5 ms·

The IBM-ification of Google?

206 points by sabatonfan 5mo ago

somesortofthing 4mo ago
Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. People always talk about how big companies fail because they're unwilling to take risks and just recommit to their areas of strength, but this is what risk-taking looks like - you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't. People who think it's a quality product won't be wary of whether it'll get killed - the quality itself is insurance against that. How many DAUs would stadia or hangouts or even reader have today?
- andrewxdiamond 4mo ago
  I think the complaint about Google specifically is that they seem to do these things and commit to what seem to be whole lines of business without an actual business plan to make it viable. It’s one thing to take risks. It’s another thing to just guess without a plan.
- wrs 4mo ago
  This is not about stickiness. People complain because they liked the dead product. Do you hear complaints about Google+ dying? Reader wasn't a risk, it was a product people loved that wasn't hard to run. It was just too boring to maintain, didn't support the ad monopoly, and Google dropped it for the next shiny monetizable object. Anyway, enterprise products are an entirely different ballgame where product support, and the reliability thereof, is measured in decades. The consumer product attitude is just a bad look, but things like the Railway incident are deal killers.
  - antibios 4mo ago
    Reader was dropped in the run up to G+. I believe there was a strategic decision to try and get people to move to G+ and move both personal news and organisational news together.
    - dekhn 4mo ago
      The leadership was never completely honest about why Reader was shutdown, and the stated reasons didn't pass some basic sniff checks. But it was easy to read between the lines: the executives' attention was on other things, and Reader was a threat to their growth. But also it was a passion project that a company like Google would struggle to keep updating since it brought in little revenue (even though there were hordes of people volunteering to maintain it for free in their 20% time).
      - ghaff 4mo ago
        The decline of RSS among a certain audience was only peripherally related to the elimination of Reader; it's not like there aren't other RSS readers out there even if Google makes a convenient villain. But Google did whiff on social in general and certainly indexing the world's information became a very secondary goal especially after failing with some efforts on the copyright front.
  - blondin 4mo ago
    Google+ couldn't handle spams. Inbox was an excellent execution. one needed the tech that made Gmail, and the other couldn't co-exist with Gmail? we will never truly know.
    - ghaff 4mo ago
      I would have said Knoll was the bigger fail on the spam front. You can't have unmoderated posting generally.
  - ventana 4mo ago
    Well, actually, Google+ circa 2014 was the only social network that had enough of the interesting technical content for me, and I did use it in exactly the way how one would use a decent social network: I posted my content, got comments, and read what other people posted. Some formatting weirdness aside, it was not bad at all, and surely better and quieter, in a good sense, than Facebook back then, and especially than Facebook now. I still have the Takeout archive of my posts, might be a nice time machine experience to parse that huge JSON and read through it. So, yes, I do complain.
    - wrs 4mo ago
      I thought the “circles” idea made total sense and it could have been a good social network, if they had let it do that instead of forcing it into every other part of Google.
- KerryJones 4mo ago
  Most people would argue that Stadia would have many. Many people loved Google Reader. There are numerous examples of things that were great and were killed, because they hadn't monetized enough or "fast enough", and when you are chasing results on a quarterly basis, you can't always get things that will generate tremendous value with more time.
- spicyusername 4mo ago
  I don't disagree with your point. It's interesting to imagine if there's some kind of middle ground where products could be launched without the pretense of them being permanent? I suspect at least some of people's frustration is that X or Y was pitched as something serious, which then grates some when it gets canceled. But maybe you can't launch a product without pretending it's going to be real because it'll be dead on arrival?
  - rkagerer 4mo ago
    ...where products could be launched without the pretense of them being permanent Yeah, it's what Google used to do by releasing everything as "Beta". Gmail was in Beta for 5 years with millions of users.
- cyberax 4mo ago
  Can you name a good new Google product then? I just can't remember anything recent. I can't even remember any good recent _improvements_ to their core products. If anything, recent changes are more like downgrades than upgrades.
  - erwincoumans 4mo ago
    Gemini is pretty good.
    - bigstrat2003 4mo ago
      You're entitled to your opinion, but you're literally the first person I've ever heard say that. Even people who like LLMs seem to think that GPT and Claude are the good ones, with Gemini being B tier at best.
      - amazingamazing 4mo ago
        https://openrouter.ai/rankings https://openrouter.ai/rankings
        cyberax 4mo ago
        Uhh... It's on the 13-th place in rankings. And way behind in most benchmarks?
        kaashif 4mo ago
        #6 in usage by tokens. It obviously has some use case. My experience is that Gemini is much more token efficient than other models. Measuring tokens is like measuring distance travelled by measuring fuel consumption. I mostly use Codex though, I can't be bothered to have more than one subscription.
      - erwincoumans 4mo ago
        Agreed Gemini maybe not the best, but it is still pretty good. And their research was the foundation of others (Attention is all you need paper).
- csallen 4mo ago
  I'm sure that Google internally is well aware of the negative press that comes with product shutdowns, and is doing them regardless as a deliberate strategic tradeoff where they believe the benefits outweigh the costs. But it's very difficult to measure the costs, bc the #1 cost is lost trust, and how do you measure that? Many people simply won't sign up for a Google product bc they don't trust it'll be around long enough to justify the investment. These people don't show up in any metrics that you can reason about, and they're the least likely to take any surveys you might send out. At best, Google can guess what the impact is, and they might be wildly underestimating. I think a different strategic decision they could've made (and still could make!) would be to the do the opposite, and prioritize the benefits of keep projects alive over the costs of ruthlessly sunsetting then. They could say, "You know what, we have considerable resources. When we release something new, we're going to dedicate ourselves to keeping it running indefinitely." They wouldn't have to market them, or advertise them, or connect them to every new part of the evolving Google ecosystem, or make them particularly easy to find, or even keep them open to new signups. But just keeping them running as-is, indefinitely, and having customers tell each other, "It's Google, you can trust it, it's not going away," would be such a great PR win.
  - janalsncm 4mo ago
    It’s not just the price of keeping the servers humming. You have to pay people to maintain the software. So now you’re paying hundreds or thousands of people to maintain zombie software.
    - csallen 4mo ago
      Yeah, there are costs for sure. But this is "zombie software" with millions, probably tens of millions of users. And Google has ~80,000 engineers? And the company prints an incredible amount of money. I think the real cost/risk here is not financial, but strategic, i.e. preventing a loss of focus.
      - bonesss 4mo ago
        The common critique of Googles actions - the organization has profits, therefore there is no problem engaging in less profitable activities — strikes me as superficial. It’s not about investing any given portion of revenues, it’s investing optimally. There are opportunity costs that must be considered in investments (and that means Net Present Value calculations). Google’s revenue and profits are for the shareholders. When revenue is directed back into the business the question simply isn’t if the whole business will make money, it’s if this investment is optimally profitable considering all the alternatives. If a support engineer on Google+ generates $X over 5 years, but that same resource would generate $3X working on Gemini then dictating eternal Google+ support is robbing future Google of revenue. Investments need to be individually justified, but also better than the alternatives to make fiscal sense. Even though that sucks for pleased consumers.
