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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#161

Post by chatmasta »

esafak wrote: post #121
pardoned_turkey wrote: post #86

Ian's post is pretty incisive, although I've read so many of these over the past 15 years or so. And the prescription is always to go back in time. I don't really think that's possible. When you're a newcomer, a disruptor, the whole point is to be different. You're bold, you have a clarity of purpose, you say things like "we're building a new kind of a company" or "the user comes first." But once you achieve market d…

Google has the margins to take risks. If you don't disrupt yourself somebody else will.

So when Bezos says "your margin is my opportunity," he's talking to Google?

It's not just that Google can take risks because they have margins. It's more that they need to take risks to diversify their source of margins before they disappear to someone like Bezos.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#162

Post by swetland »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #126
jimbokun wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This podcast reinforces what you're saying about Android, from the perspective of an early Android engineer when it was acquired by Google: https://corecursive.com/android-with-chet-haase/

Yeah, I definetly wouldn't want to have been on the early Android team. Imagine you work your ass of to build the Android 1.0 device to compete with the Blackberry and then when you're close to launching the iPhone drops and your leadership says we gotta throw everything in the trash and start over from the touchscreen perspective. Mind you, the iPhone employees didn't have it much better either, with most of them wo…

The whole "throw everything in the trash and start over" thing is massively overstated. The iPhone announcement absolutely impacted things, not entirely all bad -- there was interest from OEMs before that, but it went through the roof after -- and it did mean we moved from the plan to ship a blackberry-style device first followed by a touchscreen device to skipping right to touch for initial launch, recognizing that the landscape had absolutely changed.

Initial work on the touchscreen based hardware started back in June 2006 (I remember meeting with HTC during a monsoon to kick off the project that became Dream/G1) and OS work to support larger displays, touch input, etc was underway before iPhone was announced.

Blackberry was not really the concern early on... Windows Mobile was. Folks (correctly as it turned out) believed mobile was going to be the next big platform area and there was concern (from Google, but also from OEMs, cellular carriers, etc) that Microsoft might end up entrenching themselves the way they did in PCs through the 90s, possibly including a more successful attempt to control the browser/web experience.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#163

Post by codewiz »

> Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.

I left 3 years ago for the same reason: I couldn't stand seeing Google continue to decline under Sundar's leadership.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#164

Post by strikelaserclaw »

fidotron wrote: post #19

This is interesting, surprisingly blunt, and quite on point about the current malaise, but . . . I think this is the perspective of someone that was happily drinking the kool aid for longer than they should have been. For example, my impression was that had Android assimilated into the wider Google they would have failed. The wider Google views the fact Android isn't Chrome OS as a strategic failure, but the truth is…

Seems like most of the people who want to join google these days, "why do you want to join google", "for the tc and prestige"

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#165

Post by Chabsff »

lesuorac wrote: post #33
nostrademons wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not localStorage.

Non-sequitor. If you look back the at the original post I say "Hard drive" not the "localStorage object". And they are indeed stored are your system and not the servers. https://allaboutcookies.org/what-is-a-cookie-file#:~:text=In... .

The distinction, and this is an important one, is that cookies have a hard cap of 4Kb of data per domain, making them nigh-useless for that purpose. All they are good for is recognizing a given user server-side across multiple page loads and storage of a few handful of user preferences. Cookies also get sent with every request, so using them as storage is just asking to balloon your bandwidth costs.

On top of that, using localStorage for storing large amounts of data rarely involves anything like a cookie warning because it's 100% client side unless manually sent back to the server. And even then, if you anonymize the data (i.e. you don't care who's storage you are using), you still don't technically need any warning.

All this to say: There is basically no relationship whatsoever between pervasive cookie warnings and the usage concerns you are voicing. Both are valid concerns, both are important stakes, but they have nothing to do with one-another.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#166

Post by steveBK123 »

pardoned_turkey wrote: post #86

Ian's post is pretty incisive, although I've read so many of these over the past 15 years or so. And the prescription is always to go back in time. I don't really think that's possible. When you're a newcomer, a disruptor, the whole point is to be different. You're bold, you have a clarity of purpose, you say things like "we're building a new kind of a company" or "the user comes first." But once you achieve market d…

Personally all large company processes start to rhyme and things feel like ground hog day.

After spending the first 10 years of my career at 100K+ employee firms, I've only worked at 500 - 2500 person companies since.

There's benefits from a process perspective of working at a big place and understanding what guardrails may be useful, and I suppose later in career boomerang back and sort of slowly coast into retirement..

But mid career if you know what you are doing and want to deliver, huge firms can be very very stifling places.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#167

Post by okdood64 »

> it's surprising how often coincidences and mistakes can appear malicious

Seems just like the recent news where YouTube was intentionally throttling Firefox, which turned out to be a not accurate representation.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#168

Post by debatem1 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #158
debatem1 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point being made is exactly that your inference about Google's motives early on was wrong. Common. But wrong.

"Our motto is "Don't be evil"" is not an inference. It's a quote.

The inference you made is that Google actually was evil all along.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#169

Post by emodendroket »

metanonsense wrote: post #148
pardoned_turkey wrote: post #86

Ian's post is pretty incisive, although I've read so many of these over the past 15 years or so. And the prescription is always to go back in time. I don't really think that's possible. When you're a newcomer, a disruptor, the whole point is to be different. You're bold, you have a clarity of purpose, you say things like "we're building a new kind of a company" or "the user comes first." But once you achieve market d…

Well said. I think this happens very naturally with every growing / successful company. Comparing my company of 30 or so with Google is like comparing a bacterium with a race horse, but even at our size being disruptive / staying innovative gets harder every month. Do you assign your best resources to the product that gets the money in? Or can you afford having capable people taking bets on new products, even when yo…

It was easier to thread this needle in an easy-money environment than now, when everyone has suddenly grown much more conservative.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#170

Post by chatmasta »

fidotron wrote: post #19

This is interesting, surprisingly blunt, and quite on point about the current malaise, but . . . I think this is the perspective of someone that was happily drinking the kool aid for longer than they should have been. For example, my impression was that had Android assimilated into the wider Google they would have failed. The wider Google views the fact Android isn't Chrome OS as a strategic failure, but the truth is…

Flutter is a really amazing project, independently of its roots within Google. If the author has spent nine years working on it, then it's understandable why he'd stay at Google even if he didn't like the taste of the Kool-Aid. And it seems he's still working on Flutter now, so clearly it's a passion project for him. Do you blame him for chugging that Kool-Aid as long as he could?
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