Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mourning Google

tbray.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 485 posts

Re: Mourning Google

#301

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #112

This is really mourning the human condition. This scenario is not new. It is one that has been repeated over and over again --- not just in the history of business but in the history of humanity. I'm not the only one who saw the big flashing warning signs at the start of the Big Tech/social media era. The distressing and frustrating part is the fact that so many others didn't. I watched as even my own family ignored…

> "Don't be evil" was really just a diversion --- a seductive marketing ploy that soon vanished

I don't buy this. I believe that "Don't be evil" was a genuine desire, but it characterized a contrarian position designed to stand in opposition to traditional corporate culture.

The correct lesson, IMO, is that you cannot ever grow to be a corporation remotely the size that google is and fight that traditional corporate culture successfully. Larry & Sergey were just incredibly naive about this, that's all.

If you want to "not be evil", you must be prepared to remain small, and probably niche. That doesn't mean you're unimportant, but you're definitely not Google as we know it today.

Re: Mourning Google

#302

Post by Apocryphon »

rchaud wrote: post #293
GNOMES wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious on your Android would be dead without Samsung comment. I know the US is skewed towards iOS, but Android is the #1 mobile OS, presumably due to cheap devices. Is there a stat showing Samsung is largest manufacturer? I found this, but company market cap != number of devices obviously https://finance.yahoo.com/news/16-biggest-smartphone-compani... It looks like there are 20+ manufacturers in the Open Handset All…

The OHA has about as much relevance as the League of Nations did in the 1930s. Samsung makes screens, SOCs, storage and memory. They put Android into every conceivable form factor and distributed them in every country on earth at every price point. That is why Android suceeded. Google's original Android partners were HTC and Motorola, neither of whom ever had the scale to compete with Apple. Google even acquired Moto…

There was a time when it felt like HTC made every smartphone. Of course, that was very early in the history of smartphones, and mostly because HTC phones were often not branded as such, so they were almost like the mystery manufacturer behind everything.

Would very much like even a fraction of these Google eulogies to have a retrospective on the fall of HTC.

Re: Mourning Google

#303

Post by un_ess »

Multicomp wrote: post #216
Chathamization wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

The book "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory describes how the Labs was working. The last chapter tries to figure out why it was working and one of the conclusion is that the Labs was always guided by the long term idea that it might help the telephone company (and that the breakup removed a) the long-term funding b) some kind of direction )

Re: Mourning Google

#304

Post by jmbwell »

Multicomp wrote: post #216
Chathamization wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

100% with you.

And growth is not just in physical size but in intelligence. 40 year old me knows a whole lot more even than 20 year old me thought he did.

Sustainability is hard. Would Google still be a favorite if it had never gone beyond a handful of products? Well never know, but has chasing new shiny worked out?

I guess for the billionaires, it has.

Re: Mourning Google

#305

Post by Apocryphon »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #301
jqpabc123 wrote: post #112

This is really mourning the human condition. This scenario is not new. It is one that has been repeated over and over again --- not just in the history of business but in the history of humanity. I'm not the only one who saw the big flashing warning signs at the start of the Big Tech/social media era. The distressing and frustrating part is the fact that so many others didn't. I watched as even my own family ignored…

> "Don't be evil" was really just a diversion --- a seductive marketing ploy that soon vanished I don't buy this. I believe that "Don't be evil" was a genuine desire, but it characterized a contrarian position designed to stand in opposition to traditional corporate culture. The correct lesson, IMO, is that you cannot ever grow to be a corporation remotely the size that google is and fight that traditional corporate…

People forget how common this cycle reappears in tech. Jobs founded Apple in opposition to IBM culture alongside Wozniak the ultimate hobbyist tinkerer. Musk was lauded for open-sourcing Tesla’s patents, ten years ago. I’m sure even an up-and-coming Microsoft was seen as a “good guy” at the top of the ‘90s. Though some of this was just public posturing, of course.

Re: Mourning Google

#306

Post by VBprogrammer »

sgu999 wrote: post #200
k_kelly wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s far more 5D chess than that. Search costs nothing to run relative to ad revenue. Microsoft makes each query require 100x the cpu usage because users expect an LLM answer for results. Microsoft’s share of search goes from 1% to 5%. Their cost go up but their sale of ads increases and they get valuable IP. Google loses 5% share of market but its costs go up 100x. Google can no longer finance its other bets like Cl…

Is your point that MS is diversified enough to absorb the losses of eating up Google's share in search even with the now higher costs?

The point, as I understand it, is for Microsoft the additional cost of making their search return results as a LLM is pretty small as compared to their overall business.

However, they will force Google's hand into moving their whole search load over to LLM to avoid loosing market share to Bing. This will cost Google a lot more as search is a much bigger part of their business.

It's an interesting theory but I wouldn't know enough to evaluate how likely it is.

Re: Mourning Google

#307

Post by uoaei »

cousin_it wrote: post #16

I 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…

The very premise that a single company should have as a goal to "win in every market" is problematic to its core. Can you justify this premise and how it relates to your assessment of Google?

Re: Mourning Google

#308

Post by dmoy »

nonameiguess wrote: post #266
sneed_chucker wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 D…

> How do you get this? I don't even know.

Well one component that has changed there is that the marginal tax rate on the inflation-equivalent of a Google Director pay back then was 80-90%, so there wasn't really a point in enticing people with large salaries.

Also, the factory workers you mentioned could afford houses in a big city on a single income. Now a single FAANG eng struggles to do the same unless they get N promotions, and even moreso if you tack childcare costs on top.

Re: Mourning Google

#309

Post by el_benhameen »

Xcelerate wrote: post #53

> 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…

Where do we think the unicycle riders work now?

Re: Mourning Google

#310

Post by cmrdporcupine »

Chathamization wrote: post #124
cousin_it wrote: post #16

I 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…

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…

You have observational bias based on the things that you are interested in and observed as an outside observer.

The real innovation at Google is internal and invisible to you -- often secret, maybe kind of boring, but totally transformational. It's infrastructure and its support. And all those moonshot things and stuff were mainly PR, sideshows, and not the primary focus of the company's brains.

And they ke thing is Google doesn't/didn't have to be productive" for these moonshot types of projects. As a % of headcount they are fairly low, even. The real money comes from ads ads ads and always will. The rest (non-ads/non-search) of the company is there to capture SWE headcount from the rest of the industry, not to produce monetary value for Google. The ad revenue firehose is so incredible that it was inevitable it would turn into a swamp of misused potential like you describe.

The real innovation in Google is the stuff that people on this forum don't see. Because it's mostly secret or invisible. It's giant data centres using a pile of custom technology to eek out massive throughput, more fiber and Internet backbone than you can imagine. And the SREs and ops people who keep all this stuff running.

All to keep that firehose running. The rest is all sideshow. I was a SWE at Google, but the real talent there is SRE and infra development.

Post reply on HN