5 ms·

It's OK. This is the dying, last gasp effort that a company makes when it has no way to innovate, no way to add any real value, no capacity to drive change int

by b112 7mo ago

It's OK. This is the dying, last gasp effort that a company makes when it has no way to innovate, no way to add any real value, no capacity to drive change internally, and has become completely non-user focused. In short, it's what companies like IBM and Broadcom are now. Shallow husks of their former self, mere holding companies for patents, with a complete lack of care and concern about any end-user retention. Google search has turned completely into junk over the last two weeks. You may think "two weeks only?!", and you're right there, but this is a whole new level of stupid. You may not be getting this where you are, but here searches are constantly prepended with human checks, searches can take up to 5+ seconds, you name it. They literally spend so little on maintaining and working on their search engine, that it's effectively unusable much of the time now. I don't care whether it's bot traffic, or what, and no it's not just me, or my ISP. This is wide-scale. It takes so long I just click on an alternate search engine and search there. I don't have time to waste in their inanity. Any sane and sensible company wouldn't entirely trash and destroy their mainline product, which is key to drive users to experience Google products. But this degree of sheer, unbridled arrogance is what topples empires. The thought that it really doesn't matter, flows off of google as a foul stench. Look at Microsoft of old, the god of arrogance. Once the most dominant, powerful tech company in the world. They were king. Browser king. OS king. Everything king. Now they are barely noticed by large swaths of the market. So goes Alphabet these days.

