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There is no strategy. The thought of Google having a central product management strategy -- and successfully executing it across many teams -- is hilarious to p

There is no strategy. The thought of Google having a central product management strategy -- and successfully executing it across many teams -- is hilarious to people who work there. It's chaos that outsiders try to read into. This is a consequence of bad internal economics and incentives. Google PMs and engineers are incentivized to create new products and ship them by quarterly deadlines (perf/promo cycles) rather than align their teams towards a cohesive user experience. Thinking this way would occasionally cause teams to, gasp, not build a product they wanted to build. Everyone needs to ship something, ideally something new. After all, you don't get promoted for deciding not to build something. I've seen awful products/implementations go out the door and get killed or reimplemented soon thereafter. And people still list these as "achievements" on promotion packets (and they get promoted despite the product failing!). The company is kind of trying to address this by changing promotion criteria, but it's culturally ingrained and won't change for some time.

72deluxe 11y ago
Informative, thanks. Is this why Google announces sweeping changes every year at i/o and redesigns the Android UI every single year? eg. use the dedicated search button on the phone, btw this button no longer exists, respond to the menu button, btw this button no longer exists, put menus at the top, put menus at the bottom, use hamburger menus, don't use them, use swipe navigation, use swipe navigation if it fits with your app, do things to ENCHANT and DELIGHT the user. According to the UI guidelines, clicking a button should cause the user to burst into tears of joy due to the delightful experience they have just had. Is it because they need to appear to be producing new things all the time? If so, it'd also explain why some products get released to much fanfare (and applause from the BBC Technology news team it seems) and then get no updates, maintenance and get binned a few years later. (Many examples of this). The most annoying of these was the Talk replacement for Android (Hangouts) which got rid of features of Talk and still has an abysmal tablet interface and general bugginess ("Did you not get my call???" "No"). I am not meaning to be overly critical, but the constant change for the sake of change is wearying. I have been using Android since the G1 and every i/o they have redesigned the interface. The examples of "bad UI" and "bad text" are all from their own older versions of Android. It makes you wish they'd make their mind up.
- tdkl 11y ago
  That's exactly the thing that pushed me from Android after 5 years. If I'm a paying customer, I want to be treated as one, not a beta tester with $currenthypedthingwedemoedatIO. That's why I'm still convinced that Google doesn't make products, but tech demos.
  - 72deluxe 11y ago
    That seems a good evaluation of it! It is particularly starting to grate on me how I rarely get updates for my phones despite the security holes found in the versions of Android I am running. Also, I look at reviews of Android M on Ars Technica etc. and realise that I will never ever be running that version of the OS on my devices, not in the foreseeable future. It saddens me.
    - tdkl 11y ago
      Indeed, it's hard to be excited about the upcoming features, if you count in the actual availability of it because of the update model, which is usually release_date+couple months and where release_date is still 5-6 months from now. If we compare to a service: if x free, then I could live with that, but devices aren't free (and my time certainly ain't).
    - Grazester 11y ago
      Reviews of M exist? Wasn't this just the development version released? I really question this. Get a Nexus device. updates are guaranteed for 2 years. Blame your phone's manufactures for not getting updates not Android or Google. I would love to know how many years of support does qualcomm guaranteed for their chipset driver updates. I remember reading this was an issue for Google updating the Galaxy Nexus.
      - 72deluxe 11y ago
        You're right - they were just overviews of the previews of M. I did notice that many things were changing in them too - I found it odd that the way pages were laid out was so fluid/changeable compared to the previous M preview given that UI guidelines should dictate how things are laid out. The fact that things move around so much would be indicative of not being really sure how it should look (despite the UI guidelines), perhaps? If I was buying a car and the next version of the car the next year moved the dials to the other side of the dashboard or swapped whether the indicator stalk was on the right or the left of the steering wheel, you'd ask what the heck was going on. Yet this appears to be normal for Android. I would love to blame my phone manufacturer for not getting updates, apart from Android was started with the Open Handset Alliance. It doesn't appear to be much of an alliance to me. It's a daft situation. If you bought a laptop and could only install hotfixes and KB releases via Dell, yet Dell did not give them to you, would you be happy with Microsoft? Would you take their advice to just buy a Surface Pro from them? That would be unrealistic because it would ignore the massive market that is Wintel devices; rather you would expect Microsoft to only provide Windows to Dell if they agreed to provide hotfixes Microsoft gave them. If you had a MacBook Pro and El Capitan would not run on it, yet you were aware of all the security holes in Mavericks and some in Yosemite, would you accept advice to just buy a new MacBook to get security fixes? Or would you expect Apple to backport fixes when they know that a sizeable percentage of customers are connecting to their App Store with older versions, given your purchase fee of the hardware? The solution to not getting updates for a device is not to buy a new device. Google boasts how many devices they have all over the world (see last year's io keynote) and how Android is everywhere, yet it failed to mention the important point about Android being everywhere: that it is insecure outdated Android that is everywhere. Google know how many people are connecting with older versions (the Play dashboard tells you what percentage is running which version), so they should push out updates or mandate in their agreement with phone manufacturers that a timely update cycle should be followed, or the agreement would be terminated. There would be no other way to keep control or maintain a high standard. I say this with a plethora of Android devices and with my dayjob of writing Android apps. It is a rubbish situation for security.
spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
Sounds like British Telecom :-) I know some one going for a promotion to a first level manager (PCG U) they used 10+ FTE's for a year and a million pounds to redevelop a system used by BT worldwide into the "approved" Oracle OWS platform. Not the best use of a million pounds of shareholder money :-( But they got the manage x people and have a budget of y pounds tick in the box.

