191–200 of 427 posts
Google's two (maybe three) core Google-branded products to non-tech people are Search, Gmail and maybe Chrome. I don't think non-techies could even tell you what some of the other products are or did. I would also wager most people outside of tech don't realize YouTube is owned by Google. Tech people pay a lot of attention to this stuff, but casual user's don't notice or don't care.
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> you get a company that throws stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, and if it doesn't kills it immediately. I would love if they followed this strategy. Instead, you have products like reader and inbox with many passionate users, which demonstrate some wall stickiness, and they're killed rather than monetized. Monetize me. I recognize that the things I like cost money. Figure out how to make money off me! I would…
The metric you need to keep in mind here is revenue per employee. Keeping one product up and running necessarily means withholding engineers from another. As an extreme example, ads engineers make Google many times their salary, benefits, and ephemeral costs, and even non-revenue-generating services like Photos and Assistant indirectly drive traffic to the money makers. Meanwhile, consider Reader. A product with only…
I get this, but then why even launch if there's no vision at all beyond cancel it in a couple years since they're not willing to even try to drive new revenue with these? No profits, burnt goodwill—cynically, I wonder, is it just make-work to keep restless engineers happy and out of the arms of potential upstarts and competitors?
Cool cool, if that's what you must do. Google can go on making piles of cash with their money engines and on the side, going through an elaborate game of charades as if they were making real products so they can figure out who gets get a promotion for best pretending to create anything of actual value.
But, I'm going to ignore all Google product launches and treat them as the mistimed april fools jokes they are.
Warning: Personal opinion ahead To understand why this keeps happening, you need to understand the product and engineering culture at Google. As a group, Google engineers and PMs are obsessed with promotion. At the heart of every conversation about system design or product proposal lies an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) question: will working on this get me promoted? The criteria for promotion at Google, especially…
It is general true for any big organization. In my own firm, I could see the rush into machine learning direction as a door way to a promotion. Any engineer or PM who works on a ML related project and is able to ship it would have a higher chance of getting promoted. I could also say the same for the usage of AWS products. In the end, I often see projects resembling the messy mashup of AWS products to form a unnecess…
Carpenter makes and sells chairs to people who need chairs, farmer grows and sells apples to people who want apples.
Then there's the line worker making just chair legs for people they'll never meet, and the farmer selling their entire apple crop to a big company that'll do who-knows-what with them—sell them, turn them into apple sauce, use them as input to some process that turns out a "natural ingredient" that's some pure, extracted chemical contained in the apples.
Then there's the sort of crap we're talking about here. Projects that obviously never should have existed in the first place, and/or that would have been better if done in a simpler, faster, cheaper way, but a ton of make-work was thrown in due to agency problems and perverse incentives.
How much of the benefit of computers is being eaten by this kind of thing? The most effective things we do with them may provide 1000x the economic output of that apple farmer, or more, but then we spend a bunch of time doing useless or negative-value stuff, without even getting into a lot of the actually-lucrative work having large negative externalities—spyware-enabled advertising, say, or even just advertising, full stop. What does it do to someone's psyche to spend 90+% of their time doing harmful or useless stuff? Hell some people end up doing nothing of actual value for years on end. What are we doing?
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Ehh, I disagree with your assessment, and to illustrate why I think you need to focus on asblockers. AMP serves a critical strategic purpose: it severely disincentivizes crappy, JS-heavy websites on search results and as a result makes people less likely to install adblockers. Google is terrified of adblockers going mainstream, to the point where they’re willing to risk anticompetitive suits by creating their own. AM…
> AMP serves a critical strategic purpose: it severely disincentivizes visiting a non-Google branded site. Fixed it for ya. P.S. Google sucks balls.
