5 ms·

This culture was, imo, directly responsible for google's failure to launch a facebook competitor early enough for it to matter. The Orkut project was basically

by emtel 2y ago

This culture was, imo, directly responsible for google's failure to launch a facebook competitor early enough for it to matter. The Orkut project was basically banned from being launched or marketed as an official google product because it was deemed "not production ready" by SRE. Despite that it gained huge market share in Brazil and a few other countries before eventually losing to FB. By the time their "production ready" product (G+) launched it was hilariously late. Facebook probably would have won anyway, but who knows what might have happened if Google had actually leaned into this very successful project instead of treating it like an unwanted step-child.

mike_hearn 2y ago
How was it banned from being launched? It did launch and the desire to not be promoted as a Google product came from Orkut himself, iirc. The reason it was not regarded as 'production ready' was that the architecture didn't scale. In fact it also didn't run on the regular Google infrastructure that everything else used and that SRE teams were familiar with; it was a .NET app that used MS SQL Server. This design wasn't a big surprise. Facebook won not because Orkut lost but because Facebook were the first to manage gradual scaleup without killing their own adoption, by figuring out naturally isolated social networks they could restrict signup to (American universities). This made their sharding problem much easier. Every other competitor tried to let the whole world sign up simultaneously whilst also offering sophisticated data model features like the ability to make arbitrary friendships and groups, which was hard to implement with the RDBMS tech of the time. Orkut did indeed suffer drastic scaling problems and eventually had to be rewritten on top of the regular Google infrastructure, but that just replaced one set of problems with another.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Of course restricting rollout to American university emails (including alumni addresses--at least at one point) was also a pretty natural consequence of Facebook's origins.
- emtel 2y ago
  The attitude within SRE toward Orkut (the product) was one of disdain if not contempt. A healthy culture does not treat rapidly growing products this way.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    I mean, I'm personal friends with a former Orkut SRE. The idea that Google SRE ignored or disdained Orkut just isn't right. Nonetheless, if your job is defined as "make the site reliable" and it's written in a way that can never be reliable then it's understandable that you're going to have at least some frustrations.
    - emtel 2y ago
      Search SRE were huge dicks about it. I felt bad for the Orkut SREs.

by emtel 2y ago

mike_hearn 2y ago

How was it banned from being launched? It did launch and the desire to not be promoted as a Google product came from Orkut himself, iirc. The reason it was not regarded as 'production ready' was that the architecture didn't scale. In fact it also didn't run on the regular Google infrastructure that everything else used and that SRE teams were familiar with; it was a .NET app that used MS SQL Server. This design wasn't a big surprise. Facebook won not because Orkut lost but because Facebook were the first to manage gradual scaleup without killing their own adoption, by figuring out naturally isolated social networks they could restrict signup to (American universities). This made their sharding problem much easier. Every other competitor tried to let the whole world sign up simultaneously whilst also offering sophisticated data model features like the ability to make arbitrary friendships and groups, which was hard to implement with the RDBMS tech of the time. Orkut did indeed suffer drastic scaling problems and eventually had to be rewritten on top of the regular Google infrastructure, but that just replaced one set of problems with another.

ghaff 2y ago
Of course restricting rollout to American university emails (including alumni addresses--at least at one point) was also a pretty natural consequence of Facebook's origins.
emtel 2y ago
The attitude within SRE toward Orkut (the product) was one of disdain if not contempt. A healthy culture does not treat rapidly growing products this way.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  I mean, I'm personal friends with a former Orkut SRE. The idea that Google SRE ignored or disdained Orkut just isn't right. Nonetheless, if your job is defined as "make the site reliable" and it's written in a way that can never be reliable then it's understandable that you're going to have at least some frustrations.
  - emtel 2y ago
    Search SRE were huge dicks about it. I felt bad for the Orkut SREs.