- Aurornis 4mo ago
  > People who think it's a quality product won't be wary of whether it'll get killed - the quality itself is insurance against that. Not true in the slightest. Google has had some quality hardware products where they killed the cloud service and rendered them useless. Products that were stable and working, but Google decided to pull the plug and make the hardware worthless. Quality of the product means nothing. You’re at the mercy of the whims of Google’s decision making. The thing you like may stop working in a couple months.
  - dgoldstein0 4mo ago
    Unfortunately quality and earning money are only loosely correlated - especially for Google when they can pour money into making something good, but baby necessarily figure out how to make it earn. And it also seems if it's not a $100 m+ business they lose interest very quickly. So even good things that could run somewhat cheap of optimized end up with no long term place in the Google ecosystem when they fail to make it big. ... That all said Google kills perfectly good things because they have a few internal rules that encourage it: that there can only be one of a system (dunno if that's applies to product but they seem to always want to consolidate every few years) and that stuff cannot be unowned so reorgs => kill products that don't match the new org structure. That and they incentivize pumping out new products with their promotion process - whether or not they really needed yet another chat/vc/etc product, someone probably figured they could climb the career ladder by shipping another one.
- light_hue_1 4mo ago
  > Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. ... you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't Except that Google kills the products we use! Google Reader had basically the entire community. No one cares when they kill something niche. I don't touch new Google products, they're toxic. And now with AI I can finally stop using their search too. All that will be left is email because it's too much of a commodity.
  - soraminazuki 4mo ago
    If anything, email is the #1 priority for de-googling, lest they slop you with a ban. Losing access to your email is so disruptive that migrating to a more trustworthy provider with custom domain support is worth the time and effort of updating addresses.
- ajross 4mo ago
  > Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints Exactly. I mean, you can argue forever about the stuff that got killed. But you know what didn't get killed? All the stuff they're turning into $4.6T of market cap. In particular, they didn't kill AI. They're the only pre-AI tech giant with a successful frontier LLM, everyone else failed (Meta) or missed the boat (Apple, Microsoft[1]). They're the only tech giant[2] to produce working in-house datacenter AI hardware. Making a lot of bets means that you make a lot of bad bets too. But Google has made a lot of good bets. [1] Though MS got near-exclusive access to OpenAI via a very expensive late investment, which sorta counts. [2] NVIDIA is giant now, they certainly weren't when these bets were being placed.
- zrn900 4mo ago
  > you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't. They killed their chat app. Then had their pants on fire after Discord became the thing. The same can happen with any app they killed. So no, that's not 'taking risks'. Taking risks is shutting down perfectly working apps that can suddenly become 'the new thing'.
- GCA10 4mo ago
  I've come to believe that Big Tech's fondness for launch-and-kill approaches to new products is closely related to the career incentives for both PMs and finance chiefs. Both of them are acting rationally to advance their careers. In tandem, they create a horrifying cycle of death. Product managers win their chops by launching something and winning applause for getting fast adoption in the first few months. Once the boss says "Wow," it's on to a bigger new chance. It's habit-forming to outrun your failures in a system where personal incentives reward ephemeral success. Finance folks win their chops by identifying bits of the company that aren't pulling their (economic) weight. If you haven't delivered $$$ of efficiency savings, why are you even on the payroll? Pulling the plug on small/mid-sized products that have plateaued is the way you get recognition and promotions. CEOs, of course, could change this. But they're the ultimate plate-spinners in a big company, trying to keep up the appearance that they've got everything in control and making sure that neither shareholders nor employees mutiny. As long as they've got a new sizzle story to sell, no one (except users) is there to grieve about what's dying. And users of a product that's less than 1% of revenue can be safely ignored.
rvz 4mo ago
[flagged]
- jeffbee 4mo ago
  This is as solid an argument as the article.
sieabahlpark 4mo ago
[dead]
devjam 4mo ago
While Apple does make nice hardware and appear to be listening to their users in that respect, don't forget that Tahoe has not been particularly well-received.
fumar 4mo ago
Is this AI authored rhetoric?
amazingamazing 4mo ago
I remember these types of posts saying Google is done because they shut down Google Reader. Google's stock was about $60 at the time. I look forward to reading this post and chuckling a few years from now. Doomers really do get more engagement, though. I have some friends in real life who complained about reader, and none of them even use RSS feeds anymore. I mean seriously? The one point I will make though is: these people complaining about Google shutting things down is really just funny. It's like complaining about people having abandoned side projects. A healthy organization tries things. Not everything works out or is cashflow positive. That's life. For reference Google has more employees than all Y Combinator companies combined. Keep in mind there are thousands of dead Y Combinator companies. A better complaint about Google would be the lack of polish on many products. Take Gmail. Google made haste in adding the "AI Inbox", and yet you can't even read threaded emails in reverse chronological order. People have been complaining about this for nearly its entire existence. With the talent, and now AI - there's no reason such a thing couldn't be fixed tomorrow. It's just CSS and there are tons of chrome extensions that implement this. C'mon...
- diob 4mo ago
  Yeah, IBM is nothing like Google, it's a weird comparison.
- majormajor 4mo ago
  I was thinking the other day that it's particularly weird that Gmail is so bereft of features after all this time. It's not that they've left it completely as-is "this is great, there is nothing to do"—but just that the things they have tried have been... kinda uninteresting and quite simple? It's weird to me that with the other AI features they've tried (including suggested responses and such in drafting new emails) there isn't anything, say, to make really good proactive suggestions for like "apply this label to all incoming emails like this." That sort of stagnation, though, and lack of their "trying things" really moving the needle compared to their decades-old ads product, makes me think they really are becoming the new IBM. IBM, in my estimation, has largely been irrelevant to the future of computing since the early 80s when MS ended up owning the PC story, but they have still had some quite solid stock prices runs at times over the decades (10x in five years at the end of the 90s, say). You can make a lot of money with a no-longer-that-interesting business.
hintymad 4mo ago
> YouTube is eating itself from the inside out too One thing that I really really hate Youtube for is that they don't allow users to turn off their shorts. You can choose to "reduce" Shorts for a given session, but they come back right next time. That said, Youtube is tremendously valuable for its high-quality content. It's kinda like a restaurant. The service can be horrible. They decor can be hideous. But! I'm going back as long as the food is delicious.
- sakesun 4mo ago
  You can go to Google Account > Data & Privacy. Then pause Youtube History. There will be no more feed on Youtube home screen. You will only see your /subscriptions feed. Little trick for a more peaceful life.
