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> 1) Big piles of money 2) Enough of a moat that there's no immediate threat from competition You just described google 10 years ago. And I would argue they ha

> 1) Big piles of money 2) Enough of a moat that there's no immediate threat from competition You just described google 10 years ago. And I would argue they have been on a downhill slop ever since. So I think its something else, perhaps great leadership at the right time. Google certianly had the talent, but pichai has been an awful steward.

runevault 2y ago
Even when you create the conditions there's always some luck factor. Whether it is leadership with the right vision or the right people in other key roles to create innovation. But I feel like the 2 points above are sort of the starting point that makes it possible for the other things to matter (or more likely, flukes can occur).
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
Part of the problem, I think, is that Google's relentless focus on information is just never to end up being as sexy as the stuff Bell Labs worked on over the years.
randomdata 2y ago
> So I think its something else The government allowed Bell to maintain its monopoly position with the understanding that Bell Labs would work for the public good. In other words, Bell was unable to capitalize on what Bell Labs created. Bell Labs, in hindsight, is so significant because everyone else was able to take their research and do something with it. Google has given us things here and there (the LLM craze stems from papers published by Google), but it seems most of the research they are doing stays within Google. For example, I expect you will struggle to find what you need to start a self-driving car company based on Waymo’s work. > Google certianly had the talent Including Bell Labs alumni. They used their time to create Go. If that isn't game changing, perhaps Bell Labs was also a product of its time?
- emchammer 2y ago
  It seems like there was something special about the innovation derived from collective spirit during that time, the 1940-1960s. Post-depression and -war momentum combined with major scientific and technology milestones that had to be passed, with a dynamic caused by an unprecedented global situation.
  - randomdata 2y ago
    What was most special is that it was new, few were doing it, and so any achievements stood out and were able to make a splash. Nowadays you can't even step outside in a rural area and not bump into someone who is trying to make their mark. We now see more achievements made each year than Bell Labs achieved in its entire history, but because of that there is no novelty factor anymore. It is now just the status quo, which doesn't appeal to the human thirst for something new. Mind-blowing discoveries made today are met with "meh" as a result. It's kind of like a long-term relationship. In the beginning feelings are heightened and everything feels amazing, but as the relationship bonds start to grow those feelings start to subdue back down to normal levels. Without halting innovation for a time (perhaps a long time), to the point that we start to forget, I'm not sure there is any way to bring back the warm fuzzies.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    Some major drivers of innovation for that time period: A lot of people were very recently very upskilled on the government's dime. A shitload of Navy personnel had just been trained on things like electrical engineering to better understand the radios and radars they were operating, and others were taught how computers worked and accidentally turned into early software developers. Labor was in short supply so companies had to provide significant benefits and eventually pay to make their business work. Low level labor making more money directly enriches a majority of Americans at the time, and a rich base like that has more resources to devote to buying goods but also investigating WHICH goods are worth it, ie making market competition actually work instead of just being about who has the lowest sticker price, which is a direct result of modern americans being dirt fucking poor in money, time, attention, resources, etc. A shortage of labor and therefore increase in the wealth of the everyman may have also contributed to the renaissance. The US was still PUMPING money into basic sciences and basic technology research. This is especially useful for materials science which feeds a lot of engineering. So many people had been