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Mourning Google

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Re: Mourning Google

#351

Post by Apocryphon »

bsenftner wrote: post #347
Apocryphon wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do non-software engineering fields somehow achieve this?

There is an entire college of communications devoted to the power of persuasion via language, professional communications, and media. Software developers culturally ignore that entire school of thought, to our determent.

I agree, I’m just wondering why other STEM fields don’t seem to have this problem or at the same level. I’m guess it’s the hubris of being the hotshot new lucrative world-eating industry.

Re: Mourning Google

#352

Post by dec0dedab0de »

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…

From the outside it seemed like Google 20-25 years ago cared more about making good things than they cared about making money. Which counter-intuitively is why they made so much money, people trusted google. Somewhere around the doubleclick merger or the IPO that changed. When google launched Gmail people were paying for invites on ebay. Changing your email address is the biggest pain in the ass in digital life and Google had people paying for the chance to do it before their friends. That would not happen if they launched something new right now.

After a decade or two of trading goodwill for short term gains no one trusts google, and pretty much only use it because they think they have to.

Re: Mourning Google

#353

Post by Kye »

behnamoh wrote: post #340
hn8305823 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder what it is about leaders like Steve Jobs that makes them popular despite how programmers working for them know the guy in charge has never written a line of code. Is it charisma (whatever that means)? Is it vision? Is it luck and being at the right place at the right time? Is it a few devoted loyal programmers who spread the word about how amazing the Führer is? I often think it also has to do with the perso…

I don't need to know anything about masonry to respect a skilled mason or for it to be mutual. Why would it be any different for a programmer and a leader? I don't know much about programming and avoid it at all costs [0], but all my programmer friends appreciate insights I have when they bounce ideas off me.

[0] I've written about this: https://kyefox.com/2022/08/05/learn-to-code-or-dont/

Re: Mourning Google

#354

Post by gumby »

vanderZwan wrote: post #22

> 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…

The metaphor can work to the degree that the dinosaurs succeeded, and the mammals stayed small (occupying a cockroach-like niche) until a large exogenous disruption upended the system.

Of course that isn't what happened to the car companies, or the newspapers, or most once large sectors, and I do actually think that the same gradual, rather than abrupt, decay will happen to these big tech companies. In fact we see it already. I strongly believe there's a Hayflick limit to companies; even GE couldn't fight it indefinitely.

Also I disagree with "Dinosaurs ... occupied every [animal] niche on the planet." Don't forget arthropoda or the variety in the sea. But maybe that's just a quibble.

Re: Mourning Google

#356

Post by wuschel »

eitland wrote: post #326
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 inc…

While I can’t really objectively comment on the development of the quality of search result over time, one is for sure: the amount of data Google has to process and the amount attempts to influence beforementioned search results have grown a couple of orders of magnitude since Google’s creation.

Re: Mourning Google

#357

Post by ipnon »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #338
Wonnk13 wrote: post #13

Tangential to the article, when I onboarded in 2017 it felt like showing up to a house party at 3am. You had missed all the action, everyone was now in some kind of stupor half awake half asleep. I think it was literal weeks after they moved "Don't be Evil" to the bottom of the employee handbook or whatever. I didn't make it to three years. I met some incredible individuals, but the org as a whole as I experienced it…

I'm glad you posted this. Honestly, while I agree with the flood of recent posts mourning Google in the wake of their layoffs (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046825 ), some of these posts (not necessarily this one by Tim Bray, as he left Google a decade ago, but certainly lots of the other ones) kinda leave a bad taste in my mouth because they strike me as a bit self-serving. That is, I think folks gener…

In companies of this size it takes decades to expire from the mortal blow. All the while investors crowd around and give reassurances of a full recovery. Always optimize for the long-term.

Re: Mourning Google

#358

Post by sidcool »

rchaud wrote: post #255

These blog posts eulogizing Google's culture death sidestep the elephant in the room; Google sells ads. Nothing else they produce makes money. Google Search didn't magically get dumber, they simply made a business decision to favor SEO-optimized junk sites, many of which run Google Ads. There's an outdated saying that goes, "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" If Google was hiring only the best and brightest, s…

Monetization aside. They have produced or augmented some of the most widely used products

Re: Mourning Google

#359

Post by eitland »

wuschel wrote: post #356
eitland wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inc…

While I can’t really objectively comment on the development of the quality of search result over time, one is for sure: the amount of data Google has to process and the amount attempts to influence beforementioned search results have grown a couple of orders of magnitude since Google’s creation.

Yes.

But

1. so has their processing power

2. lots of the problem (first page of results filled with ads that looks like content, including spam in the results and not giving us a block option) are not related to scale

3. Smaller (search.marginalia.nu) and larger (kagi.com) competitors keep demonstrating that it is possible to implement doublequotes correctly and not include results I didn't ask for - even in 2024.

Re: Mourning Google

#360

Post by ejiblabahaba »

asah wrote: post #78
rezonant wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down. In an absolute sense, probably nothing can, short of society ending cataclysm. In a shareholder sense, I think we're seeing it happen right now.

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…

With Cloud, as long as you don't mind solving the same problem multiple times every few years when things you depend on go obsolete, indeed it is a nice experience. A lot of people do mind. I won't belabor the point; Steve Yegge said it better[0]. I think some progress has been made on this front, particularly with bigger customers; but even if Google promised decades of backward compatibility tomorrow, Google's reputation would remain its own worst enemy.

Search deterioration has a much longer history than ChatGPT, but nice try. Search is an arms race against a functionally infinite tidal wave of spam, much of which is overwhelming websites beyond Google's control that historically populated Google's top search results. Epistemology is hard, the threshold for financially profitable spam is low, and the cost of sophisticated spam is getting exponentially smaller. And the long-term market solution might be someone like OpenAI thoroughly leap-frogging Google's capabilities. This is a bigger risk than you're making it out to be.

As far as privacy... Google makes an attempt to follow applicable laws, and in many cases succeeds, but it still ends up constantly trolled by regulators for money or clout. Even setting aside fines-as-taxes and legislative opprobrium, I still don't think "our panopticon strips you of way less dignity than our competitor's" is something to brag about. If you believe the nature and incentive structure of the panopticon is diabolical, businesses that function as panopticons are fundamentally untrustworthy. It doesn't stop me from using Google products and services, but in a "least bad" sense - I'm happy to switch search, email, phone OS, whatever, provided someone can make a more compelling product. I think a lot of people feel similarly.

I could argue that Google's open source contributions are largely market suppression tactics to keep the web innovating in a direction that protect's Google's core revenue. This isn't comprehensively a bad thing, as technologies like Chromium and Android are useful. But "our OSS suppresses markets more effectively than our competitors" isn't something to brag about, and combined with those regulatory trolls above, I see this as a big risk factor.

All else aside, Google (and for that matter, most of Big Tech) fundamentally relies on massive volumes of hardware manufactured in Taiwan. This isn't even a black swan, it's a sword of Damocles over the entire industry.

[0] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

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