  - Brian_K_White 4mo ago
    And that subscriptions screen has a row of all shorts across the top, and shorts trun up in searches and side bar related recommendations. This while paying them for premium for 20 years.
- SanjayMehta 4mo ago
  On IOS/macos there's an app called "Unwatched for YouTube" which allows you to subscribe to channels via RSS (no need to login) and then you can turn shorts on/off per channel. It's free for now but the developer has plans for some kind of subscription for premium features. https://apps.apple.com/in/app/unwatched-for-youtube/id6477287463 https://apps.apple.com/in/app/unwatched-for-youtube/id647728...
- kyrra 4mo ago
  There's a new setting rolling out in the YouTube app. Go to settings > time management > shorts feed limit. Turn that setting on, and you can select how many minutes you limit to. There's now an option for "0 minutes".
  - Brian_K_White 4mo ago
Ayushkumar1808 4mo ago
[flagged]
jeffbee 4mo ago
"Everyone hates YouTube" is an argument that has a lot to overcome. All objective indicators suggest it is incredibly popular, and growing in popularity, pretty much across the demographic board.
- crowcroft 4mo ago
  This is pretty common across social media as well, surveyed sentiment towards it often negative while usage is high. I suspect it's because of the addictive quality.
  - jeffbee 4mo ago
    But sentiment toward YouTube isn't negative. It is the most reputable social media in Morning Consult's brand reputation survey. It enjoys a higher reputation score than things like Cheerios and Tylenol. I don't think you can separate the reputation of the platform from the collective impression left by the creators, and people like the creators on YouTube. And, I propose, people largely DGAF about the platform features and presentation.
- CivBase 4mo ago
  I hate it, but I still use it. The platform sucks, but most of the content isn't available anywhere else. Between the infrastructure cost, the difficulty of monetization, and the immense user/create base already invested in the platform, I don't think it's possible for anyone to compete with YouTube without government intervention.
coderenegade 4mo ago
Google is in an incredibly strong position. They're a top tier AI vendor, and in a world where content creation is largely commoditized and outsourced to AI, advertising companies will determine what gets seen, and what gets buried in the noise. They control both generation and visibility of what gets generated. Facebook could be in the same position, but they aren't as strong in AI. OpenAI wants to be Google, but they don't have the advertising reach. Yeah, they aren't perfect or always necessarily the best in a given area, but to compare them to IBM is probably missing the forest for the trees.
- jagged-chisel 4mo ago
  Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Nobody ever got fired for choosing Google. Seems apropos.
  - breppp 4mo ago
    For choosing Google Cloud? When was it ever conventional to choose Google Cloud?
  - bushbaba 4mo ago
    Not really I’d not call Google the safest/most popular choice for AI or Cloud.
- trollbridge 4mo ago
  And at one point, IBM was at the head of the pack with AI. Remember Deep Blue?
  - htrp 4mo ago
    Remember Watson?
  - coderenegade 4mo ago
    IBM got to where it is today by being complacent and not keeping up with innovation. Google is notably at the forefront of innovation, in a driving seat, and that innovation directly stands to benefit one of their core businesses in a way that the market is probably only just beginning to understand. It's an entirely different situation, imo.
KnuthIsGod 4mo ago
All empires eventually decay and die. Wang, Bull, Unisys, IBM, DEC, the Mongolian Empire, the Hungarian Empire, Dutch Empire, the Portugese Empire.... they all exist in some form, but are shadows of their former selves. IBM died because it was forced to hire second raters to fill the ranks. Over time, the company became synonymous with failure and mediocrity.
- add-sub-mul-div 4mo ago
  I honestly think we're in a post-disruption era in that Google/Meta/Twitter/Reddit/etc. can't die. They have too much power and they've captured the entire population now. The internet isn't made up largely of enthusiasts anymore. Mediocrity is the strength of these platforms. The eternal September has made their home and they're not moving again.
  - scared_together 4mo ago
    I think Meta, Twitter and Reddit will lose relevance as younger generations move to different social networks. TikTok has already taken a bite out of the social media market, so has Discord. Out of the four companies listed, Google is the one whose survival I’d bet on.
  - tardedmeme 4mo ago
    People thought that about all the other megacompanies that died too. This current crop is not special. Google has just announced they'll kill search and replace it with AI - think it'll still be strong after that?
- lelanthran 4mo ago
  > IBM died because it was forced to hire second raters to fill the ranks. IBM didn't die :-/
ismepornnahi 4mo ago
Why's this poorly written piece on top of HN?
- trollbridge 4mo ago
  I rather enjoyed it. I also enjoyed reading something that did not give me the immediate impression it was AI generated.
  - linkregister 4mo ago
    "Write a snarky, cynical opinion piece about Google in the style of Lewis Black." The Opus 4.7 output was remarkably similar to the content in this blog.
  - alexgieg 4mo ago
    I noticed it as LLM-written by the middle of the second paragraph. The text is filled with classic rhetorical structures LLMs love making, especially the "it isn't X, it's Y" and "not A, not B, not C, but D" patterns.
    - lemontheme 4mo ago
      It’s the repetitive paragraph structure that raised my suspicions. Sentence. Short sentence. Noun. Noun. Noun. Sentence to reflect. Wrap it up in a bow. Sequences of short incomplete sentences, particularly in threes is such a tell
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- amazingamazing 4mo ago
  hate pieces tend to rank highly. better if it's hating on big co
- jeffbee 4mo ago
  Why is the cat in the catnip again?
raggi 4mo ago
> Look at the Railway GCP account ban situation. A literally billion dollar startup running on Google Cloud and Google just randomly snaps their fingers and deletes their account. Zero warning. No phone number to call. No account rep. Poof. Gone. It is actual insanity to me. A billion dollar customer gets the exact same automated middle finger as a low effort spam bot. Your B2B business is completely cooked if that is how you treat people. The enterprise cloud gravy train is right there and Google is standing on the tracks begging to get hit by the train. If you've been around a while you know that at any business critical scale at all you establish a relationship with your cloud provider and get an account manager. When you do this, you have a number to call. A billion dollar startup not doing this is a keen lesson for the CTO. Yes, Google likely screwed up here, but being unprepared for account problems, having no established relationship with your provider is a critical mistake. The article goes on to talk about Hetzner as an example: their pricing is great for individuals but they literally don't even offer account management relationships - even at scale they actively refuse them. There are equivalent stories of account terminations with Hetzner, which is also a key point: this isn't just a big business problem, at all.
- aurareturn 4mo ago
  I would think that Railway certainly had an account manager, right? Did they say they didn’t have one?
  - MrDarcy 4mo ago
    The article is incorrect and misleading. Railway did have an account manager and they did call them and they did pick up the phone and work with them to restore service.
    - Forgeties79 4mo ago
      An account manager overseeing such a major client should’ve never let this happen. If they don’t, why the hell are they the account manager? What are they even doing to earn their keep? This was such a preventable situation. I once worked at a company that had their domain lapse because of an internal error at the company that was paid for the domain. There was no alert, there was no attempt to rectify the situation, one day we woke up and we simply did not have control of our website for a full week. There was nothing wrong with our payment method, there was no reason the payment shouldn’t have happened, it was completely their fault. They found out because we called them in a panic. This was a major company. We left them a week later and our CEO talks about it constantly as a horror story to other companies and there is no way our situation was unique. It’s not just about the value of the contract. This whole situation has been in the news for days now. It’s terrible PR and I guarantee you it is costing them business in the long run. All I have seen for days is people talking about how poor Google’s support is, and I’m not even somebody who makes those decisions. I get it, “Google is too big to fail.” But eventually, that stops being true