recently put into such high positions that there wasn't as much of a "Management class", workers were managing workers. People could focus on doing things instead of office politics, ass covering, and pretending to look busy to people who have no freaking clue what they are managing. Germany lost IP protections for many things. This results in a fertile ground for innovation, because everyone can freely make a widget that matches the now invalid german patent X, so there is high compatibility in widgets, while also being high incentive to improve your version of Widget X in some way so you can patent that improvement, meaning there's a lot of exploration going on in the solution space. Patents explicitly freeze investment into large solution spaces, especially with how vague modern patents are, how incompetent and undertrained/understaffed the patent office is, and how hard it is to get a court to invalidate bullshit patents. Basically all those things businesses insist are bad made the world better for consumers, and more importantly, people. State investment into the population paid huge dividends. Who could have guessed.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Go is basically Limbo, with a bit of Oberon-2 sprinkled on top. They got more lucky with Go than with either Limbo or Oberon-2, thanks to Google moat, Docker pivoting from Python to Go, Kubernetes pivoting from Java to Go, both projects hiting gold with devops community. Google itself keeps being a Java and C++ shop for most purposes outside Kubernetes.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - randomdata 2y ago
    Google not using Go keeps with the Bell tradition of not using Bell Labs work, I suppose, but otherwise how does that relate?
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Bell Labs did use UNIX, C and C++, otherwise we would be luckly using safer environments.
      - randomdata 2y ago
        It doesn't seem that they ever really used Plan 9, though. Are you trying to imply that Bell Labs was just few trick pony, or what? I'm still not clear on what connection your story about Go/Limbo/Oberon-2 has to the topic at hand. It seems you forgot to include the conclusion?
        pjmlp 2y ago
        The Plan 9 guys are UNIX guys. Punchline is without Google's moat, Go would have gone the way of Plan 9 and Inferno.
        randomdata 2y ago
        > The Plan 9 guys are UNIX guys. Who are also the Go guys, but we already know that as it was already talked about much earlier in the thread. If you have some reason to return to that discussion, let it be known that you have not made yourself clear as to why. > Punchline is without Google's moat, Go would have gone the way of Plan 9 and Inferno. And that relates to the topic at hand, how? I am happy to wait. No need to rush your comments. You can get back to us when your conclusion that connects this all back to what is being talked about is fully written.
shiroiushi 2y ago
>You just described google 10 years ago. And I would argue they have been on a downhill slop ever since. Don't forget Microsoft ever since the early 90s or so. And I would argue they haven't produced much usable stuff in the research realm at all. So I think it's more than just #1 and #2. There's also a #3: a national culture where doing great things is seen as more important than simply maximizing shareholder returns. The US had that many decades ago when it sent people to the Moon, but it lost it sometime after the 1980s.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ryandrake 2y ago
  I'd love to see an alternate timeline where one of these giant companies took their trillions of dollars and said "You know what, fuck you, shareholders! We're going to be pure research now! We're going to turn our offices back into a college-campus-like playhouse of innovation! We're going to hire the best and brightest again and give them amazing things to work on rather than improving click-rates by 0.1%! We're going to do only moonshots! We're not going to maximize shareholder value!" The stock price would go to $0.01 but it would be a paradise for researchers and developers. It would be such a breath of fresh air from all of the dollar-maximizer companies that we seem to be stuck with now.
  - randomdata 2y ago
    > I'd love to see an alternate timeline where one of these giant companies took their trillions of dollars and said "You know what, fuck you, shareholders! We're going to be pure research now! If this alternate timeline where giant companies are autonomous creatures were to be, why would there be shareholders?
