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The IBM-ification of Google?

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Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#81

Post by light_hue_1 »

somesortofthing wrote: post #2

Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. People always talk about how big companies fail because they're unwilling to take risks and just recommit to their areas of strength, but this is what risk-taking looks like - you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't. People who think it's a quality product won't be wary of whether it'll get killed - the…

> Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. ... you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't

Except that Google kills the products we use! Google Reader had basically the entire community.

No one cares when they kill something niche.

I don't touch new Google products, they're toxic.

And now with AI I can finally stop using their search too. All that will be left is email because it's too much of a commodity.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#82

Post by CivBase »

jeffbee wrote: post #27

"Everyone hates YouTube" is an argument that has a lot to overcome. All objective indicators suggest it is incredibly popular, and growing in popularity, pretty much across the demographic board.

I hate it, but I still use it. The platform sucks, but most of the content isn't available anywhere else. Between the infrastructure cost, the difficulty of monetization, and the immense user/create base already invested in the platform, I don't think it's possible for anyone to compete with YouTube without government intervention.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#83

Post by throw5 »

I am sure I am not alone in observing that starting around 2020... may be even a few years earlier... Google seemed to hire a lot of middle managers. I personally knew several managers who did not seem to contribute much beyond "organizing" meetings, and I saw them all join Google one by one.

It made me think... what happened to Google's famous hiring standards? What happened to Google's engineering-heavy structure? Google is now filled with middle managers whose only previous experience has been "being scrum masters". Right then I knew that these ineffective managers I saw joining Google were not only the symptoms of Google's decline but would also become one of the causes of speeding up the decline.

How could they let this happen? What happened to all their gatekeeping... "we are okay with false negatives in hiring but we'll NOT have false positives"? Current Google hiring is all about hiring loads of true negatives.

I think I saw a similar fall in hiring standards for engineering roles too but I will leave it to someone with more data to confirm me or refute me.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#84

Post by csallen »

janalsncm wrote: post #75
csallen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that Google internally is well aware of the negative press that comes with product shutdowns, and is doing them regardless as a deliberate strategic tradeoff where they believe the benefits outweigh the costs. But it's very difficult to measure the costs, bc the #1 cost is lost trust, and how do you measure that? Many people simply won't sign up for a Google product bc they don't trust it'll be around long e…

It’s not just the price of keeping the servers humming. You have to pay people to maintain the software. So now you’re paying hundreds or thousands of people to maintain zombie software.

Yeah, there are costs for sure. But this is "zombie software" with millions, probably tens of millions of users. And Google has ~80,000 engineers? And the company prints an incredible amount of money.

I think the real cost/risk here is not financial, but strategic, i.e. preventing a loss of focus.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#85

Post by kaashif »

cyberax wrote: post #58
amazingamazing wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://openrouter.ai/rankings

Uhh... It's on the 13-th place in rankings. And way behind in most benchmarks?

#6 in usage by tokens. It obviously has some use case. My experience is that Gemini is much more token efficient than other models. Measuring tokens is like measuring distance travelled by measuring fuel consumption.

I mostly use Codex though, I can't be bothered to have more than one subscription.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#86

Post by abhiyerra »

illusive4080 wrote: post #60

IBM is reinventing itself, no? From mainframe maximalists to purchasing HashiCorp, Red Hat, Confluent. All to capture enterprise for years to come. It seems as if IBM is making a comeback.

If you read their annual report they bet the farm on RedHat and Kubernetes. They spun off their legacy services business and have basically have monopoly power over the Federal government, banks and defense contractors. They have been buying out other Kubernetes vendors such as Kubecost. They are are pretty focused now, we will see how well they will do long term.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#87

Post by verst »

sylens wrote: post #62
raggi wrote: post #38

> Look at the Railway GCP account ban situation. A literally billion dollar startup running on Google Cloud and Google just randomly snaps their fingers and deletes their account. Zero warning. No phone number to call. No account rep. Poof. Gone. It is actual insanity to me. A billion dollar customer gets the exact same automated middle finger as a low effort spam bot. Your B2B business is completely cooked if that i…

Our team at work uses all three major public clouds and our Google Account Team is by far the worst of the three. Nothing like having to explain the same problem I’m having from the start again on every monthly cadence call because they don’t note anything or try to help resolve it

Who is the best? Just curious.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#88

Post by trollbridge »

coderenegade wrote: post #32

Google is in an incredibly strong position. They're a top tier AI vendor, and in a world where content creation is largely commoditized and outsourced to AI, advertising companies will determine what gets seen, and what gets buried in the noise. They control both generation and visibility of what gets generated. Facebook could be in the same position, but they aren't as strong in AI. OpenAI wants to be Google, but th…

And at one point, IBM was at the head of the pack with AI. Remember Deep Blue?

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#89

Post by htrp »

trollbridge wrote: post #88
coderenegade wrote: post #32

Google is in an incredibly strong position. They're a top tier AI vendor, and in a world where content creation is largely commoditized and outsourced to AI, advertising companies will determine what gets seen, and what gets buried in the noise. They control both generation and visibility of what gets generated. Facebook could be in the same position, but they aren't as strong in AI. OpenAI wants to be Google, but th…

And at one point, IBM was at the head of the pack with AI. Remember Deep Blue?

Remember Watson?
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