illusive4080 4mo ago
IBM is reinventing itself, no? From mainframe maximalists to purchasing HashiCorp, Red Hat, Confluent. All to capture enterprise for years to come. It seems as if IBM is making a comeback.
- abhiyerra 4mo ago
  If you read their annual report they bet the farm on RedHat and Kubernetes. They spun off their legacy services business and have basically have monopoly power over the Federal government, banks and defense contractors. They have been buying out other Kubernetes vendors such as Kubecost. They are are pretty focused now, we will see how well they will do long term.
sebstefan 4mo ago
>YouTube is eating itself from the inside out too. Everyone hates the demonetization stuff but the low effort AI slop content is what really kills it for me. YouTube got massive because it had real creators. Supply and demand. A real marketplace. But if you keep kicking off the actual suppliers and replacing them with low effort garbage, literally anyone can host that garbage. I don't see slop on youtube and nobody I know is complaining about it. My current problem is private equity buying all the channels I love! Veritasium, Fern!
CSMastermind 4mo ago
If anything I think Microsoft is IBM
light_hue_1 4mo ago
> Eric Schmidt got booed on stage recently. Eric Schmidt! The guy who basically was Google for a decade. When your own alumni get heckled by the crowd your brand isn't just damaged. It's toxic. I was at an MIT event 8 years ago where Eric Schmidt was booed. It was his first summer at MIT. Basically everything he said about Google and his world view left the students feeling horrified. It was so bad people walked out in a daze. So if this is the bar, we passed it long ago.
- rwallace 4mo ago
  I didn't know about that event. What did he say to get booed that time?
Eighth 4mo ago
The technological world is rapidly changing and Google is changing with it. They are in a very strong position, owning the full stack in an industry that is very early and rapidly growing. They won't win all their bets but they have enough coverage for it not to matter. I disagree with the Apple comparison. Apple haven't done anything successfully innovative for what seems like decades. I do admire their stance on AI though. Not going all in makes them unique.
siliconc0w 4mo ago
Google has amazing potential but has consistently squandered it. Gemini CLI being killed/rebranded is yet another example of their complete lack of follow through and persistence. It wasn't a good product - it was slow, buggy, and unreliable but you have to fix it to demonstrate you can do more than launch and then kill products. They have everything going for them - amazing technology and technologists, huge distribution and lock-in, and a giant compute advantage and the can pay for more out of cash flow rather than debt or equity. And yet it's still hard to see them not fumbling the ball.
p1dda 4mo ago
Google is officially the most evil company in the world
throw5 4mo ago
I am sure I am not alone in observing that starting around 2020... may be even a few years earlier... Google seemed to hire a lot of middle managers. I personally knew several managers who did not seem to contribute much beyond "organizing" meetings, and I saw them all join Google one by one. It made me think... what happened to Google's famous hiring standards? What happened to Google's engineering-heavy structure? Google is now filled with middle managers whose only previous experience has been "being scrum masters". Right then I knew that these ineffective managers I saw joining Google were not only the symptoms of Google's decline but would also become one of the causes of speeding up the decline. How could they let this happen? What happened to all their gatekeeping... "we are okay with false negatives in hiring but we'll NOT have false positives"? Current Google hiring is all about hiring loads of true negatives. I think I saw a similar fall in hiring standards for engineering roles too but I will leave it to someone with more data to confirm me or refute me.
0xbadcafebee 4mo ago
Google is the opposite of IBM. IBM would send 10 consultants to coddle you while extracting all your money. Google sends you 10 automated notifications about how your service is about to be changed or terminated and then asks for more money. IBM also made its money off of fat enterprise contracts and vertically integrated products. Google makes its money off of being the monopoly owning most of the advertising industry, which ridiculously is still a thing despite advertising not really working.
- pelasaco 4mo ago
  however my last experiences with IBM was: they send you 10 junior consultants, they get the money, for 10 senior consultants, and still cannot deliver what they promised.
linkregister 4mo ago
This article is nothing more than hyperbole and opinion. Its only worth is to provide confirmation bias. I agree with many points in the article, but there is no informative aspect to the post.
- fsflover 4mo ago
  Your comment lacks any specifics. Can you elaborate?
stingrae 4mo ago
I tried to test an ad in the meta ad platform… and it is insanely terrible. Teams don’t care about B2B software even if it drives the business or there aren’t viable competitors.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
cafkafk 4mo ago
Recommending Hetzner as an alternative here is a mistake. It just exposes you to a different problem. There is a reason for the term "Hetznered" existing. Hetzner can suddenly and permanently terminates your account. They do this without warning or explanation. When it happens, you lose access to all your servers and your backups. If you search HN, you will find plenty of examples. People lose everything within 24 hours and have no recourse. Hetzner is amazing for pricing. But the only safe way to use them is if your infrastructure is cloud agnostic. If you are not locked in and can move between providers quickly, it is a very cost effective place to run stateless services like DNS.
re-thc 4mo ago
The Railway accusation focuses on 1 side of the story. No real details on if Railway did anything and if the suspension was warranted. Google may not be wrong. Who knows. Easy to blame the larger company.
thevivekshukla 4mo ago
> And Search is just completely unusable now. They built an entire empire off our content. Bloggers, old forums, niche sites. We made the web worth searching in the first place. Now their AI Overviews just scrape our exact answers, strip out the hyperlinks, and repackage it in a blue box without linking back. I don't like that they throw AI overview on your face when you search, rather they should show AI overview on the right column and search results on the left.
myst 4mo ago
I hear this every 5 years for the last 15. And IBM is far from irrelevant.
mistic92 4mo ago
Internally people feel like it's becoming IBM. Too many accountants and thinking only about money. Few things changed when AI race started but its still not enough to bring back old Google
coldtea 4mo ago
>YouTube got massive because it had real creators. Supply and demand. A real marketplace. (...) I was a hardcore Android guy because it felt open. Sideloading, choice, freedom. (...) that toxicity doesn't show up on quarterly earnings yet. But it hollows you out from the inside. Word of mouth dies. The cult following evaporates. It's despiriting when even anti enshittification blog posts bear all the style of AI created slop.
pjmlp 4mo ago
> People said IBM was too big to fail. It wasn't. It just became completely irrelevant slowly, then all at once. SV people love to throw out this line, while several of the FOSS packages they use daily in the Linux ecosystem, including the kernel, are sponsored with IBM money, either directly or via Red-Hat. https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributors?timeRange=past365days&start=2025-05-22&end=2026-05-22&widget=organizations-leaderboard https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo...
p1dda 4mo ago
Google is pure evil. The worst cyber-villain in human existance.