    - throwaway14356 2y ago
      why would they even be companies? Not sure if true but i read a funny: bezos entire fortune could keep the pentagon afloat for 2 whole weeks.
galdosdi 2y ago
And they did innovate in those days, eg, Gmail and purchase and integrate very innovative things like Writely (Docs), Grand Central (Voice). At some point they got the idea that because they made so much money, new innovations could not be valuable if the profits would likely be insignificant compared to the existing oil gusher.... which is stupid, because nothing is ever gonna look that good early on, so they took on the persona of a flaky ADD schemer -- like Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld -- always scheming with some new idea, but never with the perseverance to stick with it for more than 25 minutes before moving on to something else -- because what can possibly ever compete with ads? Google actually tried to be a "fuck you investors, we're gonna do research" company with the supershares, but they screwed up: A big mistake they made, which then got replicated throughout the industry, was issuing stock to employees. It meant that even though Larry and Sergey had supershares and no shareholders could countermand their beliefs, the employees (especially middle managers) could, by changing their work decisions to try to boost the stock, thus inoculating the company indelibly with the wall street short term thinking disease that the supershares were supposed to have prevented. It was pathetic how interested in the share price the average L4 Google employee was when I was there in the mid-teens, at least around the quarterly vest date. Whoops. Should have listened to Buffet-- never give out stock. Give performance bonuses, but never stock. You cannot depend on a large mass of people like that to stick to a higher purpose and not get tempted by the money.
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  We individual employees had little control over stock and I don't remember anybody being particularly delighted when Patrick left and Ruth took over, despite the stock going up up up. I don't think our GSUs were influencing work decisions on aggregate. What was influencing decisions was just the same as always: ad revenue. I think people who worked outside of ads at Google probably didn't get the sense of it. I came into Google as part of a competition crushing, monopoly focused acquisition, so I started off cynical. I could see right away what Google was, just a money printing machine with everything else they did a way to flush some of the excess gravy away. And because of that it all lacked purpose or real motivation. And into that void just crept more and more careerism and empire building. Agree about the ADD thing, but I think it's more a product of Perf economy than stock price. I lasted there 10 years for lack of anything else worthwhile to go to in my geo-region, and because the money was too good to pass up. But what a weird, weird, weird place. Wandering around the MTV campus was like being in a real life Elysium (movie) or something. I could never figure out what all those people were doing between free meals. I felt guilty taking the money, the whole time.
throwaway14356 2y ago
they did this ten to a billionth thing where everyone got to submit ideas. They hired an army to look at it all before it went into the incinerator. Im kinda curious what machine learning or llms could make from such a dataset. If enough people proposed something similar funding shouldn't be an issue. perhaps there is even an apples vs oranges metric for quality to be had.
BurningFrog 2y ago
Google did launch a "moonshot factory", it just never really struck gold, with the possible exception of Waymo. https://x.company/ https://x.company/
- fragmede 2y ago
  Kubernetes seems to have gotten quite a bit of traction. I hear good things about transformers these days too. a lot of people I know use chrome
stockboss 2y ago
what would be your argument for saying Google has been on a downhill slope ever since?
refurb 2y ago
I was just going to say “Google 10 years ago” I’ve also seen it with biotech companies like Genentech. They are making money hand over fist, more and more each year, so they can try for moonshots and give researchers a lot more leeway to do things their way. But once the money dried up, it was mostly gone. Got bills to pay and need to show returns on R&D in the near term.