al_borland 7mo ago
The problem is that these companies can remain on life support for decades, phoning it in and making things continuously worse as their desperation grows. If they follow the path of IBM and Broadcom, they will move away from the consumer market and focus more on the enterprise. If Google fully realized that vision it would be extremely disruptive. Them shutting down Google Reader practically killed RSS for quite a while. Imagine that level of disruption with products that have mainstream appeal… mail, maps, docs, search, etc. It would be pandemonium.
- still_grokking 7mo ago
  > mail, maps, docs, search, etc. It would be pandemonium I would hardly notice, TBH. There are alternatives for all of that.
  - account42 7mo ago
    Good for you. That doesn't change that millions of people rely on these daily, including many less technically inclined.
    - gessha 7mo ago
      Real change starts with real pain. People aren’t interested in obsessively checking privacy settings in apps or disabling tracking everywhere and I don’t expect them to. Governments don’t protect them because of gestures widely at status quo. People will realize those services are important and there will be a massive realignment. That’s how I expect things will go.
- phatfish 7mo ago
  Pretty sure this would be the only way the rest of the world (except China) dumps US tech services, so it sounds great.
- minnowguy 7mo ago
  Microsoft is already pivoting away from consumer products.
lobf 7mo ago
>Look at Microsoft of old, the god of arrogance. Once the most dominant, powerful tech company in the world. They were king. Browser king. OS king. Everything king. Now they are barely noticed by large swaths of the market. Have they ever been more valuable than now?
- yehat 7mo ago
  Do you feel they're? As user, not as investor.
  - lobf 7mo ago
    I don't know what feelings have to do with an objective measure like valuation.
- al_borland 7mo ago
  I think it’s more about how they are perceived. They’re making a lot of money somehow, but they have been losing desktop OS marketshare for at least 15 years, they completely missed mobile, Xbox seems to be failing, they completely gave up on the browser and just threw a skin on Chrome. They have O365 in the enterprise, sure, but that was a market they once owned… now they share it with Google Docs and a host of others. They had to shove Linux into Windows just to get developers to stick around. They had the PC gaming market on lockdown, but Valve is coming for them with all their Linux based efforts… we have PewDiePie as an Arch user now. How bad does Microsoft need to screw up to push someone all the way to Arch? All their consumer facing products seem to be trending down. Everyone loves to talk about FAANG… there is no M, why not? One would think Microsoft would belong more in that collection than Netflix, yet here we are. In terms of technology and looking forward, what is Microsoft doing really right? Even their investment in AI seems questionable and they pushed it into their products so hard that everyone hates it. They have GitHub and VS Code, but that was an acquisition and people are always nervous, because they don’t really trust Microsoft based on their track record. Azure is fairly popular, but AWS is still the benchmark everyone talks about. There is their enterprise management software… that helped take Styker completely down last week (maybe not totally Microsoft’s fault and more the admin, but that’s still some really bad press). Did I forget something big?
still_grokking 7mo ago
I'm not sure where you are but at least here Microslop is still ruling more or less everywhere besides the online ad market. They are big in everything that is mass scale developer oriented with things like GitHub, VSCode, or all their libs, tools, and integrations (they "own" in large parts for example Python, TS, and Rust). Governments and public services are all running on Azure. So do a lot of companies; more or less all small and mid sized. They are still dominant in the gaming market, and get stronger there with every year. Microslop was always, and still is the same Microslop. They are very successful with what they do since decades. Whether one likes that or not.
- Scoring6931 7mo ago
  They haven't been dominant in the gaming market for a long time now. Since the beginning of the last generation (Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch), Microsoft has had the worst selling game consoles. And they are getting weaker with every year: the Xbox director was fired just a few weeks ago.
  - account42 7mo ago
    They still control PC gaming. Even Valve has long given up on disrupting DirectX and the Win32 API in general and is just translating whatever APIs Microsoft decides we should have.
    - zbentley 7mo ago
      That only grants market control so long as Microsoft keeps releasing new APIs, otherwise the people reimplementing them like valve/wine will catch up. I think Valve’s play isn’t to steal tons of Microsoft’s gaming market share; their play is to just get enough of a market that game developers are incentivized to code to the APIs that work well in Proton, not whatever the latest and greatest in Windows is. If we cross that inflection point, Microsoft’s PC gaming chokehold will be on life support.
- gzread 7mo ago
  I noticed you didn't mention any consumer products except gaming. That's because they no longer dominate there.
KoolKat23 7mo ago
Sadly I'd say it's the opposite with them winning that antitrust case, none of these big guys give a shit anymore, they're basically slowly easing into doing whatever the hell they want.
bitexploder 7mo ago
This narrative has some critical flaws. Google is not just search or Android and hasn’t been for a while.
torginus 7mo ago
Just to illustrate how bad Google has gotten, I've had the boomer habit of searching for a website name and then clicking the link in Google. In the past 1-2 years I had to stop that, as there's a good chance I will be taken to some ad-sponsored link that has hijacked the search results. For example, if I search 'Claude' the actual link to claude.ai will not even fit on a 1080p screen.
aboardRat4 7mo ago
Alternatives are not that better :( Also Google search degradation is partly due to the web becoming infested with AI slop and most content moving to chat apps, which are walled gardens by default.

by b112 7mo ago

al_borland 7mo ago

The problem is that these companies can remain on life support for decades, phoning it in and making things continuously worse as their desperation grows. If they follow the path of IBM and Broadcom, they will move away from the consumer market and focus more on the enterprise. If Google fully realized that vision it would be extremely disruptive. Them shutting down Google Reader practically killed RSS for quite a while. Imagine that level of disruption with products that have mainstream appeal… mail, maps, docs, search, etc. It would be pandemonium.

still_grokking 7mo ago
> mail, maps, docs, search, etc. It would be pandemonium I would hardly notice, TBH. There are alternatives for all of that.
- account42 7mo ago
  Good for you. That doesn't change that millions of people rely on these daily, including many less technically inclined.
  - gessha 7mo ago
    Real change starts with real pain. People aren’t interested in obsessively checking privacy settings in apps or disabling tracking everywhere and I don’t expect them to. Governments don’t protect them because of gestures widely at status quo. People will realize those services are important and there will be a massive realignment. That’s how I expect things will go.
phatfish 7mo ago
Pretty sure this would be the only way the rest of the world (except China) dumps US tech services, so it sounds great.
minnowguy 7mo ago
Microsoft is already pivoting away from consumer products.