206 points by sabatonfan 5mo ago

Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. People always talk about how big companies fail because they're unwilling to take risks and just recommit to their areas of strength, but this is what risk-taking looks like - you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't. People who think it's a quality product won't be wary of whether it'll get killed - the quality itself is insurance against that. How many DAUs would stadia or hangouts or even reader have today?

andrewxdiamond 4mo ago
I think the complaint about Google specifically is that they seem to do these things and commit to what seem to be whole lines of business without an actual business plan to make it viable. It’s one thing to take risks. It’s another thing to just guess without a plan.
wrs 4mo ago
This is not about stickiness. People complain because they liked the dead product. Do you hear complaints about Google+ dying? Reader wasn't a risk, it was a product people loved that wasn't hard to run. It was just too boring to maintain, didn't support the ad monopoly, and Google dropped it for the next shiny monetizable object. Anyway, enterprise products are an entirely different ballgame where product support, and the reliability thereof, is measured in decades. The consumer product attitude is just a bad look, but things like the Railway incident are deal killers.
- antibios 4mo ago
  Reader was dropped in the run up to G+. I believe there was a strategic decision to try and get people to move to G+ and move both personal news and organisational news together.
  - dekhn 4mo ago
    The leadership was never completely honest about why Reader was shutdown, and the stated reasons didn't pass some basic sniff checks. But it was easy to read between the lines: the executives' attention was on other things, and Reader was a threat to their growth. But also it was a passion project that a company like Google would struggle to keep updating since it brought in little revenue (even though there were hordes of people volunteering to maintain it for free in their 20% time).
    - ghaff 4mo ago
      The decline of RSS among a certain audience was only peripherally related to the elimination of Reader; it's not like there aren't other RSS readers out there even if Google makes a convenient villain. But Google did whiff on social in general and certainly indexing the world's information became a very secondary goal especially after failing with some efforts on the copyright front.
- blondin 4mo ago
  Google+ couldn't handle spams. Inbox was an excellent execution. one needed the tech that made Gmail, and the other couldn't co-exist with Gmail? we will never truly know.
  - ghaff 4mo ago
    I would have said Knoll was the bigger fail on the spam front. You can't have unmoderated posting generally.
- ventana 4mo ago
  Well, actually, Google+ circa 2014 was the only social network that had enough of the interesting technical content for me, and I did use it in exactly the way how one would use a decent social network: I posted my content, got comments, and read what other people posted. Some formatting weirdness aside, it was not bad at all, and surely better and quieter, in a good sense, than Facebook back then, and especially than Facebook now. I still have the Takeout archive of my posts, might be a nice time machine experience to parse that huge JSON and read through it. So, yes, I do complain.
  - wrs 4mo ago
    I thought the “circles” idea made total sense and it could have been a good social network, if they had let it do that instead of forcing it into every other part of Google.
KerryJones 4mo ago
Most people would argue that Stadia would have many. Many people loved Google Reader. There are numerous examples of things that were great and were killed, because they hadn't monetized enough or "fast enough", and when you are chasing results on a quarterly basis, you can't always get things that will generate tremendous value with more time.
spicyusername 4mo ago
I don't disagree with your point. It's interesting to imagine if there's some kind of middle ground where products could be launched without the pretense of them being permanent? I suspect at least some of people's frustration is that X or Y was pitched as something serious, which then grates some when it gets canceled. But maybe you can't launch a product without pretending it's going to be real because it'll be dead on arrival?
- rkagerer 4mo ago
  ...where products could be launched without the pretense of them being permanent Yeah, it's what Google used to do by releasing everything as "Beta". Gmail was in Beta for 5 years with millions of users.
cyberax 4mo ago
Can you name a good new Google product then? I just can't remember anything recent. I can't even remember any good recent _improvements_ to their core products. If anything, recent changes are more like downgrades than upgrades.
- erwincoumans 4mo ago
  Gemini is pretty good.
  - bigstrat2003 4mo ago
    You're entitled to your opinion, but you're literally the first person I've ever heard say that. Even people who like LLMs seem to think that GPT and Claude are the good ones, with Gemini being B tier at best.
    - amazingamazing 4mo ago
      https://openrouter.ai/rankings https://openrouter.ai/rankings
      - cyberax 4mo ago
        Uhh... It's on the 13-th place in rankings. And way behind in most benchmarks?
        kaashif 4mo ago
        #6 in usage by tokens. It obviously has some use case. My experience is that Gemini is much more token efficient than other models. Measuring tokens is like measuring distance travelled by measuring fuel consumption. I mostly use Codex though, I can't be bothered to have more than one subscription.
    - erwincoumans 4mo ago
      Agreed Gemini maybe not the best, but it is still pretty good. And their research was the foundation of others (Attention is all you need paper).
csallen 4mo ago
I'm sure that Google internally is well aware of the negative press that comes with product shutdowns, and is doing them regardless as a deliberate strategic tradeoff where they believe the benefits outweigh the costs. But it's very difficult to measure the costs, bc the #1 cost is lost trust, and how do you measure that? Many people simply won't sign up for a Google product bc they don't trust it'll be around long enough to justify the investment. These people don't show up in any metrics that you can reason about, and they're the least likely to take any surveys you might send out. At best, Google can guess what the impact is, and they might be wildly underestimating. I think a different strategic decision they could've made (and still could make!) would be to the do the opposite, and prioritize the benefits of keep projects alive over the costs of ruthlessly sunsetting then. They could say, "You know what, we have considerable resources. When we release something new, we're going to dedicate ourselves to keeping it running indefinitely." They wouldn't have to market them, or advertise them, or connect them to every new part of the evolving Google ecosystem, or make them particularly easy to find, or even keep them open to new signups. But just keeping them running as-is, indefinitely, and having customers tell each other, "It's Google, you can trust it, it's not going away," would be such a great PR win.
- janalsncm 4mo ago
  It’s not just the price of keeping the servers humming. You have to pay people to maintain the software. So now you’re paying hundreds or thousands of people to maintain zombie software.
  - csallen 4mo ago
    Yeah, there are costs for sure. But this is "zombie software" with millions, probably tens of millions of users. And Google has ~80,000 engineers? And the company prints an incredible amount of money. I think the real cost/risk here is not financial, but strategic, i.e. preventing a loss of focus.
    - bonesss 4mo ago
      The common critique of Googles actions - the organization has profits, therefore there is no problem engaging in less profitable activities — strikes me as superficial. It’s not about investing any given portion of revenues, it’s investing optimally. There are opportunity costs that must be considered in investments (and that means Net Present Value calculations). Google’s revenue and profits are for the shareholders. When revenue is directed back into the business the question simply isn’t if the whole business will make money, it’s if this investment is optimally profitable considering all the alternatives. If a support engineer on Google+ generates $X over 5 years, but that same resource would generate $3X working on Gemini then dictating eternal Google+ support is robbing future Google of revenue. Investments need to be individually justified, but also better than the alternatives to make fiscal sense. Even though that sucks for pleased consumers.
Aurornis 4mo ago
> People who think it's a quality product won't be wary of whether it'll get killed - the quality itself is insurance against that. Not true in the slightest. Google has had some quality hardware products where they killed the cloud service and rendered them useless. Products that were stable and working, but Google decided to pull the plug and make the hardware worthless. Quality of the product means nothing. You’re at the mercy of the whims of Google’s decision making. The thing you like may stop working in a couple months.
- dgoldstein0 4mo ago
  Unfortunately quality and earning money are only loosely correlated - especially for Google when they can pour money into making something good, but baby necessarily figure out how to make it earn. And it also seems if it's not a $100 m+ business they lose interest very quickly. So even good things that could run somewhat cheap of optimized end up with no long term place in the Google ecosystem when they fail to make it big. ... That all said Google kills perfectly good things because they have a few internal rules that encourage it: that there can only be one of a system (dunno if that's applies to product but they seem to always want to consolidate every few years) and that stuff cannot be unowned so reorgs => kill products that don't match the new org structure. That and they incentivize pumping out new products with their promotion process - whether or not they really needed yet another chat/vc/etc product, someone probably figured they could climb the career ladder by shipping another one.
light_hue_1 4mo ago
> Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. ... you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't Except that Google kills the products we use! Google Reader had basically the entire community. No one cares when they kill something niche. I don't touch new Google products, they're toxic. And now with AI I can finally stop using their search too. All that will be left is email because it's too much of a commodity.
- soraminazuki 4mo ago
  If anything, email is the #1 priority for de-googling, lest they slop you with a ban. Losing access to your email is so disruptive that migrating to a more trustworthy provider with custom domain support is worth the time and effort of updating addresses.
ajross 4mo ago
> Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints Exactly. I mean, you can argue forever about the stuff that got killed. But you know what didn't get killed? All the stuff they're turning into $4.6T of market cap. In particular, they didn't kill AI. They're the only pre-AI tech giant with a successful frontier LLM, everyone else failed (Meta) or missed the boat (Apple, Microsoft[1]). They're the only tech giant[2] to produce working in-house datacenter AI hardware. Making a lot of bets means that you make a lot of bad bets too. But Google has made a lot of good bets. [1] Though MS got near-exclusive access to OpenAI via a very expensive late investment, which sorta counts. [2] NVIDIA is giant now, they certainly weren't when these bets were being placed.
zrn900 4mo ago
> you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't. They killed their chat app. Then had their pants on fire after Discord became the thing. The same can happen with any app they killed. So no, that's not 'taking risks'. Taking risks is shutting down perfectly working apps that can suddenly become 'the new thing'.
GCA10 4mo ago
I've come to believe that Big Tech's fondness for launch-and-kill approaches to new products is closely related to the career incentives for both PMs and finance chiefs. Both of them are acting rationally to advance their careers. In tandem, they create a horrifying cycle of death. Product managers win their chops by launching something and winning applause for getting fast adoption in the first few months. Once the boss says "Wow," it's on to a bigger new chance. It's habit-forming to outrun your failures in a system where personal incentives reward ephemeral success. Finance folks win their chops by identifying bits of the company that aren't pulling their (economic) weight. If you haven't delivered $$$ of efficiency savings, why are you even on the payroll? Pulling the plug on small/mid-sized products that have plateaued is the way you get recognition and promotions. CEOs, of course, could change this. But they're the ultimate plate-spinners in a big company, trying to keep up the appearance that they've got everything in control and making sure that neither shareholders nor employees mutiny. As long as they've got a new sizzle story to sell, no one (except users) is there to grieve about what's dying. And users of a product that's less than 1% of revenue can be safely ignored.