runevault 2y ago

Even when you create the conditions there's always some luck factor. Whether it is leadership with the right vision or the right people in other key roles to create innovation. But I feel like the 2 points above are sort of the starting point that makes it possible for the other things to matter (or more likely, flukes can occur).

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago

Part of the problem, I think, is that Google's relentless focus on information is just never to end up being as sexy as the stuff Bell Labs worked on over the years.

randomdata 2y ago

> So I think its something else The government allowed Bell to maintain its monopoly position with the understanding that Bell Labs would work for the public good. In other words, Bell was unable to capitalize on what Bell Labs created. Bell Labs, in hindsight, is so significant because everyone else was able to take their research and do something with it. Google has given us things here and there (the LLM craze stems from papers published by Google), but it seems most of the research they are doing stays within Google. For example, I expect you will struggle to find what you need to start a self-driving car company based on Waymo’s work. > Google certianly had the talent Including Bell Labs alumni. They used their time to create Go. If that isn't game changing, perhaps Bell Labs was also a product of its time?

emchammer 2y ago
It seems like there was something special about the innovation derived from collective spirit during that time, the 1940-1960s. Post-depression and -war momentum combined with major scientific and technology milestones that had to be passed, with a dynamic caused by an unprecedented global situation.
- randomdata 2y ago
  What was most special is that it was new, few were doing it, and so any achievements stood out and were able to make a splash. Nowadays you can't even step outside in a rural area and not bump into someone who is trying to make their mark. We now see more achievements made each year than Bell Labs achieved in its entire history, but because of that there is no novelty factor anymore. It is now just the status quo, which doesn't appeal to the human thirst for something new. Mind-blowing discoveries made today are met with "meh" as a result. It's kind of like a long-term relationship. In the beginning feelings are heightened and everything feels amazing, but as the relationship bonds start to grow those feelings start to subdue back down to normal levels. Without halting innovation for a time (perhaps a long time), to the point that we start to forget, I'm not sure there is any way to bring back the warm fuzzies.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  Some major drivers of innovation for that time period: A lot of people were very recently very upskilled on the government's dime. A shitload of Navy personnel had just been trained on things like electrical engineering to better understand the radios and radars they were operating, and others were taught how computers worked and accidentally turned into early software developers. Labor was in short supply so companies had to provide significant benefits and eventually pay to make their business work. Low level labor making more money directly enriches a majority of Americans at the time, and a rich base like that has more resources to devote to buying goods but also investigating WHICH goods are worth it, ie making market competition actually work instead of just being about who has the lowest sticker price, which is a direct result of modern americans being dirt fucking poor in money, time, attention, resources, etc. A shortage of labor and therefore increase in the wealth of the everyman may have also contributed to the renaissance. The US was still PUMPING money into basic sciences and basic technology research. This is especially useful for materials science which feeds a lot of engineering. So many people had been recently put into such high positions that there wasn't as much of a "Management class", workers were managing workers. People could focus on doing things instead of office politics, ass covering, and pretending to look busy to people who have no freaking clue what they are managing. Germany lost IP protections for many things. This results in a fertile ground for innovation, because everyone can freely make a widget that matches the now invalid german patent X, so there is high compatibility in widgets, while also being high incentive to improve your version of Widget X in some way so you can patent that improvement, meaning there's a lot of exploration going on in the solution space. Patents explicitly freeze investment into large solution spaces, especially with how vague modern patents are, how incompetent and undertrained/understaffed the patent office is, and how hard it is to get a court to invalidate bullshit patents. Basically all those things businesses insist are bad made the world better for consumers, and more importantly, people. State investment into the population paid huge dividends. Who could have guessed.
pjmlp 2y ago
Go is basically Limbo, with a bit of Oberon-2 sprinkled on top. They got more lucky with Go than with either Limbo or Oberon-2, thanks to Google moat, Docker pivoting from Python to Go, Kubernetes pivoting from Java to Go, both projects hiting gold with devops community. Google itself keeps being a Java and C++ shop for most purposes outside Kubernetes.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- randomdata 2y ago
  Google not using Go keeps with the Bell tradition of not using Bell Labs work, I suppose, but otherwise how does that relate?
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Bell Labs did use UNIX, C and C++, otherwise we would be luckly using safer environments.
    - randomdata 2y ago
      It doesn't seem that they ever really used Plan 9, though. Are you trying to imply that Bell Labs was just few trick pony, or what? I'm still not clear on what connection your story about Go/Limbo/Oberon-2 has to the topic at hand. It seems you forgot to include the conclusion?
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        The Plan 9 guys are UNIX guys. Punchline is without Google's moat, Go would have gone the way of Plan 9 and Inferno.
        randomdata 2y ago
        > The Plan 9 guys are UNIX guys. Who are also the Go guys, but we already know that as it was already talked about much earlier in the thread. If you have some reason to return to that discussion, let it be known that you have not made yourself clear as to why. > Punchline is without Google's moat, Go would have gone the way of Plan 9 and Inferno. And that relates to the topic at hand, how? I am happy to wait. No need to rush your comments. You can get back to us when your conclusion that connects this all back to what is being talked about is fully written.