72deluxe 11y ago

Informative, thanks. Is this why Google announces sweeping changes every year at i/o and redesigns the Android UI every single year? eg. use the dedicated search button on the phone, btw this button no longer exists, respond to the menu button, btw this button no longer exists, put menus at the top, put menus at the bottom, use hamburger menus, don't use them, use swipe navigation, use swipe navigation if it fits with your app, do things to ENCHANT and DELIGHT the user. According to the UI guidelines, clicking a button should cause the user to burst into tears of joy due to the delightful experience they have just had. Is it because they need to appear to be producing new things all the time? If so, it'd also explain why some products get released to much fanfare (and applause from the BBC Technology news team it seems) and then get no updates, maintenance and get binned a few years later. (Many examples of this). The most annoying of these was the Talk replacement for Android (Hangouts) which got rid of features of Talk and still has an abysmal tablet interface and general bugginess ("Did you not get my call???" "No"). I am not meaning to be overly critical, but the constant change for the sake of change is wearying. I have been using Android since the G1 and every i/o they have redesigned the interface. The examples of "bad UI" and "bad text" are all from their own older versions of Android. It makes you wish they'd make their mind up.

tdkl 11y ago
That's exactly the thing that pushed me from Android after 5 years. If I'm a paying customer, I want to be treated as one, not a beta tester with $currenthypedthingwedemoedatIO. That's why I'm still convinced that Google doesn't make products, but tech demos.
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  That seems a good evaluation of it! It is particularly starting to grate on me how I rarely get updates for my phones despite the security holes found in the versions of Android I am running. Also, I look at reviews of Android M on Ars Technica etc. and realise that I will never ever be running that version of the OS on my devices, not in the foreseeable future. It saddens me.
  - tdkl 11y ago
    Indeed, it's hard to be excited about the upcoming features, if you count in the actual availability of it because of the update model, which is usually release_date+couple months and where release_date is still 5-6 months from now. If we compare to a service: if x free, then I could live with that, but devices aren't free (and my time certainly ain't).
  - Grazester 11y ago
    Reviews of M exist? Wasn't this just the development version released? I really question this. Get a Nexus device. updates are guaranteed for 2 years. Blame your phone's manufactures for not getting updates not Android or Google. I would love to know how many years of support does qualcomm guaranteed for their chipset driver updates. I remember reading this was an issue for Google updating the Galaxy Nexus.
    - 72deluxe 11y ago
      You're right - they were just overviews of the previews of M. I did notice that many things were changing in them too - I found it odd that the way pages were laid out was so fluid/changeable compared to the previous M preview given that UI guidelines should dictate how things are laid out. The fact that things move around so much would be indicative of not being really sure how it should look (despite the UI guidelines), perhaps? If I was buying a car and the next version of the car the next year moved the dials to the other side of the dashboard or swapped whether the indicator stalk was on the right or the left of the steering wheel, you'd ask what the heck was going on. Yet this appears to be normal for Android. I would love to blame my phone manufacturer for not getting updates, apart from Android was started with the Open Handset Alliance. It doesn't appear to be much of an alliance to me. It's a daft situation. If you bought a laptop and could only install hotfixes and KB releases via Dell, yet Dell did not give them to you, would you be happy with Microsoft? Would you take their advice to just buy a Surface Pro from them? That would be unrealistic because it would ignore the massive market that is Wintel devices; rather you would expect Microsoft to only provide Windows to Dell if they agreed to provide hotfixes Microsoft gave them. If you had a MacBook Pro and El Capitan would not run on it, yet you were aware of all the security holes in Mavericks and some in Yosemite, would you accept advice to just buy a new MacBook to get security fixes? Or would you expect Apple to backport fixes when they know that a sizeable percentage of customers are connecting to their App Store with older versions, given your purchase fee of the hardware? The solution to not getting updates for a device is not to buy a new device. Google boasts how many devices they have all over the world (see last year's io keynote) and how Android is everywhere, yet it failed to mention the important point about Android being everywhere: that it is insecure outdated Android that is everywhere. Google know how many people are connecting with older versions (the Play dashboard tells you what percentage is running which version), so they should push out updates or mandate in their agreement with phone manufacturers that a timely update cycle should be followed, or the agreement would be terminated. There would be no other way to keep control or maintain a high standard. I say this with a plethora of Android devices and with my dayjob of writing Android apps. It is a rubbish situation for security.

spacecowboy_lon 11y ago

Sounds like British Telecom :-) I know some one going for a promotion to a first level manager (PCG U) they used 10+ FTE's for a year and a million pounds to redevelop a system used by BT worldwide into the "approved" Oracle OWS platform. Not the best use of a million pounds of shareholder money :-( But they got the manage x people and have a budget of y pounds tick in the box.