rvz 4mo ago

[flagged]

jeffbee 4mo ago
This is as solid an argument as the article.

sieabahlpark 4mo ago

[dead]

devjam 4mo ago

While Apple does make nice hardware and appear to be listening to their users in that respect, don't forget that Tahoe has not been particularly well-received.

fumar 4mo ago

Is this AI authored rhetoric?

amazingamazing 4mo ago

I remember these types of posts saying Google is done because they shut down Google Reader. Google's stock was about $60 at the time. I look forward to reading this post and chuckling a few years from now. Doomers really do get more engagement, though. I have some friends in real life who complained about reader, and none of them even use RSS feeds anymore. I mean seriously? The one point I will make though is: these people complaining about Google shutting things down is really just funny. It's like complaining about people having abandoned side projects. A healthy organization tries things. Not everything works out or is cashflow positive. That's life. For reference Google has more employees than all Y Combinator companies combined. Keep in mind there are thousands of dead Y Combinator companies. A better complaint about Google would be the lack of polish on many products. Take Gmail. Google made haste in adding the "AI Inbox", and yet you can't even read threaded emails in reverse chronological order. People have been complaining about this for nearly its entire existence. With the talent, and now AI - there's no reason such a thing couldn't be fixed tomorrow. It's just CSS and there are tons of chrome extensions that implement this. C'mon...

diob 4mo ago
Yeah, IBM is nothing like Google, it's a weird comparison.
majormajor 4mo ago
I was thinking the other day that it's particularly weird that Gmail is so bereft of features after all this time. It's not that they've left it completely as-is "this is great, there is nothing to do"—but just that the things they have tried have been... kinda uninteresting and quite simple? It's weird to me that with the other AI features they've tried (including suggested responses and such in drafting new emails) there isn't anything, say, to make really good proactive suggestions for like "apply this label to all incoming emails like this." That sort of stagnation, though, and lack of their "trying things" really moving the needle compared to their decades-old ads product, makes me think they really are becoming the new IBM. IBM, in my estimation, has largely been irrelevant to the future of computing since the early 80s when MS ended up owning the PC story, but they have still had some quite solid stock prices runs at times over the decades (10x in five years at the end of the 90s, say). You can make a lot of money with a no-longer-that-interesting business.

hintymad 4mo ago

> YouTube is eating itself from the inside out too One thing that I really really hate Youtube for is that they don't allow users to turn off their shorts. You can choose to "reduce" Shorts for a given session, but they come back right next time. That said, Youtube is tremendously valuable for its high-quality content. It's kinda like a restaurant. The service can be horrible. They decor can be hideous. But! I'm going back as long as the food is delicious.