lobf 7mo ago

>Look at Microsoft of old, the god of arrogance. Once the most dominant, powerful tech company in the world. They were king. Browser king. OS king. Everything king. Now they are barely noticed by large swaths of the market. Have they ever been more valuable than now?

yehat 7mo ago
Do you feel they're? As user, not as investor.
- lobf 7mo ago
  I don't know what feelings have to do with an objective measure like valuation.
al_borland 7mo ago
I think it’s more about how they are perceived. They’re making a lot of money somehow, but they have been losing desktop OS marketshare for at least 15 years, they completely missed mobile, Xbox seems to be failing, they completely gave up on the browser and just threw a skin on Chrome. They have O365 in the enterprise, sure, but that was a market they once owned… now they share it with Google Docs and a host of others. They had to shove Linux into Windows just to get developers to stick around. They had the PC gaming market on lockdown, but Valve is coming for them with all their Linux based efforts… we have PewDiePie as an Arch user now. How bad does Microsoft need to screw up to push someone all the way to Arch? All their consumer facing products seem to be trending down. Everyone loves to talk about FAANG… there is no M, why not? One would think Microsoft would belong more in that collection than Netflix, yet here we are. In terms of technology and looking forward, what is Microsoft doing really right? Even their investment in AI seems questionable and they pushed it into their products so hard that everyone hates it. They have GitHub and VS Code, but that was an acquisition and people are always nervous, because they don’t really trust Microsoft based on their track record. Azure is fairly popular, but AWS is still the benchmark everyone talks about. There is their enterprise management software… that helped take Styker completely down last week (maybe not totally Microsoft’s fault and more the admin, but that’s still some really bad press). Did I forget something big?

still_grokking 7mo ago

I'm not sure where you are but at least here Microslop is still ruling more or less everywhere besides the online ad market. They are big in everything that is mass scale developer oriented with things like GitHub, VSCode, or all their libs, tools, and integrations (they "own" in large parts for example Python, TS, and Rust). Governments and public services are all running on Azure. So do a lot of companies; more or less all small and mid sized. They are still dominant in the gaming market, and get stronger there with every year. Microslop was always, and still is the same Microslop. They are very successful with what they do since decades. Whether one likes that or not.

Scoring6931 7mo ago
They haven't been dominant in the gaming market for a long time now. Since the beginning of the last generation (Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch), Microsoft has had the worst selling game consoles. And they are getting weaker with every year: the Xbox director was fired just a few weeks ago.
- account42 7mo ago
  They still control PC gaming. Even Valve has long given up on disrupting DirectX and the Win32 API in general and is just translating whatever APIs Microsoft decides we should have.
  - zbentley 7mo ago
    That only grants market control so long as Microsoft keeps releasing new APIs, otherwise the people reimplementing them like valve/wine will catch up. I think Valve’s play isn’t to steal tons of Microsoft’s gaming market share; their play is to just get enough of a market that game developers are incentivized to code to the APIs that work well in Proton, not whatever the latest and greatest in Windows is. If we cross that inflection point, Microsoft’s PC gaming chokehold will be on life support.
gzread 7mo ago
I noticed you didn't mention any consumer products except gaming. That's because they no longer dominate there.

KoolKat23 7mo ago

Sadly I'd say it's the opposite with them winning that antitrust case, none of these big guys give a shit anymore, they're basically slowly easing into doing whatever the hell they want.

bitexploder 7mo ago

This narrative has some critical flaws. Google is not just search or Android and hasn’t been for a while.

torginus 7mo ago

Just to illustrate how bad Google has gotten, I've had the boomer habit of searching for a website name and then clicking the link in Google. In the past 1-2 years I had to stop that, as there's a good chance I will be taken to some ad-sponsored link that has hijacked the search results. For example, if I search 'Claude' the actual link to claude.ai will not even fit on a 1080p screen.

aboardRat4 7mo ago

Alternatives are not that better :( Also Google search degradation is partly due to the web becoming infested with AI slop and most content moving to chat apps, which are walled gardens by default.