Live data from Hacker News

Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

blogs.harvard.edu

171–180 of 187 posts

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, what a nasty comment. Trying to think of what possible context they could put around this comment that would justify it.

Obviously you're not familiar with Marissa Mayer's work. I remember that before Mayer, Yahoo Mail was lightweight, fast and it displayed emails chronologically and in a well categorized way. After Marissa Mayer joined Yahoo, the Yahoo email client became slow and clunky and it grouped emails together in a strange way which made it hard to find stuff; thankfully I was able to figure out a way to disable this 'feature'…

I'm aware that people didn't like Mayer's vision or decisions at Yahoo -- I'm not one to judge because I didn't use any Yahoo products during her time there, except for Tumblr and Flickr, both of which were either left alone or made some incremental improvements.

What I'm confused about in particular is why the author feels the need to snarkily slam Meyer here. Obviously she's not involved with Google's current decisions on Finance. And I'm pretty sure she wasn't involved with shutting Picasa down, which happened in early 2016. I've read articles about Mayer not being a popular manager at Google, or getting along with the chain of command, but I don't recall her being a prime mover in shutting products down while at GOogle

So why does she deserve snark when clearly there are Google executives who actually made and oversaw the decisions to shut down Picasa and Finance? Instead of doing the simple Googling needed to find who are currently the product leads, the author appears to throw in a lazy non-sequitur of Fuck Marissa Mayer, amirite?.

As for it being rooted in sexism -- who knows? It is kind of bizarre that the one Googler the author chooses to call out by name is not only a woman, but a woman who hasn't been at Google for the past 6 years.

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#172

Stay away from Google products and services! With all their stringent to the ridiculousness level hiring, they seem to hire calculators, not humans in the negative sense. They don't get families either - I haven't seen their diversity numbers, but maybe they are predominantly a bachelors' company, yet, they try to design products for families. For example, I am the family manager of our Google Play store account. Now…

All I read was rambling.

Well, you kept reading...

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#173

Stay away from Google products and services! With all their stringent to the ridiculousness level hiring, they seem to hire calculators, not humans in the negative sense. They don't get families either - I haven't seen their diversity numbers, but maybe they are predominantly a bachelors' company, yet, they try to design products for families. For example, I am the family manager of our Google Play store account. Now…

(pro tip - line breaks aid readability...)

Thanks! I didn't expect it to be that long!

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#174
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how you can hold Meyer directly responsible for the clunky Yahoo email client. This reads as incredibly sexist.

Why is it sexist? She did terrible at Yahoo. That's fact. Or you say, just because she is woman, people should say she did a good job?

No but they shouldn't single her out either. I don't see him slamming any number of male tech executives who made mistakes.

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#175
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it sexist? She did terrible at Yahoo. That's fact. Or you say, just because she is woman, people should say she did a good job?

No but they shouldn't single her out either. I don't see him slamming any number of male tech executives who made mistakes.

I agree, that that is the relevant point. There should be any number of Google execs to blame, whose period of employment actually coincided with the Picasa/Finance changes, and with some of many other past Google product shutdowns/overhauls. That the author chooses to rip on Mayer -- who hasn't been at Google in the past 6 years -- makes me expect that she was legendarily responsible for other Google product fails, but that doesn't seem the case.

What does Mayer's floundering in her post-Googler-career as Yahoo's CEO have to do with the product failures of Picasa and Finance? Referencing her in this context makes as little sense as referencing Andy Rubin -- another prominent Googler who went on to flounder as CEO.

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But hey, come build your company on top of GCP!

Funny thing is, people are lining up to do just that. I think that's a symptom of an industry where following the hype is more important than long term stability.

Or maybe they’ve carefully weighed their options, and concluded that e.g. Kubernetes on GCP works a lot better than on either AWS or Azure?

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#177
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it sexist? She did terrible at Yahoo. That's fact. Or you say, just because she is woman, people should say she did a good job?

No but they shouldn't single her out either. I don't see him slamming any number of male tech executives who made mistakes.

You can single out whoever you want. It is not sexist. What is wrong with the world?!

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#178
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's funny to me is that so many people complain about large tech companies eating up every product category and preventing competition. But when they later kill these products, people complain all the same. Which is it? Seems like an opportunity for someone else, if it was really being relied on that much. I suspect it wasn't. The author of the article said he hadn't checked in six years. Six years! And he's compl…

What's funny to me is that so many people complain about large tech companies eating up every product category and preventing competition. But when they later kill these products, people complain all the same. Which is it? Both. They expanded into an area and killed the competition then killed their product and left a void. See Google Reader for the life cycle.

And now readers still aren't popular... There is no big replacement that people are using. Google didn't kill the category, it was already dead.

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#179

Hi - I'm the creator of https://bravos.co , a replacement for Google Finance. (I didn't have anything to do with this article being posted.) I actually left my job two months ago to work on this full-time... Google Finance used to be a "home page tab" for me and it was just killing me that I couldn't find a good alternative. Bravos.co features a clean interface for tracking public companies, cryptocurrencies, and eve…

That's pretty awesome, one of my favorite features of Google Finance was how it would show the top daily gainers and losers (but ONLY of companies with market cap >= $1B) It looks like you have it at $100M on the homepage.

Any way you could make a easy to access URL that does the same thing but for market caps >= $1B?

Maybe:

https://bravos.co/gainerslosers/1B

Re: Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)

#180
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did Yahoo throw out their finance site? https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/

I meant it's a shadow of its former self from 5 years ago. It was consistently the best and most useful finance site, over Google Finance, and now the articles are terrible. The news feed for a company used to be great, but somehow it has been turned into something terrible and useless.

How would you describe the changes to the company news feed that made it terrible and useless?
Post reply on HN