sakesun 4mo ago
You can go to Google Account > Data & Privacy. Then pause Youtube History. There will be no more feed on Youtube home screen. You will only see your /subscriptions feed. Little trick for a more peaceful life.
- Brian_K_White 4mo ago
  And that subscriptions screen has a row of all shorts across the top, and shorts trun up in searches and side bar related recommendations. This while paying them for premium for 20 years.
SanjayMehta 4mo ago
On IOS/macos there's an app called "Unwatched for YouTube" which allows you to subscribe to channels via RSS (no need to login) and then you can turn shorts on/off per channel. It's free for now but the developer has plans for some kind of subscription for premium features. https://apps.apple.com/in/app/unwatched-for-youtube/id6477287463 https://apps.apple.com/in/app/unwatched-for-youtube/id647728...
kyrra 4mo ago
There's a new setting rolling out in the YouTube app. Go to settings > time management > shorts feed limit. Turn that setting on, and you can select how many minutes you limit to. There's now an option for "0 minutes".
- Brian_K_White 4mo ago

Ayushkumar1808 4mo ago

[flagged]

jeffbee 4mo ago

"Everyone hates YouTube" is an argument that has a lot to overcome. All objective indicators suggest it is incredibly popular, and growing in popularity, pretty much across the demographic board.

crowcroft 4mo ago
This is pretty common across social media as well, surveyed sentiment towards it often negative while usage is high. I suspect it's because of the addictive quality.
- jeffbee 4mo ago
  But sentiment toward YouTube isn't negative. It is the most reputable social media in Morning Consult's brand reputation survey. It enjoys a higher reputation score than things like Cheerios and Tylenol. I don't think you can separate the reputation of the platform from the collective impression left by the creators, and people like the creators on YouTube. And, I propose, people largely DGAF about the platform features and presentation.
CivBase 4mo ago
I hate it, but I still use it. The platform sucks, but most of the content isn't available anywhere else. Between the infrastructure cost, the difficulty of monetization, and the immense user/create base already invested in the platform, I don't think it's possible for anyone to compete with YouTube without government intervention.

coderenegade 4mo ago

Google is in an incredibly strong position. They're a top tier AI vendor, and in a world where content creation is largely commoditized and outsourced to AI, advertising companies will determine what gets seen, and what gets buried in the noise. They control both generation and visibility of what gets generated. Facebook could be in the same position, but they aren't as strong in AI. OpenAI wants to be Google, but they don't have the advertising reach. Yeah, they aren't perfect or always necessarily the best in a given area, but to compare them to IBM is probably missing the forest for the trees.

jagged-chisel 4mo ago
Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Nobody ever got fired for choosing Google. Seems apropos.
- breppp 4mo ago
  For choosing Google Cloud? When was it ever conventional to choose Google Cloud?
- bushbaba 4mo ago
  Not really I’d not call Google the safest/most popular choice for AI or Cloud.
trollbridge 4mo ago
And at one point, IBM was at the head of the pack with AI. Remember Deep Blue?
- htrp 4mo ago
  Remember Watson?
- coderenegade 4mo ago
  IBM got to where it is today by being complacent and not keeping up with innovation. Google is notably at the forefront of innovation, in a driving seat, and that innovation directly stands to benefit one of their core businesses in a way that the market is probably only just beginning to understand. It's an entirely different situation, imo.

KnuthIsGod 4mo ago

All empires eventually decay and die. Wang, Bull, Unisys, IBM, DEC, the Mongolian Empire, the Hungarian Empire, Dutch Empire, the Portugese Empire.... they all exist in some form, but are shadows of their former selves. IBM died because it was forced to hire second raters to fill the ranks. Over time, the company became synonymous with failure and mediocrity.

add-sub-mul-div 4mo ago
I honestly think we're in a post-disruption era in that Google/Meta/Twitter/Reddit/etc. can't die. They have too much power and they've captured the entire population now. The internet isn't made up largely of enthusiasts anymore. Mediocrity is the strength of these platforms. The eternal September has made their home and they're not moving again.
- scared_together 4mo ago
  I think Meta, Twitter and Reddit will lose relevance as younger generations move to different social networks. TikTok has already taken a bite out of the social media market, so has Discord. Out of the four companies listed, Google is the one whose survival I’d bet on.
- tardedmeme 4mo ago
  People thought that about all the other megacompanies that died too. This current crop is not special. Google has just announced they'll kill search and replace it with AI - think it'll still be strong after that?
lelanthran 4mo ago
> IBM died because it was forced to hire second raters to fill the ranks. IBM didn't die :-/

ismepornnahi 4mo ago

Why's this poorly written piece on top of HN?

trollbridge 4mo ago
I rather enjoyed it. I also enjoyed reading something that did not give me the immediate impression it was AI generated.
- linkregister 4mo ago
  "Write a snarky, cynical opinion piece about Google in the style of Lewis Black." The Opus 4.7 output was remarkably similar to the content in this blog.
- alexgieg 4mo ago
  I noticed it as LLM-written by the middle of the second paragraph. The text is filled with classic rhetorical structures LLMs love making, especially the "it isn't X, it's Y" and "not A, not B, not C, but D" patterns.
  - lemontheme 4mo ago
    It’s the repetitive paragraph structure that raised my suspicions. Sentence. Short sentence. Noun. Noun. Noun. Sentence to reflect. Wrap it up in a bow. Sequences of short incomplete sentences, particularly in threes is such a tell
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
amazingamazing 4mo ago
hate pieces tend to rank highly. better if it's hating on big co
jeffbee 4mo ago
Why is the cat in the catnip again?

raggi 4mo ago

> Look at the Railway GCP account ban situation. A literally billion dollar startup running on Google Cloud and Google just randomly snaps their fingers and deletes their account. Zero warning. No phone number to call. No account rep. Poof. Gone. It is actual insanity to me. A billion dollar customer gets the exact same automated middle finger as a low effort spam bot. Your B2B business is completely cooked if that is how you treat people. The enterprise cloud gravy train is right there and Google is standing on the tracks begging to get hit by the train. If you've been around a while you know that at any business critical scale at all you establish a relationship with your cloud provider and get an account manager. When you do this, you have a number to call. A billion dollar startup not doing this is a keen lesson for the CTO. Yes, Google likely screwed up here, but being unprepared for account problems, having no established relationship with your provider is a critical mistake. The article goes on to talk about Hetzner as an example: their pricing is great for individuals but they literally don't even offer account management relationships - even at scale they actively refuse them. There are equivalent stories of account terminations with Hetzner, which is also a key point: this isn't just a big business problem, at all.

aurareturn 4mo ago
I would think that Railway certainly had an account manager, right? Did they say they didn’t have one?
- MrDarcy 4mo ago
  The article is incorrect and misleading. Railway did have an account manager and they did call them and they did pick up the phone and work with them to restore service.
  - Forgeties79 4mo ago
    An account manager overseeing such a major client should’ve never let this happen. If they don’t, why the hell are they the account manager? What are they even doing to earn their keep? This was such a preventable situation. I once worked at a company that had their domain lapse because of an internal error at the company that was paid for the domain. There was no alert, there was no attempt to rectify the situation, one day we woke up and we simply did not have control of our website for a full week. There was nothing wrong with our payment method, there was no reason the payment shouldn’t have happened, it was completely their fault. They found out because we called them in a panic. This was a major company. We left them a week later and our CEO talks about it constantly as a horror story to other companies and there is no way our situation was unique. It’s not just about the value of the contract. This whole situation has been in the news for days now. It’s terrible PR and I guarantee you it is costing them business in the long run. All I have seen for days is people talking about how poor Google’s support is, and I’m not even somebody who makes those decisions. I get it, “Google is too big to fail.” But eventually, that stops being true

illusive4080 4mo ago

IBM is reinventing itself, no? From mainframe maximalists to purchasing HashiCorp, Red Hat, Confluent. All to capture enterprise for years to come. It seems as if IBM is making a comeback.

