311–320 of 463 posts
So many companies try to emulate how Google works. There are multiple books, hundreds or thousands of articles. People speculate on the perks, the review structure, the hierarchy, the autonomy. However, when other companies try to imitate Google they always fail because they're missing a crucial piece: Billions of dollars in ad revenue Google doesn't work the way it does to be successful. It works that way because it…
So many companies try to emulate how Google works. There are multiple books, hundreds or thousands of articles. People speculate on the perks, the review structure, the hierarchy, the autonomy. However, when other companies try to imitate Google they always fail because they're missing a crucial piece: Billions of dollars in ad revenue Google doesn't work the way it does to be successful. It works that way because it…
Reminds me of Valve's no manager management style: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-04-27/why-there... When you have a lot of money, a lot of things work because you have a lot of money. You often see the same thing with people trying to emulate pro-athletes training methods. A genetically gifted pro-athlete can often succeed in spite of their training, and not necessarily because of their training.
I've been studying Atari for quite a while, there's so many interesting pieces to the company and their success and failure, and it's all been so well documented and autopsied that it makes for a marvelous case study that still has amazing applicability today.
One of the problems with companies that have cash cow revenue streams is that it sometimes doesn't matter what kinds of decisions the executives make, poor or good, the money will keep rolling in...until one day it doesn't and nobody has a clue how to actually manage the rapidly sinking ship. I've been studying Atari for quite a while, there's so many interesting pieces to the company and their success and failure, a…
One of the problems with companies that have cash cow revenue streams is that it sometimes doesn't matter what kinds of decisions the executives make, poor or good, the money will keep rolling in...until one day it doesn't and nobody has a clue how to actually manage the rapidly sinking ship. I've been studying Atari for quite a while, there's so many interesting pieces to the company and their success and failure, a…
(It's probably already clear that there's a lot of power in an AI-first approach, but it's worth noting that this change didn't just happen with Sundar's blog post last month. A better way to look at it is to realize that if Google has been running their custom machine learning ASICs for over a year now, they must have started designing them well before that, which, to me, was amazingly early. Google acquired DeepMind in 2014.)
Not all those bets will, or have to, work, as long as some of them work out really well. I'm curious to see what happens with VR, for example. But I think AI is the most obvious central bet, in the same that that mobile was beforehand.
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""the magic is gone."" Not only is the magic gone, but the boring, day to day fabric of functionality is gone. Have you tried to really search for anything with google in the past five years ? I don't mean meandering, aimless, consumer-centric searches like "new fitness watch" where any result tangentally related is useful ... I mean a specific, meaningful, concise search with multiple keywords, all of which are key…
i share the same experience. i have been using google to find articles that share a specific opinion so i do very specific searches in hopes of finding editorial opinion pieces. what i get back are lame how-to guides and wikipedia articles.
What I do now is to create a Google Custom Search Engine with all my RSS feed subscriptions; it resembles this earlier feature as I feed it lots of personal blogs that I read, but it is not even close to the earlier blogsearch.
Similarly there was a discussion/forum search which was also useful; that too was removed.
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True, and one other thing I've noticed is e.g. "Half of my searches" can bring say 200,000 results, but "Half of my" yields 50,000. A few other weird things that's been there for years and nobody seems to care. As long as consumer-level searches work and ads are clickable, Google's clock is ticking.
I wouldn't put too much stock on those numbers. They are probably statistical estimates, not actual counts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, and one other thing I've noticed is e.g. "Half of my searches" can bring say 200,000 results, but "Half of my" yields 50,000. A few other weird things that's been there for years and nobody seems to care. As long as consumer-level searches work and ads are clickable, Google's clock is ticking.
I wouldn't put too much stock on those numbers. They are probably statistical estimates, not actual counts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do people in Google still think the magic is there? It seems like a great place if you want stability and a nice salary, but obviously (unless you're in the comparatively tiny X dept) you're going to be a very small cog in a huge machine?
I know many people at Google Boston (Cambridge). They are all bored out of their skulls. One guy says how he works 30 hours in a busy week and uses his 20% time to hit the gym. But in another's words: "how can I leave when they pay me so much?"
They essentially have a bunch of people doing nothing much in particular, going nowhere in particular, while acting on their whim and whatever their hand position happens to be on that day. It's even worse as they constantly try to claim they are about-- something greater.
It's hilarious. It's not that they are wasting money (ie, doing something worth something but that may not provide any returns, or something big and unconventional but that doesn't seem relevant at the time), it's that they are wasting money (ie, wasting money).
They are either doing what they're doing to make more money or to protect their revenue stream, or to be once again doing the dumbest thing.
Nothing really gets funding unless it's going to make more money, or serve as good PR to distract from how full of it they are or to try to brush aside failure.
These days, when their products fail, all I see is failure. That is, it probably took 2 years to develop whatever crap was released, rather than it being "early days" and them "trying many different things." They picked one thing, spent an eternity on it, pushed out absolute garbage, then failed.
Everything else that went somewhere or that could go somewhere gets caught in political gridlock, as the idiots descend to try to claim credit, while really trying to be the cliche they've always been: stomp out anything that's going anywhere, because... .