Google is pure evil. The worst cyber-villain in human existance.
The IBM-ification of Google?
151–160 of 168 posts
Re: The IBM-ification of Google?
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not about stickiness. People complain because they liked the dead product . Do you hear complaints about Google+ dying? Reader wasn't a risk, it was a product people loved that wasn't hard to run. It was just too boring to maintain, didn't support the ad monopoly, and Google dropped it for the next shiny monetizable object. Anyway, enterprise products are an entirely different ballgame where product support,…
Well, actually, Google+ circa 2014 was the only social network that had enough of the interesting technical content for me, and I did use it in exactly the way how one would use a decent social network: I posted my content, got comments, and read what other people posted. Some formatting weirdness aside, it was not bad at all, and surely better and quieter, in a good sense, than Facebook back then, and especially tha…
I thought the “circles” idea made total sense and it could have been a good social network, if they had let it do that instead of forcing it into every other part of Google.
Re: The IBM-ification of Google?
#153Not 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…
I've come to believe that Big Tech's fondness for launch-and-kill approaches to new products is closely related to the career incentives for both PMs and finance chiefs. Both of them are acting rationally to advance their careers. In tandem, they create a horrifying cycle of death.
Product managers win their chops by launching something and winning applause for getting fast adoption in the first few months. Once the boss says "Wow," it's on to a bigger new chance. It's habit-forming to outrun your failures in a system where personal incentives reward ephemeral success.
Finance folks win their chops by identifying bits of the company that aren't pulling their (economic) weight. If you haven't delivered $$$ of efficiency savings, why are you even on the payroll? Pulling the plug on small/mid-sized products that have plateaued is the way you get recognition and promotions.
CEOs, of course, could change this. But they're the ultimate plate-spinners in a big company, trying to keep up the appearance that they've got everything in control and making sure that neither shareholders nor employees mutiny. As long as they've got a new sizzle story to sell, no one (except users) is there to grieve about what's dying. And users of a product that's less than 1% of revenue can be safely ignored.
Re: The IBM-ification of Google?
#154> 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…
& people wonder why Microsoft quickly gained ground in Cloud.
they know how to support businesses - small or large. better support if you're enterprise.
hell M$ can even have people at your place in an instant - not the "forward-deployed engineer" propaganda being spread around by SV these days.
Re: The IBM-ification of Google?
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the use of Account manager if a billion dollar company got screwedup for straight 5 + hours?
Without an account manager, you submit a ticket and no one looks at it for a few days. With an account manager, you call this person up immediately, and they hound the devs in person or call up the devs personally.
If iam an enterprise customer, the least i expect will be a prior communication and a warning email before account termination. Is this too much?
Re: The IBM-ification of Google?
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The common critique of Googles actions - the organization has profits, therefore there is no problem engaging in less profitable activities — strikes me as superficial. It’s not about investing any given portion of revenues, it’s investing optimally. There are opportunity costs that must be considered in investments (and that means Net Present Value calculations). Google’s revenue and profits are for the shareholders…
Yes, but this is exactly my point. You can't perfectly calculate exactly how much revenue is lost due to breaking trust with users because you repeatedly sunset projects that they've relied on.
Maybe if Google had those support engineers on Google+ for 5 years generating $X, that would've created enough trust that Gemini could now generate $4X.
Re: The IBM-ification of Google?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without an account manager, you submit a ticket and no one looks at it for a few days. With an account manager, you call this person up immediately, and they hound the devs in person or call up the devs personally.
If iam an enterprise customer, the least i expect will be a prior communication and a warning email before account termination. Is this too much?
This problem likely had nothing to do with the account manager though. I doubt it was the account manager making the call to suspend the account.
Re: The IBM-ification of Google?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
The common critique of Googles actions - the organization has profits, therefore there is no problem engaging in less profitable activities — strikes me as superficial. It’s not about investing any given portion of revenues, it’s investing optimally. There are opportunity costs that must be considered in investments (and that means Net Present Value calculations). Google’s revenue and profits are for the shareholders…
Yes, but this is exactly my point. You can't perfectly calculate exactly how much revenue is lost due to breaking trust with users because you repeatedly sunset projects that they've relied on. Maybe if Google had those support engineers on Google+ for 5 years generating $X, that would've created enough trust that Gemini could now generate $4X.
It’s also hard to estimate the lost revenue from projects which aren’t started because your staff is busy maintaining legacy projects.
Re: The IBM-ification of Google?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typically a strong account team builds processes with other teams (compliance, engineering, etc) that enshrines and insulates important accounts from accidents like this. In this case, I'd expect major accounts (and maybe Railway isn't above this level?) to be in a protected tier that is immune from automated suspensions like this. If suspicious traffic occurs that _would_ trigger a suspension like that, the account…
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48231538 , they appeared to have everything you can have, and it wasn’t enough to prevent this.
Oh I was just describing to GP what a strong customer motion would do to protect against these things, not commenting on what Railway had or didn't.
But clearly GCP _doesn't_ have a strong customer motion or this story wouldn't have happened.
Re: The IBM-ification of Google?
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
My company also used all 3 (at a very large scale / spends). MS was nice, but useless / incompetent technically. Anything non-trivial took forever to get a straight answer or resolve. We rarely got to speak directly to anyone with real expertise. AWS, we could speak directly to Sr engineers on the relevant team. Full transparency, highly responsive. They were clearly trying to understand our issues and suggest change…
My experience with AWS hasn't been good when we had major problems in redshift becoming unresponsive. Since it was an intermitent issue and not a full blown blackout they just shrugged and we kept having problems for months.
I can confirm. Redshift support is mediocre even for a F100 firm with TAM support if the workload is large and complex and you have some needle in the haystack causing problems like you allude to.
Practically speaking keeping an eye on locks and transactions is a good idea, as is watching out for your statistics on key core columns going bad when they shouldn't. (analyze and vacuum sometimes don't actually do anything when you need them to...)