abhiyerra 4mo ago
If you read their annual report they bet the farm on RedHat and Kubernetes. They spun off their legacy services business and have basically have monopoly power over the Federal government, banks and defense contractors. They have been buying out other Kubernetes vendors such as Kubecost. They are are pretty focused now, we will see how well they will do long term.

sebstefan 4mo ago

>YouTube is eating itself from the inside out too. Everyone hates the demonetization stuff but the low effort AI slop content is what really kills it for me. YouTube got massive because it had real creators. Supply and demand. A real marketplace. But if you keep kicking off the actual suppliers and replacing them with low effort garbage, literally anyone can host that garbage. I don't see slop on youtube and nobody I know is complaining about it. My current problem is private equity buying all the channels I love! Veritasium, Fern!

CSMastermind 4mo ago

If anything I think Microsoft is IBM

light_hue_1 4mo ago

> Eric Schmidt got booed on stage recently. Eric Schmidt! The guy who basically was Google for a decade. When your own alumni get heckled by the crowd your brand isn't just damaged. It's toxic. I was at an MIT event 8 years ago where Eric Schmidt was booed. It was his first summer at MIT. Basically everything he said about Google and his world view left the students feeling horrified. It was so bad people walked out in a daze. So if this is the bar, we passed it long ago.

rwallace 4mo ago
I didn't know about that event. What did he say to get booed that time?

Eighth 4mo ago

The technological world is rapidly changing and Google is changing with it. They are in a very strong position, owning the full stack in an industry that is very early and rapidly growing. They won't win all their bets but they have enough coverage for it not to matter. I disagree with the Apple comparison. Apple haven't done anything successfully innovative for what seems like decades. I do admire their stance on AI though. Not going all in makes them unique.

siliconc0w 4mo ago

Google has amazing potential but has consistently squandered it. Gemini CLI being killed/rebranded is yet another example of their complete lack of follow through and persistence. It wasn't a good product - it was slow, buggy, and unreliable but you have to fix it to demonstrate you can do more than launch and then kill products. They have everything going for them - amazing technology and technologists, huge distribution and lock-in, and a giant compute advantage and the can pay for more out of cash flow rather than debt or equity. And yet it's still hard to see them not fumbling the ball.

p1dda 4mo ago

Google is officially the most evil company in the world

throw5 4mo ago

I am sure I am not alone in observing that starting around 2020... may be even a few years earlier... Google seemed to hire a lot of middle managers. I personally knew several managers who did not seem to contribute much beyond "organizing" meetings, and I saw them all join Google one by one. It made me think... what happened to Google's famous hiring standards? What happened to Google's engineering-heavy structure? Google is now filled with middle managers whose only previous experience has been "being scrum masters". Right then I knew that these ineffective managers I saw joining Google were not only the symptoms of Google's decline but would also become one of the causes of speeding up the decline. How could they let this happen? What happened to all their gatekeeping... "we are okay with false negatives in hiring but we'll NOT have false positives"? Current Google hiring is all about hiring loads of true negatives. I think I saw a similar fall in hiring standards for engineering roles too but I will leave it to someone with more data to confirm me or refute me.

0xbadcafebee 4mo ago

Google is the opposite of IBM. IBM would send 10 consultants to coddle you while extracting all your money. Google sends you 10 automated notifications about how your service is about to be changed or terminated and then asks for more money. IBM also made its money off of fat enterprise contracts and vertically integrated products. Google makes its money off of being the monopoly owning most of the advertising industry, which ridiculously is still a thing despite advertising not really working.

pelasaco 4mo ago
however my last experiences with IBM was: they send you 10 junior consultants, they get the money, for 10 senior consultants, and still cannot deliver what they promised.

linkregister 4mo ago

This article is nothing more than hyperbole and opinion. Its only worth is to provide confirmation bias. I agree with many points in the article, but there is no informative aspect to the post.

fsflover 4mo ago
Your comment lacks any specifics. Can you elaborate?

stingrae 4mo ago

I tried to test an ad in the meta ad platform… and it is insanely terrible. Teams don’t care about B2B software even if it drives the business or there aren’t viable competitors.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

cafkafk 4mo ago

Recommending Hetzner as an alternative here is a mistake. It just exposes you to a different problem. There is a reason for the term "Hetznered" existing. Hetzner can suddenly and permanently terminates your account. They do this without warning or explanation. When it happens, you lose access to all your servers and your backups. If you search HN, you will find plenty of examples. People lose everything within 24 hours and have no recourse. Hetzner is amazing for pricing. But the only safe way to use them is if your infrastructure is cloud agnostic. If you are not locked in and can move between providers quickly, it is a very cost effective place to run stateless services like DNS.

re-thc 4mo ago

The Railway accusation focuses on 1 side of the story. No real details on if Railway did anything and if the suspension was warranted. Google may not be wrong. Who knows. Easy to blame the larger company.

thevivekshukla 4mo ago

> And Search is just completely unusable now. They built an entire empire off our content. Bloggers, old forums, niche sites. We made the web worth searching in the first place. Now their AI Overviews just scrape our exact answers, strip out the hyperlinks, and repackage it in a blue box without linking back. I don't like that they throw AI overview on your face when you search, rather they should show AI overview on the right column and search results on the left.

myst 4mo ago

I hear this every 5 years for the last 15. And IBM is far from irrelevant.

mistic92 4mo ago

Internally people feel like it's becoming IBM. Too many accountants and thinking only about money. Few things changed when AI race started but its still not enough to bring back old Google

coldtea 4mo ago

>YouTube got massive because it had real creators. Supply and demand. A real marketplace. (...) I was a hardcore Android guy because it felt open. Sideloading, choice, freedom. (...) that toxicity doesn't show up on quarterly earnings yet. But it hollows you out from the inside. Word of mouth dies. The cult following evaporates. It's despiriting when even anti enshittification blog posts bear all the style of AI created slop.

pjmlp 4mo ago

> People said IBM was too big to fail. It wasn't. It just became completely irrelevant slowly, then all at once. SV people love to throw out this line, while several of the FOSS packages they use daily in the Linux ecosystem, including the kernel, are sponsored with IBM money, either directly or via Red-Hat. https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributors?timeRange=past365days&start=2025-05-22&end=2026-05-22&widget=organizations-leaderboard https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo...

p1dda 4mo ago

Google is pure evil. The worst cyber-villain in human existance.