shiroiushi 2y ago

>You just described google 10 years ago. And I would argue they have been on a downhill slop ever since. Don't forget Microsoft ever since the early 90s or so. And I would argue they haven't produced much usable stuff in the research realm at all. So I think it's more than just #1 and #2. There's also a #3: a national culture where doing great things is seen as more important than simply maximizing shareholder returns. The US had that many decades ago when it sent people to the Moon, but it lost it sometime after the 1980s.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ryandrake 2y ago
I'd love to see an alternate timeline where one of these giant companies took their trillions of dollars and said "You know what, fuck you, shareholders! We're going to be pure research now! We're going to turn our offices back into a college-campus-like playhouse of innovation! We're going to hire the best and brightest again and give them amazing things to work on rather than improving click-rates by 0.1%! We're going to do only moonshots! We're not going to maximize shareholder value!" The stock price would go to $0.01 but it would be a paradise for researchers and developers. It would be such a breath of fresh air from all of the dollar-maximizer companies that we seem to be stuck with now.
- randomdata 2y ago
  > I'd love to see an alternate timeline where one of these giant companies took their trillions of dollars and said "You know what, fuck you, shareholders! We're going to be pure research now! If this alternate timeline where giant companies are autonomous creatures were to be, why would there be shareholders?
  - throwaway14356 2y ago
    why would they even be companies? Not sure if true but i read a funny: bezos entire fortune could keep the pentagon afloat for 2 whole weeks.

galdosdi 2y ago

And they did innovate in those days, eg, Gmail and purchase and integrate very innovative things like Writely (Docs), Grand Central (Voice). At some point they got the idea that because they made so much money, new innovations could not be valuable if the profits would likely be insignificant compared to the existing oil gusher.... which is stupid, because nothing is ever gonna look that good early on, so they took on the persona of a flaky ADD schemer -- like Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld -- always scheming with some new idea, but never with the perseverance to stick with it for more than 25 minutes before moving on to something else -- because what can possibly ever compete with ads? Google actually tried to be a "fuck you investors, we're gonna do research" company with the supershares, but they screwed up: A big mistake they made, which then got replicated throughout the industry, was issuing stock to employees. It meant that even though Larry and Sergey had supershares and no shareholders could countermand their beliefs, the employees (especially middle managers) could, by changing their work decisions to try to boost the stock, thus inoculating the company indelibly with the wall street short term thinking disease that the supershares were supposed to have prevented. It was pathetic how interested in the share price the average L4 Google employee was when I was there in the mid-teens, at least around the quarterly vest date. Whoops. Should have listened to Buffet-- never give out stock. Give performance bonuses, but never stock. You cannot depend on a large mass of people like that to stick to a higher purpose and not get tempted by the money.

cmrdporcupine 2y ago
We individual employees had little control over stock and I don't remember anybody being particularly delighted when Patrick left and Ruth took over, despite the stock going up up up. I don't think our GSUs were influencing work decisions on aggregate. What was influencing decisions was just the same as always: ad revenue. I think people who worked outside of ads at Google probably didn't get the sense of it. I came into Google as part of a competition crushing, monopoly focused acquisition, so I started off cynical. I could see right away what Google was, just a money printing machine with everything else they did a way to flush some of the excess gravy away. And because of that it all lacked purpose or real motivation. And into that void just crept more and more careerism and empire building. Agree about the ADD thing, but I think it's more a product of Perf economy than stock price. I lasted there 10 years for lack of anything else worthwhile to go to in my geo-region, and because the money was too good to pass up. But what a weird, weird, weird place. Wandering around the MTV campus was like being in a real life Elysium (movie) or something. I could never figure out what all those people were doing between free meals. I felt guilty taking the money, the whole time.

throwaway14356 2y ago

they did this ten to a billionth thing where everyone got to submit ideas. They hired an army to look at it all before it went into the incinerator. Im kinda curious what machine learning or llms could make from such a dataset. If enough people proposed something similar funding shouldn't be an issue. perhaps there is even an apples vs oranges metric for quality to be had.

BurningFrog 2y ago

Google did launch a "moonshot factory", it just never really struck gold, with the possible exception of Waymo. https://x.company/ https://x.company/

fragmede 2y ago
Kubernetes seems to have gotten quite a bit of traction. I hear good things about transformers these days too. a lot of people I know use chrome

stockboss 2y ago

what would be your argument for saying Google has been on a downhill slope ever since?

refurb 2y ago

I was just going to say “Google 10 years ago” I’ve also seen it with biotech companies like Genentech. They are making money hand over fist, more and more each year, so they can try for moonshots and give researchers a lot more leeway to do things their way. But once the money dried up, it was mostly gone. Got bills to pay and need to show returns on R&D in the near term.