121–130 of 401 posts
Leadership all the way to the top is completely inept.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having briefly interacted with the founders of Google a couple of times, I'm pretty sure it's by design. I think that at some point, they recognized that Google must turn into a big, boring company that communicates in platitudes. There is no other way to do it when you have 150,000 employees, trillions of dollars at stake, and every regulatory agency in the world wants a piece of you. Even in the late 2000s, when Go…
Does it actually take 150k employees to produce Google's output? They grew by like 30k employees since 2021 but I'm not seeing correspondingly more or better products.
I mean, LinkedIn has what, 20,000 employees? If you had spherical developers in a vacuum, I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products, but there's more to running a tech company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm hoping they're building a commodity AR/VR operating system -- essentially spatial Android. They've already announced a partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm so I've got to imagine some interesting hardware is coming soon.
Meh, I hope they don't chase the VR train and instead focus on making Search actually usable again. It's soooo bad these days and actively getting worse, with ever more ads and SEO crap.
Google does not accidentally do things with their core products, they choose and then execute negative user experience for their own benefits.
"And I just want to clarify that, through these changes, people feel it on the ground and sometimes people write back and say, ‘Thank you for simplifying.’" Is there any mandatory training for CEOs to first understand when somebody is kissing up, second evaluate how devastating is cherry picking rare positive feedback to the company's morale? I can't believe top people can be so inept.
What he said probably cannot be verified, even. On another note, has anyone noticed how Pichai likes to take pictures in front of others’ work for the media [1]? To me, it’s a weird feeling—- like someone taking credit for others’ work. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/10/23/google-quantum-computing...
The photo you linked to is only confusing because he's not wearing a suit. Chuck that guy in a suit, have him look on politely as someone in a high-vis vest or a lab coat points at something, and this photo would be one among thousands.
(repost after every Google-bashing...) Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out. As user, I'm pretty ok with Google. Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day. Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privilege…
I want to run ads and I am unable to. Chrome never finishes loading ads.google.com so I switched to Firefox. It loads successfully on Firefox but I cannot get it to actually run an ad.
"Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision." This is definitely a small-to-large company pattern I've observed
At least from my perspective it’s just the relentless pursuit of driving stock prices up
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Waymo came out of X.
The question remains. Waymo is not really a product and it's unclear when it will become one in a broadly-deployed way.
People take Waymo on a daily basis without incident. Just because it may not be available to you doesn't mean it's not real. It is heads and shoulders above anyone else in the industry.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The technology predates X; X just housed it for a while. There were self-driving cars at Google in 2008, that look almost exactly like the ones that drive around now, except the computer vision hardware was bulkier.
That doesn’t sound right. Do you mean the Google Street View cars? Those weren’t self-driving and Google didn’t start work on that front until Sebastian Thrun joined Google X in 2009.
"Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision." This is definitely a small-to-large company pattern I've observed
At least from my perspective it’s just the relentless pursuit of driving stock prices up
(repost after every Google-bashing...) Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out. As user, I'm pretty ok with Google. Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day. Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privilege…
Are gmail and gsuite really adding features? I've used Google Slides for over a decade and I don't see any real improvement; Google Drawings is just pathetic. Basically "Powerpoint from 2001, but with doc sharing".
https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/
This lists literally every new feature it gets. Browse to your heart's content.
Here's everything specific to Slides:
https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/search/label/Google%...
I think Sheets has seen the most improvements since that's what power business users need, followed by Docs.