The future does not belong to Google and Facebook. Data privacy is too important to allow massive grow in ads, and they are not companies organized around selling software. As the article points out, we can live without both. It isn’t 2009.
Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
181–190 of 576 posts
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#182Google's main liability is that they can never, under any circumstances, prioritize user privacy. The reason the products listed by the author have rough corners is that those products don't contribute much to the bottom line. Google is an advertising company that happens to use technology. The problem is that too many people view it as a technology company that happens to be into advertising. As browsers adopt ad-bl…
> Nothing Google will try to do in the years ahead will change the basic equation.
If Google splits up their various products into separate companies forced to survive on their own without Google's monopoly money to fall back on, we might actually see some quality products and services out of Google for the first time in a long, long time.
Of course, the leadership will have to pull their heads out of their gilded asses for something like that to ever happen.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#183Someone once described the big tech companies this way:
Google is about solving tough/new engineering problems;
Microsoft is about building software;
Apple is about the consumer;
Facebook is about your attention span;
Amazon is about your wallet.
I thought that summed up their personalities pretty well so thought I’d share.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#184To be clear, this is a stealth ad for Hey email service wrapped in a rant against Google. #1 on HN 20 minutes after posting. It's quite impressive, actually.
(author here) i promise this is not an ad for Hey haha, have no affiliation with basecamp and wish i was that good at content marketing.
It's kind of fishy this is the only comment OP responded to. And OP's other most recent comment was on a basecamp thread
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#185They were too busy grinding leetcode and focusing on "playing the game" and not growing or hiring innovators. The Max Howell incident is a perfect example. Creates legitimately useful software that everyone loves, can't invert a binary tree (because we do this all day right? this question is highly relevant to the job /s) so you can't work here.
Maybe at one point edit distance questions were useful in identifying the 2% of CS grads that actually paid attention in class, but now it just produces code bots.
Google gamified the interview, and in the process, became beholden and captured by its own madness.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#186To be clear, this is a stealth ad for Hey email service wrapped in a rant against Google. #1 on HN 20 minutes after posting. It's quite impressive, actually.
(author here) i promise this is not an ad for Hey haha, have no affiliation with basecamp and wish i was that good at content marketing.
I am extremely doubtful.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#187Google had (or still has) perverse incentives.
No incentive to do the boring work of maintaining and improving existing products.
Lots of incentive to create new things -- even if they overlap functionality of existing things -- which then must be phased out to make room for the awkward new things. Even if everyone preferred the old things.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#188There was some point in the past year I read a comment here about the problem with Google is that when people wants to get promoted at Google to a senior or Staff (PE?) position they need to invent those big changes or projects. It results in adding bloat into existing software or abandon one.
I am having that feeling at this point in my career. Without a moonshot project I wouldn’t expect to get pass an assessment committee. It’s sad.
One of my colleagues working for Netflix tells me that they don’t have any fancy titles except senior SDE there. They pay you more if you’re that worthy, though. I can’t stop wondering what if tech companies follow this practice. Then, people would just focus on making stuff better instead of chasing the carrots waved in front of them.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#189It is well known the incentives at Google are aligned at working on new features than maintaining them and keeping users happy. May be this is just a natural outcome of that. This is one of the most damaging things Google and the people it influenced did to programming profession. There is a generation of programmers now who can do very well on leetcode, but god help those who maintain that code after them - I know t…
All organizations that grow rapidly face an "Alexander bias" where the sort of incentivizes, perspectives and people that allowed them to rapidly capture territory cause them to value capturing new territory even when it is no longer possible or in their organizational interest to do so. Even when organizations identify the problem, evolving from the cult of the new to the cult of incremental improvement is always ha…
How does this apply to all the chat apps? Google chat was great, wouldn't redoing the tech and making apps for all platforms have captured more territory than changing every couple years? When you have network effect, it's just crazy to try to rebuild that network every couple years if the point is to grow.
Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
#190Google's main liability is that they can never, under any circumstances, prioritize user privacy. The reason the products listed by the author have rough corners is that those products don't contribute much to the bottom line. Google is an advertising company that happens to use technology. The problem is that too many people view it as a technology company that happens to be into advertising. As browsers adopt ad-bl…
The internet runs on ads and unless every site becomes membership driven ads are a natural revenue stream. And I personally don't see memberships becoming a preferred method of subsidizing much of the internet for most people.
So ads it is, and ads it will likely be.
With that said, Google doesn't have to a bad actor to survive with regards to advertisements, as it is relatively safe revenue stream for the foreseeable future.