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> I'm not seeing how infrastructure or data management > was any particular value of Google's, and have seen > absolutely nothing declaring otherwise. > Indexi

by bborud 13y ago

> I'm not seeing how infrastructure or data management > was any particular value of Google's, and have seen > absolutely nothing declaring otherwise. > Indexing/deduplicating/managing data didn't > seem to be a problem for anyone. Well, I'd say otherwise. It was hard and there were big differences in how efficient the various platforms were. And sadly, not all of them could keep up with the development pace and the growth of the web. (I used to work for two of Google's competitors in the late 90s and early 2000s, I had some knowledge of the internals of a third competitor and I eventually ended up working at Google for a few years). > Alas, herein we see the magic of the survivorship bias: Google > won, therefore Google must have done everything right. That was not what I said. Please do not pretend that I said that. I said that what Google did represented heavy lifting and what Pointcast did wasn't. I didn't touch on why Google succeeded at all. In fact, Google's success is entirely irrelevant.

corresation 13y ago
>That was not what I said. Please do not pretend that I said that. I said that what Google did represented heavy lifting and what Pointcast did wasn't[....]In fact, Google's success is entirely irrelevant. At this point I have absolutely no idea what it is you are trying to say, then, as you apparently want to have your argument work in any way way that you think has some sort of lesson. Google is successful today because they made business bets after the .COM crash that no one else was making. They brought a new approach that earned them attention and customers, and the rest is history. They did good engineering, but so did countless companies that failed or continue in obscurity. I suppose that is the "heavy lifting"? Pointcast obviously was doing good engineering (they had an engineering scale that was pretty much unprecedented at the time), but their business case completely fell apart and the organization was dissolved. There were literally zero issues with the engineering of Pointcast, nor were they replaced by competitors (despite that apparently being your angle?). It simply wasn't a viable business at the time, and they couldn't find a way to make money.

by bborud 13y ago

corresation 13y ago

>That was not what I said. Please do not pretend that I said that. I said that what Google did represented heavy lifting and what Pointcast did wasn't[....]In fact, Google's success is entirely irrelevant. At this point I have absolutely no idea what it is you are trying to say, then, as you apparently want to have your argument work in any way way that you think has some sort of lesson. Google is successful today because they made business bets after the .COM crash that no one else was making. They brought a new approach that earned them attention and customers, and the rest is history. They did good engineering, but so did countless companies that failed or continue in obscurity. I suppose that is the "heavy lifting"? Pointcast obviously was doing good engineering (they had an engineering scale that was pretty much unprecedented at the time), but their business case completely fell apart and the organization was dissolved. There were literally zero issues with the engineering of Pointcast, nor were they replaced by competitors (despite that apparently being your angle?). It simply wasn't a viable business at the time, and they couldn't find a way to make money.