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Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

arstechnica.com

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Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#391

Post by ken »

jfasi wrote: post #61

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…

Stupid question: why are Google engineers so obsessed with promotion? I'm sure any entry-level engineer there makes more than I ever have in my life, and anyone who hasn't cashed in their billion-dollar startup lottery ticket by now is far too late to the party to ever do so.

What exactly is the benefit of promotion? Is a 6-figure salary and all the perqs in the world not enough? At all the places I've worked, from tiny startups to big stable companies, I haven't seen this phenomenon. Does Google's rapid rise simply attract the sorts of people who feel they deserve it?

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#392

Post by Jasper_ »

what_ever wrote: post #390
Jasper_ wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The slowest, most resource-intensive web sites I visit are, in order: Slack, GMail, and Google Play Music. If Google wants others to take web performance seriously, they should start with their own internal stuff.

Are Slack, GMail, Google Play Music websites or web applications? AMP is not applicable to sites/applications that remain open in your tabs all the time. I think it's more applicable to pages you open, consume the information and close the tab in couple of minutes. Disc: Googler but nowhere close to AMP.

Let's say Google Maps then. It will show up in search results, artificially at the top because of close integration, but performs incredibly poorly. I can't take their claims about AMP being about performance seriously when they do not seem to make any attempt at optimizing the stuff that they put on top.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#393

Post by vardump »

wlesieutre wrote: post #69
o10449366 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I know a lot of "non-techies" that switched to using iPhones just for iMessage because Google's messaging ecosystem is confusing and seems to change every 12 months. I also know a lot of non-techies that use Google Play Music to upload and manage their own music libraries. It's rumored that Play Music is going to be killed in the next few months as Google pushes YouTube music subscriptions instead. The pr…

> Google's messaging ecosystem is confusing and seems to change every 12 months Don't worry, they'll launch a new messaging platform that will definitely sort this out for real this time!

I know you're joking. That said, they're planning to use RCS, a successor of SMS. I guess the users will be expected to pay for each message or to buy a package. I also don't expect to be able to send from a web site, unless my phone is active and the message can be sent through it.

Just no. I'd rather use even WhatsApp than that.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#394

Post by Aeolun »

ken wrote: post #391
jfasi wrote: post #61

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…

Stupid question: why are Google engineers so obsessed with promotion? I'm sure any entry-level engineer there makes more than I ever have in my life, and anyone who hasn't cashed in their billion-dollar startup lottery ticket by now is far too late to the party to ever do so. What exactly is the benefit of promotion? Is a 6-figure salary and all the perqs in the world not enough? At all the places I've worked, from t…

I’m not sure I understand this perspective. If I’m making 100k, and I could be making 150k by being promoted, while working on interesting new things at the same time (regardless of success), then that is what I would be doing.

Little point in sticking at 100k my whole career for some misplaced sense of honor.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#395

Post by rhizome »

What "brand?" They sought to dilute it by creating Alphabet, then continued a habit of unreliability in everything that could be said to support their "brand."

If you look at Google/Alphabet, they are a search engine, gmail/gdocs, and somewhat of a device maker. Everything else might be killed off today. Or not. Who knows? Certainly none of us. Regardless, they survive as long as they do as the gadgets that they started as during somebody's 20% time or pre-acquisition ramen-startup era. Might as well be toys.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#396

Post by Aeolun »

joefkelley wrote: post #291
TheTruth1234 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, but to you and any other GOOGLE EMPLOYEES Are you not internally aware of this? Do you just carry on regardless? What happens when you voice this issue internally? As an ex-Google fan boy, the title of this article has been true for years and it's what poisoned me (and no doubt many others) against you. So you must be aware of it. What's your take? I'm super curious as to why you gave up tech (brand) leadersh…

Oh everyone is aware of it. They have been making some changes to the promotion process to try to address it. But it's still a huge issue. I'm not so sure about what the alternative is, though. The promotion process at other places I've worked was pretty much "does your boss like you? If so, they'll promote you." Which has a whole host of other issues. For instance you can get promoted for doing a mediocre job at mai…

On the other hand, you could be promoted for just doing a great job and being a fit for the new position without any hassle.

I feel people are underestimating the benefits of this simple structure.

Nobody would want to promote someone that will consistently make them look bad.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#397

Post by int_19h »

Flockster wrote: post #115
criley2 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I don't want a mail program is because 99.9% of my email is utter garbage, so the idea that I need to take up bandwidth and diskspace and processor time on my machine to basically download gigabytes of unwanted advertising, scams, phishing attempts, etc, is ridiculous.

My experience with Gmail is the complete opposite. It is far better at filtering spam/phishing - mails than all the other free mail services.

It used to be the case, but apparently they can't sustain it without tightening the filters. In the past few months, the false positive rate went through the roof, and I don't trust their filters anymore.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#398

Post by bradlys »

ken wrote: post #391
jfasi wrote: post #61

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…

Stupid question: why are Google engineers so obsessed with promotion? I'm sure any entry-level engineer there makes more than I ever have in my life, and anyone who hasn't cashed in their billion-dollar startup lottery ticket by now is far too late to the party to ever do so. What exactly is the benefit of promotion? Is a 6-figure salary and all the perqs in the world not enough? At all the places I've worked, from t…

You could go from making $200k/yr to $400k/yr with one to two promotions.

It's a big jump and for people who live in an area where homes are regularly $2-4m (they're not even nice homes), you have to make big money in order to afford one.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#399

Post by _ptgt »

JohnWilcox wrote: post #329
blihp wrote: post #302

Customers/users/developers don't care what the reasons are, only that it continues to happen. What is especially irksome to many is that they are shutting down products/services that found an audience... just not one large enough, fast enough to Google's taste. The more they shut down products, the longer many are going to wait before even considering using one of their new products/services especially if there's a c…

It’s odd that Google/Alphabet doesn’t understand this basic negative feedback loop. It has become apparent to me, even if you ignore the rot that has pervaded throughout the organization, which is manifesting itself in Search results.

I'm sure individuals within the company understand it. Maybe even most individuals.

Get people in large groups though and throw career advancement in the mix for highly career-driven Googlers and all of a sudden what everyone knows to be good for the group ceases up be relevant.

Re: Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

#400

Post by sigmaml »

svachalek wrote: post #256
sigmaml wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is anecdata, but in my reasonably large group of acquaintances and fellow professionals (hundreds), I haven't heard this complaint in ages! In any case, if you are having spam delivered to your inbox in GMail, it is very easy to train it to detect spam. Mark as many such as you can, and report them as spam. GMail learns very quickly.

The problem is the big gray zone between spam and letters from Mom. All those mailing lists you get on because you signed into their website or thought something looked interesting once, and they're more or less behaving themselves but still more noise than you're willing to deal with most days. Inbox dealt with that category of mail, which is at least 90% of what I get, in a simply beautiful way that I can't replace…

I understand.

1. Does any other provider have better spam filtering than GMail, though? Curious.

2. You can configure inbox to show all the messages in Primary. Then, the tabs don't appear.

3. I don't see any ads. Probably because I pay for storage?

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