221–230 of 485 posts
> quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business” This seems to be the real challenge that I haven’t seen any company founder overcome. How do you keep these types of people out? It’s like one gets in, then they let all their friends in, then they overtake the company. The tech company offices I visited in 2010 were full of nerds—people who rode unicycles, j…
There are aspects to early Google that have been memory holed because they are no longer fashionable or even acceptable and yet may have been key to early success. Firstly they were allergic to design and marketers. The whole data driven approach yielded interfaces that were gawky but highly functional, the extreme opposite of today. The iPhone caused them to throw the baby out with the bathwater on that. More contro…
> quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business” This seems to be the real challenge that I haven’t seen any company founder overcome. How do you keep these types of people out? It’s like one gets in, then they let all their friends in, then they overtake the company. The tech company offices I visited in 2010 were full of nerds—people who rode unicycles, j…
The giants of today weren’t particularly giant back then, but we famously had the balmer era, Cisco’s decline, and Yahoo’s slow death.
Presuming that interest rates stay high, it will be difficult to justify speculative bets in tech. Even SaaS models may see investors discount future cash flow potential. This means investors will look for higher payouts from existing firms, and underinvest in new firms - a few new firms will have special privileges due to who invested in them and what they do.
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That's the impression I have. I remember a little over a decade ago when the population at large was completely hyped about all of the world changing technology we were going to see coming from the moonshots at Google X. The excitement over Google Glass, the mystery over the Google barges. Eventually, people started wondering when these hyped up products in development were going to actually become products[1]. Not i…
I think you could go further - the old Google culture was not great at teamwork, and most definitely not when teams crossed boundaries with third parties, where they would expect to be dictating reality and struggled when this wasn’t possible. (Credit where it is due - certain people in the Android group worked this out and changed their tune, and much money was made as a result). There are limits to how much tiny te…
> To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the…
> Dinosaurs were doing great. They also were not slow or stumbling. They occupied every niche on the planet. The main reason most of them went extinct was a massive asteroid triggering the K–Pg extinction event (and even then birds are still around and doing just fine, thank you). The inability to avert or survive through an extinction level event literally proves that they are an evolutionary dead end. Extinction le…
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Search was a product designed by two engineers. Maps from 2005 was a very sleek product, but at the time there were no competitors on the web, and now Maps is so ubiquitous, and requires such an insane data investment, that we'll probably never know the ideal Maps design, because every competitor out there is still catching up. Their primary advantage was the money they threw at mapping data and the ability for them…
“Gmail was not actually a particularly elegant product design” It popularized instant search, tagging and threading to such a degree you have clearly forgotten how elegant it was!
If I remember my thoughts back when Gmail was launched I was clearly awestruck. Gmail showed what was possible to do if one had fast internet connection. All those little interactions enabled through ajax! I think it was the first time, atleast for me, a product was as good as a desktop app w.r.t interactions and usability.
For comparison, with Yahoo mail one had to hit compose button and wait for a few seconds for compose window to open up. With Gmail it was extremely nifty and nearly instantaneous because I think it was done clientside and Ajax.
My opinion is that google only ever presented as a new type of company - without ever being that. It was marketing spin - and I bought into that. I since found out it was funded from inception by inqtel, the CIA's venture capital arm. There are lots of articles to this effect, eg: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo... So, the hype, the free canteen, etc was all just spin to move people from…
> I since found out it was funded from inception by inqtel, the CIA's venture capital arm. It just occurred to me - it's almost a too stupid theory to be true, but you should never underestimate this kind of corporate stupidity - the name change to Alphabet, maybe that was part of telling the actual alphabet agencies, "We're on your side"? One thing is sure, Schmidt really, really wanted to have a good relationship w…
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Openai's entire business model and product offerings are based on theft. Google's no saint, but the scale and scope are rather different. Furthermore, openai's shills spamming forums to defend the practice is unseen in intensity.
Training models is fair use, and i think the courts will agree with that. Saying its based on theft is not so cut and dry as youre making it out.
What happened with Google has nothing to do with “late stage capitalism” and everything to do with horrible management. You only have to compare Sundar to Satya to see what could have been possible for Google with better leadership and vision. Particularly given the legacy Google had to work with and the early focus on AI which was thoroughly squandered. Capitalism will start to really work its magic when Google’s op…