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Mourning Google

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Re: Mourning Google

#321

Post by InitialLastName »

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…

> I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was? Put smart people in a supportive playground and harvest the cream off the top? Lasers, MOSFETs(?), UNIX, C, awk, all those came in one way or another from there.

In a somewhat-parallel to early Google, it's worth noting that Bell Labs was funded by, and operated in service to, a near-total national-scale monopoly. When that monopoly was deconstructed, it triggered a decline in the output of the research organization as well (there's a clear decline in the ground-breaking output of Bell Labs after the 1984 Ma Bell breakup).

Re: Mourning Google

#323

Post by hn8305823 »

psunavy03 wrote: post #298
fidotron wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Part of the function of a Jobs type character is to be the defining asshole in the organization that no one has a chance of defeating alone. Except you don't have to be an asshole to be that person, just in charge.

Just having the power isn't enough. Nobody respects pushovers. Think of "Asshole" in corporate leadership as "a show of force" that earns begrudging respect.

But to your point you can earn respect without always being an asshole, or being one for no reason at all.

Re: Mourning Google

#324

Post by refulgentis »

fidotron wrote: post #271
vharish wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current Google is no better when it comes to team work. It's likely worse when it comes to cross team work.

Absolutely. My outside impression of current Google is everyone is at war with everyone at their level. Get promoted and it's war with a new level. Your success at a given level is based on your ability to persuade the level above of your use to them ascending further levels. It's tempting to blame Sundar for this, but he is the result of this game being setup that way in the first place, and he simply eliminated all…

They fixed the VPs but they're way too busy to appeal to, even when they agree with you and everyone was told as much. And now you have extremes of rest-and-vest and "if I get the Visibility(tm) for this, maybe I'll get one more promo..." behavior from the L7s and lower.

Re: Mourning Google

#325

Post by hyperthesis »

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…

Jobs-as-coach, guiding by valuing what you value but more so, by its contribution to a valued goal. https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html

Elon does the same externally ("visionary") - and I expect internally.

Re: Mourning Google

#326

Post by eitland »

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…

I have another explanation. Lets start with what the article says, but doesn't explain:

> 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.

My theory is A/B testing or other research led then to short term optimization after short term optimization:

- a new design was tested that made ads more like ordinary links - profit increased (I am not saying this was on purpose to trick people, only I think experiments were made and their results guided the design)

- research in some form or another showed that most users reacted positively when search was made less hard core by removing or significantly reducing the effect of search operators like doublequotes

- etc etc

- meanwhile content farms and more legitimate web sites on the other side were also experimenting

- at some points the old engineers started to leave search and indexing and indexing deteriorates

Still everything worked for a while:

- DuckDuckGo were still worse and did all the same things: didn't prioritize results correctly, ignored search operators etc.

- Same goes for Bing until GPT

But at some point Google has optimized its result and its workforce to where we are today:

- results are as bad as the search engines they replaced

- the once clean results have been optimized step by step until most of the page above fold is ads

- search operators are gone

- and meanwhile Kagi and others have snuck up and snatched us that used to tell people to use Google

Google is a sad mess now IMO, but I guess every step on the way to were we are today was a measureable improvement.

Re: Mourning Google

#327

Post by acdha »

DeathArrow wrote: post #245
acdha wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What successful product have they launched since 2008, when they embraced DoubleClick’s management culture? Ads bring in a lot of revenue, scaling with the general internet-using population growth, but they also seem to have made Google’s management incapable of thinking about products which are not immediately, wildly successful at selling tons of ads or harvesting data for ad targeting. It’s fortunate that they’ve…

That is from an user perspective. From a shareholder perspective they are doing just fine. Yes, from an user point of view, Google sucks. But it's making money. Probably it's hard for a company to achieve behemoth status and still do nice things.

Your original claim wasn’t scoped to shareholder returns, but even as a shareholder (which I happen to be) throwing away their reputation & goodwill is a concern. Only a few businesses like ISPs have something like a natural monopoly insulating them from the long-term impacts of that loss. Saying it’s doing fine sounds a lot like the people saying it was good to have accountants in charge of IBM in the 90s, who were right until it was too late to recover.

The problem isn’t just size but business model: Apple does much better because they have never lost track of the need to have each user actively choose their products. The ad business is different since, say, a Maps user is not who gives Google revenue and that makes it easier not to respect them, with consequences which are not immediately coupled to revenue.

Re: Mourning Google

#328

Post by asah »

anticorporate wrote: post #187
asah wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out. As user, I'm pretty ok with Google. Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day. Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. It's cute to think you have any…

> Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. What you're describing is security, not privacy. Privacy is not determined by how far the data is shared. If Google respected privacy, they would not collect most of the information that they do in the first place.

true, but let's not paint the bike shed here: you can have all the best policies, and hackers and inside threats ruin all of it. If I'm going to trust a cloud provider with (say) multimedia, I trust YouTube and Google Photos a lot more than random small providers, who sound good until the next hack.

Re: Mourning Google

#329

Post by flobosg »

lxgr wrote: post #157
redrove wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s simpler than we may think: don’t hire anyone who hasn’t pushed a git commit in a management position. Knowing code is the new knowing how to read and write, we should be less tolerant of “non-technical”, “in English, doc!” type people in positions of power in tech companies.

Having pushed a git commit says nothing about whether the person pushing it has enjoyed doing so intrinsically or as a means to an end. Conversely, I’ve worked with very passionate technical people that seemingly couldn’t care less about their share value or even core business metrics (which is ok as long as there’s somebody around that can reel them in if they go off on a tangent and they let them), but just don’t l…

> Having pushed a git commit says nothing about whether the person pushing it has enjoyed doing so intrinsically or as a means to an end.

Case in point: the Hacktoberfest fiasco.

Re: Mourning Google

#330

Post by SadCordDrone »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #257
SadCordDrone wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a reason that kids use TikTok as search engine on mobile. That's because kids are dumb and have no attention span to read anything. Source: I am from the same generation you talk of.

Reading is a skill. The more you read, the better you get. The laptop encourages you to surf (and surfing is reading), the phone encourages you to scroll, usually through images and videos. Attention span is a separate issue. I lack the attention span to watch a short youtube video, but I can easily read long essays.

The phone is not that bad for reading.

Granted, reading PDFs is harder. But reading webpages is mostly fine.

When I started using phones, I didn't have the luxury of high speed internet and multimedia-focused apps. I should probably be thankful for that.

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