31–40 of 93 posts
Now CNBC takes it and puts it on steroids.
> GOOGLE CAN NO LONGER INNOVATE!!! says former big shot employee
I won't be surprised if this also affects their stock price.
Why was he still there, after 13 years? He should have been able to retire ages ago, or if he wants to keep working, should have gone somewhere innovative half a decade ago.
> becoming "100% competitor-focused" and said the company "can no longer innovate." I understand that from a nowadays developer perspective, innovation is held in high regard and rightfully so. However, NO ONE can innovate constantly and forever. A competition race such as the cloud pricing Google vs. Amazon he mentioned is actually a good thing for customers from a economic standpoint. At some point, all companies h…
However, NO ONE can innovate constantly and forever. A competition race such as the cloud pricing Google vs. Amazon he mentioned is actually a good thing for customers from a economic standpoint. There was recently an article on HN that claimed that the cost of starting a new business group at Amazon was amazingly low, and that the process was amazingly fast. Basically, you get the people together/get people hired, a…
If and when, a product group becomes a major hit and rockets to a billion users, you'll say it's innovation, but in reality, probably 0.1% of the employees got to work on it. Everyone else will feel like there's no innovation going on in the group they work in.
You cannot have a company continually hitting iPhones every year. Even Steve Jobs said he only worked on three disruptive innovative products: The Apple 2, the original Mac, and the iPhone, and those were spaced out by very long periods.
You can't grow a company to billions in revenue and tens of thousands of employees and have all of them working on new stuff, and no significant overlap with existing product categories of competitors.
The question is, where IS the innovation? Which big companies are doing an impressive job of innovating? Remember when Tim Cook was criticised for not constantly bringing out new product lines? Yo don't hear that any more - people seem to have forgotten about the idea that Apple might be a company that actually comes up with entirely new product categories. Indeed Apple hardly even releases updates to its computers a…
I’m afraid his comments on not because my customer focussed enough jibe with my experience of Google. Google has done great UX, but two examples of dreadful customer apps are Google Groups and the Google Admin interface. I have to daily make routine changes to accounts and Google Admin is so unbelievably slow that I curse it every time I have to login to it (which is incredibly frequently). The UI is slow, non-intuit…
Google Groups has been on life support for 15+ years. If they knew what they were doing it could have been a Reddit killer integrated into a functioning G+.
Perhaps the real flaw was abandoning the federated architecture of USENET for the centralized architecture of say Reddit or Facebook.
Maybe we should bring back UUCP. :)
The question is, where IS the innovation? Which big companies are doing an impressive job of innovating? Remember when Tim Cook was criticised for not constantly bringing out new product lines? Yo don't hear that any more - people seem to have forgotten about the idea that Apple might be a company that actually comes up with entirely new product categories. Indeed Apple hardly even releases updates to its computers a…
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/8/16622802/apple-ar-headset...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
However, NO ONE can innovate constantly and forever. A competition race such as the cloud pricing Google vs. Amazon he mentioned is actually a good thing for customers from a economic standpoint. There was recently an article on HN that claimed that the cost of starting a new business group at Amazon was amazingly low, and that the process was amazingly fast. Basically, you get the people together/get people hired, a…
Companies change as they get bigger because of increasing risk. The company has more value and making big gambles risky ventures with a large company starts to become irresponsible.
But yes, in many ways it is less risky for a big company to try to acquire successful innovative small companies rather than trying to do the innovation in-house. But they criticized for that, too.
Reading the blog post, it seems curious to me that much of what his startup is predicted on is lack of any kind of governmental oversight, standards, and enforcement. It actually seems to be more taking advantage of an undesirable 3rd world situation than improving it.
Holy crap, that has got to be some tasty Kool-Aid. Reading the blog post, it seems curious to me that much of what his startup is predicted on is lack of any kind of governmental oversight, standards, and enforcement. It actually seems to be more taking advantage of an undesirable 3rd world situation than improving it.
The question is, where IS the innovation? Which big companies are doing an impressive job of innovating? Remember when Tim Cook was criticised for not constantly bringing out new product lines? Yo don't hear that any more - people seem to have forgotten about the idea that Apple might be a company that actually comes up with entirely new product categories. Indeed Apple hardly even releases updates to its computers a…
JWZ once described a "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model of software development, where you get bored with the old codebase and just throw it out, only to make just as many mistakes with the new one.
Lots of open-source projects do that, but it also happens with business. Version 1, written in your garage (or Starbucks, these days), is the best thing ever. Version 2 fixes bugs, improves performance, integrates with 23 popular services, has complete documentation, etc., and then the press roasts you for no longer being "innovative".
(As a budding indie developer, I feel the heat: people buy version 1.0 and expect it to be perfect. Sorry, I don't know how to deliver an Apple-like experience on day 1. I do my best to fix any issues you find, as soon as I reasonably can, though.)
Everything is perennially semi-broken, and everybody is constantly telling me that their idea is going to be the Next Big Thing, and I know that it's just going to be semi-broken forever, too. We complain about micropayments and subscriptions and advertising, but the truth is that no end-user would ever pay what software costs, if they knew how expensive it was to get right.
I spent a week and I couldn't get OAuth2 to work with Google Sheets, at all. There's some cargo-cult guesses on StackOverflow, but nobody even has a good idea for how to debug it. Google's own documentation doesn't even match what their webpage shows, and many of the options don't appear to do anything at all.
I'd be very happy, as a user and as a developer, if everybody stopped trying to "innovate" and just fixed their crap. I love Yegge's writing, but it's a little funny to hear the media complain about lack of innovation while we're still arguing about how best to patch up Meltdown/Spectre. We're so friggin' innovative I can't even trust a CPU built in the past 20 years.