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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

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Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#501

Post by uniqueid »

mav3rick wrote: post #497
uniqueid wrote: post #494

I'm surprised the author doesn't spend more time discussing Google's search engine. I've been using DDG as my primary search for a while, because Google Search has been returning increasingly bad results already for quite some months. For the past couple days I've tried Google's Search again, and, oh wow!, it is hilariously bad now, just laughable! It now entirely ignores search terms, and the AI and ad-based results…

Yes, the entire world is raving about DDG results.

Let's revisit the topic three months from now. The change to which I refer probably occurred less than a month ago. Not that Google results hadn't already been going downhill for months prior, but it became dramatically worse at some point over the past month.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#502

Post by tengbretson »

qubex wrote: post #224
tengbretson wrote: post #71

It boggles my mind to imagine how many verticals in the technology space have been kneecapped because of google. There could be so many companies that could offer amazing services but they just can't compete with a half-assed "free" service made by Google, which is just a temporary cost center for all the ad revenue they don't know what to do with.

You’ve just made the core argument of anti-trust legislation, which is far broader in scope than discussion of monopolies and far subtler. At root, monopolies are easy to detect, and it follows fairly uncontroversially from basic economics that’s been agreed-upon for centuries that if there are no (potential) competitors than there is no competition, rent-seeking/profit-gouging behaviour ensures by the incumbent, and…

This is a great summary! The thing I see Google doing that I believe is even worse is that they swoop in early on in an innovative space and get their subsidized free offering on the market first or early. This seems to prevent these tiers from forming entirely, since even if a competitor can beat "free" they have to constantly be looking over their shoulder to make sure Google doesn't give away their killer features, so no one ends up even playing!

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#503

Post by scarface74 »

jariel wrote: post #417
scarface74 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was listening to an interview from a manager at GCP on the “Screaming in the Cloud” podcast. He had written a great cost calculator that would show how much money that someone could save over AWS. But because he couldn’t convince corporate to adopt it and when it became a feature it fell under the reliability guidelines, they canned it even though customers liked it.

So there are at least a few things here: 1) A 'cost calculator' will be a hugely sensitive product, that is absolutely in the domain of sales, it has nothing to do with dev. So many sales issues around that - this will be the primary issue with such a product. 2) Just because some people like it doesn't mean it's worth maintaining. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. Paradoxically, because it was such a marketing/sales focu…

If you are trying to get enterprise customers, do you really want to be known as the company that drops features at the drop of dime?

AWS has a number of services that have been deprecated for years but it still supports like SimpleDB and running an EC2 instance outside of a VPC. Heck they still support transferring files from S3 over BitTorrent in older regions.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#504

Post by bsder »

jariel wrote: post #422
dleslie wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy. On the outset, you might think with such ridiculously high compensation there would be an expectation of quality, but I think that's an error. Google operates as an ad-company that happens to employ ridiculous amounts of exhorbitantly compensated individuals to engage in market and technological research, particularly to open or exp…

"_open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same." No, I think they wanted to make money from it directly via Enterprise sales. MS Office is the #1 source of profit for MS for a long while. In the 2000's it seemed 'everything was going cloud', naturally Google thought they could leapfrog MS into that space. But it didn't work out.

Well, obviously, if Google was going to have to take an actual phone call from somebody when things went pear-shaped, that was never going to work out.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#505

Post by uniqueid »

mav3rick wrote: post #497
uniqueid wrote: post #494

I'm surprised the author doesn't spend more time discussing Google's search engine. I've been using DDG as my primary search for a while, because Google Search has been returning increasingly bad results already for quite some months. For the past couple days I've tried Google's Search again, and, oh wow!, it is hilariously bad now, just laughable! It now entirely ignores search terms, and the AI and ad-based results…

Yes, the entire world is raving about DDG results.

...and by the way, have you not noticed that your Google search results are peppered with paid results, and search terms that went "missing"?

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#506

Post by dleslie »

300bps wrote: post #476
Spooky23 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, no. They have >100k employees.

Google has 118,899 employees. IBM has 352,600 which is about 3x the number of employees that Google has.

You're comparing a 900lbs Gorilla to a 300lbs Gorilla and sort of overlooking that they're both Gorillas.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#507

Post by mdoms »

agustamir wrote: post #254
SenHeng wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We recently switched from Meet back to Zoom, because Zoom lets you use your speakers while Meet requires everyone to use a headset. Zoom does some kind of active noise-cancelling where it will avoid picking up whatever the person on the other end just said, preventing the echo effect. Meet doesn't, it picks up everything. So if you use a speaker, everything the other person says gets repeated back at them. When Meet…

> Zoom lets you use your speakers while Meet requires everyone to use a headset Really? Is that restriction on desktop or mobile? I've been using speaker mode on meet(mobile) for a while now. Or is it implicitly imposed by you due to lack of noise cancelling features?

No this is definitely not correct for mobile or web platforms. You 100% do not need a headset, although you should use one because Meet's echo cancellation is pretty aggressive and causes all kinds of problems without a headset.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#508

Post by agentdrtran »

crazygringo wrote: post #452

Google's been improving G Suite a ton , but just not "innovating" in the way the author wants. What Google hasn't been doing is blowing up how word processors and spreadsheets work, like a "Google Wave" re-envisioning or something of them. Why? Because people understand how Word and Excel and Docs and Sheets work and don't want change . What Google has been doing over the past ten years centers around 1) interoperabi…

I'm not asking Google to throw away how docs or slides work and I like the simplicity of G Suite, but look at the quarterly reports for G Suite customers and Docs will get one or two things. It's still missing tons of basic features (mixed page orientation!). Sheet's "explore" mode has been useless for me, as most AI features are. Drive File Stream is cool but the transition process was a disaster and accessing cloud files on a local machine is not exactly amazing. I would love if Google didn't try to "innovate" and focused on making improvements to what they have.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#509

Post by zepto »

dleslie wrote: post #506
300bps wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has 118,899 employees. IBM has 352,600 which is about 3x the number of employees that Google has.

You're comparing a 900lbs Gorilla to a 300lbs Gorilla and sort of overlooking that they're both Gorillas.

I think the argument is that the 300lb gorilla is actually an overweight chimp.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#510

Post by dlubarov »

iknowpromo wrote: post #474
foobiekr wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are they getting _promoted_ though. successful promo packet for sustaining work would be a very big change.

I've seen a bunch of successful promo packets for work on code health, system reliability, etc. - including promos to L6. The "trick" to successful L5 and L6 promos (and above) for this sort of work is to have credible estimates of the actual impact of your work. Way too many engineers spend quarters or years refactoring or rewriting systems, and then go for promo with a case that's basically: "System X was kludgy, c…

Another ex-Googler here. This seems like a viable strategy, but it seems rather inefficient for the organization, don't you think? E.g.

> Write some queries, run an internal survey

> Write a proposal doc, get it reviewed by others

Even if one could convincingly claim a causal effect on those noisy metrics, that sounds like quite a bit of overhead. IMO the majority of cleanup or bug fixing work shouldn't require any sort of formal planning or justification. At other companies, we would just go ahead and do the work. Then if an IC's work shows a pattern of code quality improvements, the manager should take notice and make sure it's considered in any promotion decisions.

Moreover, the strategy you mention requires a concerted effort to improve the quality of a particular component in a short period of time. Ideally one should evaluate bugs and quality issues as they arise, and most of them should be fixed promptly. But if a Googler is optimizing for promotions, it seems better to let code rot for months or years, then fix many issues in a short sprint to create a nice dip in the metrics.

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