Google employees blast 'profoundly boring' management lacking 'visionary leader' • Hacker News Board

Re: Google employees blast 'profoundly boring' management lacking 'visionary leader'

#21

Post by bell-cot » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 1:00 PM UTC

AznHisoka wrote: post #16

bell-cot wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a disclaimer of sorts - "this is my immediate reaction, probably somewhat emotional, which should not be taken too personally nor too seriously".

If you don’t want anyone to take it personally or seriously, then maybe don’t post it

Such things are matters of degrees, and humans use all sorts of intonations, gestures, tags, emoticons, and such, to provide similar disclaimers. Being neither young nor on-line enough to feel myself fluent in the current local dialect of those, I fall back to something that feels workable, if rather clumsy.

Re: Google employees blast 'profoundly boring' management lacking 'visionary leader'

#22

Post by IAMMidway » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 1:07 PM UTC

Maro wrote: post #20

thiago_fm wrote: post #6

You don't need to be a Google employee to know its products lack innovation from day 1. It's a one trick pony company, having just created search, rest is only buy/copy/steal. It's a company rotten to the core. It bought a few companies back then and helped scale it with capital (Android, YouTube...), also copied others, like there's a whole Netflix documentary about Google Maps. Don't come saying that Gmail was geni…

Search, Ads, Analytics, Gmail, Docs, Drive, Youtube, Maps, Android, Calendar.. All 10 are category defining (but at least top 3) products. I'd like to have a 1-trick pony like that one day!

Genuine question: What is category defining about Google Calender? Or even good? In my experience it lacks a lot of features and is kind of clunky.

Re: Google employees blast 'profoundly boring' management lacking 'visionary leader'

#23

Post by Maro » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 1:11 PM UTC

IAMMidway wrote: post #22

Maro wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search, Ads, Analytics, Gmail, Docs, Drive, Youtube, Maps, Android, Calendar.. All 10 are category defining (but at least top 3) products. I'd like to have a 1-trick pony like that one day!

Genuine question: What is category defining about Google Calender? Or even good? In my experience it lacks a lot of features and is kind of clunky.

I worked at roughly 10 companies in my life. Most either used Outlook/Office or Gmail/Calendar/Drive. Personally I hate the Microsoft office productivity stack, and on the other hand, I love using the Google stack, including Calendar.

Re: Google employees blast 'profoundly boring' management lacking 'visionary leader'

#24

Post by jasfi » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 1:17 PM UTC

I'd say they're slow, not boring. But this is good for a multitude of startups, including OpenAI. This is why startups can succeed, because they move faster than the bigger companies. So is anything really wrong?

Re: Google employees blast 'profoundly boring' management lacking 'visionary leader'

#25

Post by CuriouslyC » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 1:19 PM UTC

Sundar Pichai is a MBA-bot. He's going to chase fads in a me-too fashion while running the tired MBA playbook until they give him the boot or he runs the company into an unrecoverable senescence.

Re: Google employees blast 'profoundly boring' management lacking 'visionary leader'

#26

Post by pharmakom » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 1:29 PM UTC

mola wrote: post #13

thiago_fm wrote: post #6

You don't need to be a Google employee to know its products lack innovation from day 1. It's a one trick pony company, having just created search, rest is only buy/copy/steal. It's a company rotten to the core. It bought a few companies back then and helped scale it with capital (Android, YouTube...), also copied others, like there's a whole Netflix documentary about Google Maps. Don't come saying that Gmail was geni…

Be fair, Gmail was groundbreaking. It's UX was miles ahead of anything else. Especially webmail UIs. Google was a good product company for a while. But the it wasn't anymore.

Exclusivity made everyone think so. Groundbreaking marketing, for a webmail service.

Re: Google employees blast 'profoundly boring' management lacking 'visionary leader'

#27

Post by happymellon » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 1:32 PM UTC

ctvo wrote: post #17

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's UX was miles ahead of anything else. Not my experience. UX was more or less in line with everyone else, UI just looked cleaner and prettier because it didn't yet have obtrusive ads compared to the competition. Gmail was groundbreaking because it offered 1GB of storage at launch compared to measly 100MB or so from Yahoo or Microsoft. Google brand name + invite only scarcity at launch + huge storage space + no ad…

Gmail was the first single page application I remembered using. It was eye opening to many people what the web could be as an application platform. You could compose a message and have it follow you as you read other emails, for example. It was not just about storage space: Gmail was better in every way. Even the spam filter was smarter and better than everyone else’s for a very long time.

Then they disabled the delete key from deleting an email.

Why would anyone do that?

Re: Google employees blast 'profoundly boring' management lacking 'visionary leader'

#28

Post by happymellon » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 1:33 PM UTC

idontwantthis wrote: post #9

bradhe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if Gmail was genius, it's almost 20 years old and hasn't really evolved that much since day 0.

How would you want it to evolve? It shows and sends emails good. The promotions and social tabs are nice but I’d probably rather those all just went to spam instead.

I'd like my delete key to delete emails.

Like my other mail clients.

Re: Google employees blast 'profoundly boring' management lacking 'visionary leader'

#29

Post by prepend » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 1:58 PM UTC

thiago_fm wrote: post #6

You don't need to be a Google employee to know its products lack innovation from day 1. It's a one trick pony company, having just created search, rest is only buy/copy/steal. It's a company rotten to the core. It bought a few companies back then and helped scale it with capital (Android, YouTube...), also copied others, like there's a whole Netflix documentary about Google Maps. Don't come saying that Gmail was geni…

> It's a one trick pony company

This is most successful companies though. Companies are lucky to have a single good idea. So I don’t think it’s a valid criticism to say “all McDonald’s had was franchising systematic food production” as that’s a big deal and it’s carried then all these decades. Or “all Toyota had was their production assembly method” etc etc.

I think companies are typically a really good idea and then many years of optimizing that idea and process innovation.

Re: Google employees blast 'profoundly boring' management lacking 'visionary leader'

#30

Post by aitchnyu » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 2:00 PM UTC

mola wrote: post #13

thiago_fm wrote: post #6

You don't need to be a Google employee to know its products lack innovation from day 1. It's a one trick pony company, having just created search, rest is only buy/copy/steal. It's a company rotten to the core. It bought a few companies back then and helped scale it with capital (Android, YouTube...), also copied others, like there's a whole Netflix documentary about Google Maps. Don't come saying that Gmail was geni…

Be fair, Gmail was groundbreaking. It's UX was miles ahead of anything else. Especially webmail UIs. Google was a good product company for a while. But the it wasn't anymore.

It started the trend of ...drum roll... taking you to the inbox after logging in. Others would take you to a news frontpage or some other crap. When I open a page for AWS and GCP service and I see a marketing page instead of a list of cloud resources, I die a little.