My list of degooglifying actions (mostly from my older post [1]) * switch default search engine to DuckDuckGo (one can still use the !s bang when one wants to see what Google has) * use tracking blockers (uBlock origin, BlockBear on iOS) * use anonymous/private/porn mode browsing most of the time (except for sites I actually want to be logged in permanently) * use Zoho as a replacement for shared Google docs * use Yo…
I can also recommend Invidious [1] as a Youtube replacement. It's effectively a proxy in front of Youtube, only loading the source data (i.e. the video) in its own container. You can subscribe to channels via the builtin RSS functionality just like on Youtube. I use a redirector extension [2] in Firefox to automatically redirect any Youtube links to Invidious, since the signature for loading videos is identical. [1]…
Then it will be killed when it gets popular, and is not a long-term replacement, because that's only dubiously legal at best (and I'm being generous there, I'd go with "not legal"), and the blocking-it arms race is going to be advantage Google.
There isn't really a replacement for YouTube, because it's not a service, it's content.
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You're basing that on pure speculation so be careful what conclusions you're drawing from it. Chromebooks have historically gotten very good support, even though they tended to be relatively underpowered - the pixelbook isn't so I wouldn't expect support to stop anytime soon.
I don't know if it counts as speculation when a number of outlets are reporting on 'roadmap cutbacks,' including asking employees in the Pixel group to look for other roles. [1] Is it 100% confirmed? No, but that's part of the brand trust referenced in the original post: where there's smoke, there is probably fire, and it would be beneficial to brand trust if Google provided a longer-term roadmap for these products.…
Pixel book is not going anywhere and they are adding to the list with the Atlas.
It was one organization that speculated incorrectly and others picked up.
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Google's only obligation is to its shareholders. AMP serves its interests. So does building covert search engines to help root out chinese dissidents. That 'cat and mouse' game is the natural order of things. There is no stopping that other than making things anti-competitive which is what Alphabet clearly wants to do. Google has become evil and we should expect nothing less from a multibillion dollar conglomerate li…
What is a "company like Alphabet"? Can any company of the size and scale of Alphabet, or aiming to be such one day, avoid these pressures? Why isn't this the Google we grew up with, given that this is what Google was growing up to be all along? A serious question is whether a young company in roughly the state Google was in the early '00s can reasonably commit to never becoming a multibillion-dollar conglomerate.
They simply could have committed not to becoming a publicly traded company. I know every YC investor looks at going public as the end all be all for every company on earth but I think the pursuit of the public market at all costs mindset typically espoused by communities like this one is morally devoid and obviously has long term consequences in the tech community at large.
Go public at all costs is the mindset here and in most VC communities. Make money at all costs is really what they mean to say. Get rid of that mindset.
Google used to have a moral compass. That was the Google I grew up with. Before all the pressures of being a publicly traded multibillion-dollar conglomerate got to them and now they are basically no better than ATT.
Closing inbox has really made me re-evaluate if I want to continue using Google for email, as the clusterf--- of garbage that Gmail has turned into for people with long-standing accounts is untenable. The kitchen-sink approach of gmail has created a website/app that wants to meet every need and honestly meets none. In the next 24 hours or so I'll be forced from a clean and clear perfectly rolled up and ideal notifyin…
Closing inbox has really made me re-evaluate if I want to continue using Google for email, as the clusterf--- of garbage that Gmail has turned into for people with long-standing accounts is untenable. The kitchen-sink approach of gmail has created a website/app that wants to meet every need and honestly meets none. In the next 24 hours or so I'll be forced from a clean and clear perfectly rolled up and ideal notifyin…
I completely agree. Gmail doesn't seem to have that much customisation. I don't understand why the "Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums" are baked in without being able to customise them. The Inbox bundles seem to be slightly renamed categories that Gmail has, but with the ability that they're always on the main page and being able to create your own. Why couldn't this be easily ported back over to Gmail and tweaked…
It's one of the reasons I will never buy any games on google stadia when it launches, I expect it to be shut down in 2-3 years. I have the network to use streaming so I'm not so worried about performance, ps now for instance is almost indistinguishable from playing locally on my ps3.
This makes me think that Stadia might be a "build now, monetize later" experiment that will quickly be shut down if/when people don't buy/subscribe and no other revenue stream is easily found.
I might pay for Stadia if it was something like PaperSpace, where I can basically spin up a VPS optimized for game streaming, install steam, and play whatever games I have. Absent that, Stadia would need to provide offline copies of the games for backup should their service either go down or be cancelled.