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Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs

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Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs

#91

Google search has gotten so bad I’m genuinely considering trying bing

Bing isn't objectively "better," just different. Same with DuckDuckGo. Yandex is the only way to find whatever Kiwi Farms' current address is.

It's 1997 all over again. We had to find stuff using Yahoo, Altavista and Lycos (and others) before AskJeeves and Dogpile started aggregating results. Then some weird company called Google showed up and blew them all away.

Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs

#92

Sundar should have been let go years ago, but I guess the pandemic money explosion made it easy for him to show big returns. But look between the margins and it's clear google is rotting on the inside. Search sucks. Gemini a year behind (despite google inventing transformers). Canceling products left and right leaving no consumer faith in new offerings. Cloud platform being an absolute terrible experience, even if yo…

> Search sucks. Subjective, but rings true. > Canceling products left and right leaving no consumer faith in new offerings. I don't think vast majority of Google users see it this way. The canceled products might be popular in HN, but have comparatively few actual users. > Cloud platform being an absolute terrible experience, even if you have a rep inside too. This seems to be consensus, yes. > Internal power groups…

> I don't think vast majority of Google users see it this way. The canceled products might be popular in HN, but have comparatively few actual users.

For their hardware products, this is definitely the case. Stadia, When they bought Fitbit, Google Home devices are few things that come to mind.

When they shut down Stadia and refunded everyone, "I would have bought games and tried out Stadia if they at least put this as part of their release announcement". What a sad state of things really.

Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen a similar degradation with my AirPods Pro. However I was thinking that to be an artifact of them aging and the mics to just be degraded…

Weird as I have been noticing all my HomePods (older and newer models) are also less responsive to “Hey Siri”. Used to be I could walk through a room and turn lights on as I went. Now they do nothing. I have to talk directly to them. I have gotten the feeling they tweaked it to ignore voice if audio fidelity does not hit thresholds that suggest the speaker is being talked to directly. Perhaps it limits false positive…

I'm not sure my Homepods are less responsive but Siri for sure is. Tons of "hold on" and "there's been a problem" for kitchen timers that I set. I don't know what it needs to do to be able to tell me the time on a timer, but at the end of their life (or before) that'll be it for Homepods.

Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs

#94

Google search has gotten so bad I’m genuinely considering trying bing

Brave search is ok. Google, Bing and Duckduckgo have terrible results.

What do you mean by "terrible"?

I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo quite a while ago now, at least a decade I think, and it meets my needs well enough that I have never bothered to try anything else.

Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs

#95
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CEO did not know this was happening? The company is (sadly) it's leadership

And a Coach gets the wind behind the wings from its Players.

Ah yes, I love this argument!

So CEO's are supposed to be magical super-rare humans who do nothing but are worth 1000s of regular workers and take all credit for good returns...

Until things go bad and then it's all the worker's fault! The ship was too big to steer!

If CEOs are worth as much as they think they are then they should have no problems taking all of their comp in stock, and bonuses (if any!) should be handcuffed to hard goals.

Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs

#96

Can anyone name one thing of value this dude has actually done in his time in charge. Feel in a few years he's gonna have a worse reputation than Ballmer in terms of squandering potential.

Stock went up ~18% per year since Oct 2015. Does anything else matter to Pichai's bosses (board & shareholders)?

Seems good until you compare it to msft or another big qqq holding over that same time span

Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs

#97

Sundar should have been let go years ago, but I guess the pandemic money explosion made it easy for him to show big returns. But look between the margins and it's clear google is rotting on the inside. Search sucks. Gemini a year behind (despite google inventing transformers). Canceling products left and right leaving no consumer faith in new offerings. Cloud platform being an absolute terrible experience, even if yo…

> Internal power groups crippling anything that isn't deemed sufficiently DEI compliant.

huh?

Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs

#98
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re showing very little understanding for how the world works with this reply. Do you think developers have free rein in big companies?

Product Managers and Division Managers and Staff Engineers and Research Scientists do, and there are thousands of each of these at Google. Maybe the problem is deeper and stem from culture and hiring practices that privilege academia, instead of real world industry and engineering experience?

And who built Google as it is? Both founders were from academia.

Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs

#99
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait a minute! Hire thousands of half genius from the best Universities in the World.Torture them with algorithmic party tricks, give them infinite budget and time for years... And....When they are unable to create competitive products outside of the usual cash cow, blame the CEO?

Yes. You can't just hire a bunch of smart people and be surprised when a product doesn't get made. That's not how building stuff works.

Actually purely stochasticaly if you would distribute cash among them and add a reward function, you should at least have VC performance.

Re: Google cites 'durable cost savings' as CEO Sundar Pichai warns of more layoffs

#100
Google Domains, a product that gave them some change(189M), was shut down.

It seems like they'll shut down any product that doesn't cause the world to stop.

We're using some products and upper management is thinking on moving parts of the core business to different platforms "just in case".

Google is loosing what little credibility they have left by always shutting down perfectly good products.

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