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More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

bloomberg.com

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Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#221

Post by feanaro »

Kovah wrote: post #177
Mr_P wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take a step back, Google's launch & deprecate cycle for new products actually kind-of makes sense. Internally, Google is not so different from an ecosystem of VC-funded startups. They try a lot of things. Some ideas work and others don't. The alternative is to never ship new products out of fear of failure. Or, to indefinitely support everything, regardless of how tiny. Or, to wait so long to derisk a new prod…

From a business perspective, Google's way to work with products makes totally sense, as you described. But - and that's that problem I have with Google - from a user perspective, their way to work is unprofessional. Why did this become an internet meme? Because all the projects they launch are launched with a lot of loud tam tam, they advertise them and for new users it clearly feels like this new product is here to…

Gmail was famously in beta for many years, long after it became an extremely important service.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#222

Post by piyush_soni »

feanaro wrote: post #215
mac01021 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are expensive. And their presence compromises your family's privacy.

I'm afraid having Google's robot butlers around all the time wouldn't do wonders for privacy either.

Better than an actual person though, at least for now.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#223

Post by tyingq »

petra wrote: post #209
jillesvangurp wrote: post #172

Arguably, Google's best CEO was Eric Schmidt. He's the one that turned Google from a startup into an awesome tech company. But nobody ever accused him of having no vision. That's because vision was not his role. That role was for both founders who acted in a duo CTO role. Looking at Google today, they have a CEO but no CTO and the founders seem to be not involved in day to day strategy of Google. So, the real problem…

I do think that Google has a technical vision. They want more people writing amazing content, and not SEO garbage. They want to offer people focused answers to their questions. They want to serve as your personal assistant. They want people to really trust the first answer they get from Google. And they want to be deeply integrated with your life. The thing is: building AWS is more of an engineering project. Achievin…

"They want more people writing amazing content, and not SEO garbage"

I'm not convinced on this one. It feels like they've ceded the SEO spam war to me. As mentioned in the article, they just crudely exclude large swaths of content now instead of trying to filter out actually bad content.

And they have just generally devalued the organic results in favor of ads, widgets, curated stuff...anything that keeps you walled in to Google owned properties or ads. It's fairly common now to have zero organic results above the fold.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#224

Post by netheril96 »

vl wrote: post #115
ajmbbs wrote: post #14

Is this a bit similar to what Microsoft went through in the early 2000s?

All corporations grow, decay and rot on the similar trajectories, so in this sense it's similar. I worked at MS at this time, and I think BigG now is like MS in 2003 roughly speaking. I'm waiting for miniggl to appear, then the circle will be complete. :)

What/Who is miniggl?

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#225

Post by netheril96 »

scottlocklin wrote: post #199
mav3rick wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right Google is losing in ML or not caught up to speed ? I don't know when you left but even outside Google it's pretty much known that ML innovation is Google's strength. Two big teams use Rust at Google in production. I guess Google didn't make the TPU or Tensor Flow as well. Take your pitch forks out but once you're done have a look at some facts.

They kicked off the deep learning trend when they bought deep mind I guess. Otherwise what innovation are you talking about? Switching from KNN to DL in machine translations is impressive as a technical achievement ... but not really an innovation, and I doubt all this "innovation" impacts their bottom line in any way.

> Otherwise what innovation are you talking about?

Quantity: Google has the highest number of deep learning papers accepted into top conferences among all institutions, even when papers from DeepMind are not counted in Google's.

Quality: Transformer and the recent BERT have, pun intended, transformed the entire NLP field. Batch normalization is now a staple of all neural networks, as are its descendants instance normalization, group normalization, etc.

These are just on top of my head. Google may have done many things wrong these days, but it definitely has not lost any edge in machine learning.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#227

Post by petra »

tyingq wrote: post #223
petra wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think that Google has a technical vision. They want more people writing amazing content, and not SEO garbage. They want to offer people focused answers to their questions. They want to serve as your personal assistant. They want people to really trust the first answer they get from Google. And they want to be deeply integrated with your life. The thing is: building AWS is more of an engineering project. Achievin…

"They want more people writing amazing content, and not SEO garbage" I'm not convinced on this one. It feels like they've ceded the SEO spam war to me. As mentioned in the article, they just crudely exclude large swaths of content now instead of trying to filter out actually bad content. And they have just generally devalued the organic results in favor of ads, widgets, curated stuff...anything that keeps you walled…

As of anything with SEO, it's all guesses.

But in general, the job of SEO's is increasingly being about writing better content and satisfying the user, and less about "tricks". That's true , at least generally.

But when i say better content, better is defined as more engaging, shareable, linkable, clickable. that sort of stuff. This isn't our cup of tea here at HN, but maybe that's what most people go for. Maybe.

BTW, my fun pet conspiracy theory(everybody should have one!) , is that somewhere deep in the belly of alphabet, they have a secret search engine built for engineers, that nobody knows it exists, even the engineers(it uses a google theme), and it's the key behind their moonshot empire. :)

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#229

Post by ramraj07 »

ptd wrote: post #159
aylmao wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their search engine is really hard to replace, not just because of the quality, but also because of how ubiquitous it is. For the web, yes. I'd argue it's not threatened by other search engines, though it is threatened by other players and indexes: - Apps. Google can't crawl apps, and people are getting used to the idea of finding information in separate indexes as opposed to a single universal one. Each app today…

I think you’re a more sophisticated user. Most people would just google something like best [type of food] restaurant in [city]. They’re not going to help specially for yelp stuff when it shows up on google anyways. If I want to find someone’s Facebook, I search for their name and Facebook on google.

Yelp is for sophisticated users?

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#230

Post by move-on-by »

tinus_hn wrote: post #219

I used to love them, now I avoid them like the plague. If possible I do not use any Google products.

Yeah me too. They’ve made it a lot easier on me by killing off the two products that I still enjoyed, inbox and hangouts. Thanks Google! You made the transition easier then expected. Even if I did have a shred of trust for google, why would I invest myself into a new product of theirs? They’ll just kill it off
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