints per day posted.

ChuckMcM 3y ago

You know how a chess player will say something like "mate in 6" because their experience of all the options left to their opponent are both easily countered and will not prevent them from losing? Companies, and tech companies in my experience, get into death spirals due to a combination of people, culture, and organization. Pulling out of one of those is possible but requires a unique combination of factors and a strong leadership team to pull off. Something that is very hard to put into place when the existing leadership has overriding voting power. You can look at GE, IBM, and to some extent AT&T as companies that have "re-invented" themselves or at least avoided dissolution into an over marketed brand. I have a strong memory of watching a Jacques Cousteau documentary on sharks and learning that Sharks could become mortally wounded but not realize it because of how their nervous system was structured. As a kid I thought that was funny, as an engineer watching companies in the Bay Area die it was more sobering. If you have read the article, I think Gomes was right and saw search as a product, whereas Raghavan saw it as a tool for shoveling ads. A good friend of mine who worked there until 2020 wouldn't tell me why they left, but acknowledged that it was this that finally "ruined" Google. Their cash cow is dying, I know from running a search engine what sort of revenue you can get from being "just one of the search engine choices" versus the 800lb gorilla. Advertisers are disillusioned, and structurally their company requires growth to support the stock price which supports their salary offerings. There is a nice supportable business for about 5,000 - 8,000 people there, but getting there from where they are? My best guess at the moment is that when they die, "for reals" as they say, their other bets will either be spun off or folded, their search team will get bought by Apple with enough infrastructure to run it, Amazon or someone else buys a bunch of data centers, and one of the media companies buys the youtube assets.

bane 3y ago
With Google, I always feel like the side hustles (waymo, X, etc.) Really exist to be sold off in the future to prop up the add/search business and ensure future profitability. Everything not adds/search is on that list, and anything shut down despite being useful isn't seen as future-sellable. Google today is starting to smell of future financial engineering games, like when a car maker earns more through financing than selling core product.
eitally 3y ago
fwiw, there are approximately 25,000 FTEs reporting up to Thomas Kurian, and I'm not sure how many thousands of TVCs. That's just for Cloud, and doesn't include the massive numbers of additional, relevant employees directly support Cloud from within TI. Part of Google's problem is that it's so big and so broad, and has always insisted on a monorepo for internal source code, and it's outsourced to vendors as much as possible, that it's nearly impossible to disentangle any one business unit from the next. I predict that if the FTC or the EU seriously try to break up the company, this will be there argument against it.
iamthirsty 3y ago
> You know how a chess player will say something like "mate in 6" because their experience of all the options left to their opponent are both easily countered and will not prevent them from losing? As a chess person, saying "Mate in _" means it's a calculated inevitability. There is no mathematical way out of it. It is not nearly equivalent to the outside judgement of a company with so many factors — it's just incomparable.
- narag 3y ago
  Yes, but there are other positions that do fit the comparison, like a couple of advanced passed pawns that can still be defended against with surgical precision, but most times are lethal.
  - iamthirsty 3y ago
    Again, I think there is a misunderstanding of what the saying is used for. In chess, it's specifically used for saying "even with the best defense possible, you will be mated no mater what in a maximum of X moves." Computers use this definition as well. If Stockfish says # in 6, that means there is an indefensible path to mate available, and with the best play of the opponent will take 6 moves. It's not a "Mate in X, probably."

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

Companies this size die several years before the body hits the floor. They're dead when everyone starts to hate them and someone says "no, look how much money they're making, they're fine." That's the fatal blow, because they think they're fine, and keep doing the things that make everyone hate them. At that point you're just waiting for someone else to offer an alternative. Then people prefer the alternative because the incumbent has been screwing them for so long, and even if they change at that point, it's too late because nobody likes or trusts them anymore, and ships that big can't turn on a dime anyway. You have to address the rot when customers start complaining about it, not after they've already switched to a competitor.

carlossouza 3y ago
That also sounds a lot like Blockbuster. Google continues generating profits out of inertia and a lack of a better alternative. It went for “don’t be evil” to “a necessary evil” (just until something a little better appears).
- nothercastle 3y ago
  I think they are just at attain median levels of evil now.
eproxus 3y ago
The bigger the behemoth, the slower the fall.
samch 3y ago
I know they aren’t the same scale as Google, but what you wrote really describes Atlassian for me.
- rurp 3y ago
  While I totally agree that Atlassian products are terrible and steadily getting even worse, I'm not sure they are going anywhere anytime soon given their disconnect between users and customers. Most people who have to suffer their products have no say in the purchasing decision, and the company does a somewhat better job of appealing to the relative small group that does. Atlassian could very well have Oracle-like staying power.

bevekspldnw 3y ago

The majority of that revenue comes from violating data protection law and regulators and litigants are slowly racking up a series of wins which will gut ads margins. There is no Plan B, they are just going to break the law until they can’t and there’s zero clue what happens after that. They sat back and let OpenAI kick their ass precisely because ghouls like Prabakar call the shots and LLM are not a good display ads fit. The best parallel for Google is Kodak.