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Mourning Google
261–270 of 485 posts
Re: Mourning Google
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
The primary reason for Chrome’s success was literal billions of dollars in pervasive advertising (I remember years of Chrome TV ads and billboards), ads plastered all over Google’s products saying “better in Chrome”, and product bundling into many many pieces of software a user might download (e.g. Acrobat[1]). That’s not to say that it wasn’t a technically good product, but it wasn’t so much better than the competit…
Honestly I feel like I am in a parallel universe with ideas like this. Chrome was dramatically faster than anything else (thanks to v8 which was a total revolution for js engines) and each tab crashed separately, with far better security than other browsers of the time. On Windows (and initially it was only on Windows) this was a big deal and so it displaced a huge proportion of the tech aware userbase very fast, per…
Also because Firefox had become bloated and clunky at that point, Chrome was much more lightweight and zippy. It was Mozilla’s complacency that ceded their position as the alternate browser.
Re: Mourning Google
#263> Use Chrome for Google stuff: Maps, Calendar, Docs, Translate I don't see any good reason to stick to Chrome for these. I've been using them without issue via Firefox for years. I used to see warnings on some of those products that " works best with Google Chrome" when using Firefox but those have all disappeared now and even when they did have those warnings I don't remember experiencing any major issues.
It's the other way around, Chrome acts as a funnel that leads users to the Google ecosystem. It's a huge part of their sticking power.
This is accomplished both by how integratred it is with Google Search, but also by making competing technologies awkward or impossible to use, like bookmarks and RSS feeds, which used to be relatively big back in the day.
Re: Mourning Google
#264The author's calling out of 'Late Capitalism' is misplaced. Oligarchy, monoploy, cronyism, corporate and state collusion, corporate dominance in election funding are all anti competitive and lead to nothing representing Capitalism.
Re: Mourning Google
#265I have a different theory about the cause of the decline. Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to…
Same as Bell Labs. Having great technical talents is not enough to have a great business.
Odd, it one mention of ‘hunger’ that I’ve seen in this discussion…
Bell labs, Watson labs, others all had hungry researchers that were passionate about an area of research and simply needed the resources to realize it. That is all, and guess what, they churn out some pretty damn amazing research. Almost like clockwork. Turning that in to an actual product? A product the market wants? That is a whole different can of worms; that doesn’t diminish the research though, and when it’s really done well the research trickles into many products.
A very wise episcopal priest told me once that you should seek discomfort, too much comfort leads to complacency, too much suffering leads to anything that feels like it can end the immediate pain, but just a little discomfort and that’s where you learn, are challenged and grow. I think it is generally true. ESR wrote I the Catherdral and Bizaare that an “itch” is the source of a lot of great software. I’m not disparaging anyone, but you have to wonder when a single “engineer” can earn $120m+ from a company without delivering a product or world changing research. It’s hard to imagine that there is a lot of hunger there, it’s also hard to imagine what some of the really hungry folks that make a lot less than 1% of that think there.
Not saying it can’t be fixed, I expect google to be around and make a lot of money for a long time, but it will be different.
Re: Mourning Google
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People like to say, "But those people don't even create anything, they're just taking credit for other people's work!" But just letting smart people gather and work on pet projects doesn't seem to work particularly well either. Maybe having a headstrong product oriented person upstairs is useful/necessary. I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was? Put smart people in a supportive playground and harvest the c…
Don't think the Bell Labs people were pulling Google tier TC.
This is the real core of the problem. Bell Labs was populated by hackers who were perfectly content to earn double to triple what an average factory worker was getting for less toil while doing cool shit. FAANGs became too profitable and attracted people who would have been finance bros in the 90s. Engineers expected to be compensated like quants and directors like portfolio managers. You don't get a Skunk Works or DARPA from that. Moonshot basic research like that may or may not make money. Your fundamental motivating force has to be doing cool shit, not getting rich. If you want something like Google X to work, the culture has to be such that no one is going to jump ship when Netflix offers to double your cash compensation.
How do you get this? I don't even know. As far as I can tell, a lot of 20th century Skunk Works and Bell Labs type of stuff was motivated by heavy government investment and individual patriotism in trying to outdo Nazis and Soviets for the sake of free civilization. Bell himself was an interesting case. He only invented the telephone in the first place as part of his research into helping deaf people and he invested most of his riches from the invention back into research for helping deaf people. He rather presciently never even owned a telephone and refused to allow one in his personal workspace because of fear it would distract from the work.
Re: Mourning Google
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your theory doesn't match the timeline. Under the engineering first strategy, Google became the juggernaut it is today, with products like Gmail, Maps, Street View and of course Search. Unfortunately, the approach doesn't work for all product categories. Product design, usability, simplicity, and sheer style were not the forte of the Google of old. As a result they saw themselves fall behind Facebook in social, faile…
My theory is any engineer led organization is doomed to fail because the STEM education does not include professional communications, and as a result any engineer led project and organization has communications issues that ultimately lead to failure. Quality communications is so critical in any collaborative, it is simply amazing an emphasis on communications is not a part of technology development - where "new" and…
How do non-software engineering fields somehow achieve this?
Re: Mourning Google
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was also much more O2 in the atmosphere. Doubtful that's coming back.
Plants do this weird thing and turn CO2 into O2. More CO2 means more plants. The earth is greening with the additional atmospheric carbon. https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-fertilization...
O2 levels are not set that way.
Just think where all the new CO2 is coming from.
Re: Mourning Google
#269>"And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives." I wished the author had elaborated on both of these points. Can people say what are the things that Google can't find? What do people consider the compelling alternatives in 2024?
I think Kagi, and MS Bing/copilot are considered “good” nowadays.
Re: Mourning Google
#270>It’s not that I think the companies are the problem, it’s the machineries and imperatives of Late Capitalism, which for a while we foolishly thought Internet companies could route around. A pseudo-communist critique of Google. >But those Ten Blue Links surfaced by the PageRank-that-was had a special magic. I found them intensely human, a reflection of the voices populating what remains of the Web, the only platform…
A nostalgia-driven critique of HN and of tech, delicious Tim Bray has been shared on this site for the last seventeen years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=11&prefix=false&q...
None of this is relevant to my comment.