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Mourning Google

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Re: Mourning Google

#361

Post by blihp »

MrPatan wrote: post #167
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…

The market, made up of a lot of people, seems to think the richest man in the world is pretty valuable. A subset of people around here don't think that way. Why? I have my own opinion, not very flattering.

When you really analyze at how many/most of the richest people in the world got so rich, they tended to extract (i.e. more parasitic) much of the value rather than create (i.e. more symbiotic) it. They have also often done so at the direct expense of others simply so they could have more... when they already had much more than they could ever use. Our economic system allows for this, but to praise these folks for much of what they did leaves a bad taste.

Re: Mourning Google

#362

Post by gdiamos »

“Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”.”

That sounds pretty negative about people who were “good at business”.

How is that different from engineers who join because they wanted to be cool?

Re: Mourning Google

#363

Post by samirillian »

_bohm wrote: post #67
samirillian wrote: post #25

I like Tbray's posts but I want to quibble over language. What's happening to the term "late stage capitalism"? Feels like it's becoming a meme like neoliberalism. What does it even mean to say that it wasn't tech's fault, it was late stage capitalism's fault? Kind of dodging a particular responsibility with a generality. I think LSC came to prominence through cultural marxists like David Harvey and Frederic Jameson.…

> cultural marxists I think maybe you mean just "Marxists". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th... To your question, I do think the term is becoming heavily watered down as I see it being used frequently by people who clearly lack the context on Marxist thought to be able to use it with it's original meaning. More often, when people use the term, I infer the sentiment that the "capitalism" we…

Actually I meant Western marxists

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Marxism

> Less concerned with economic analysis than earlier schools of Marxist thought, Western Marxism placed greater emphasis on the study of the cultural trends of capitalist society, deploying the more philosophical and subjective aspects of Marxism, and incorporating non-Marxist approaches to investigating culture and historical development

I thought Western marxist would be obscure to hn readers and that in the context what I meant by cultural Marxism would be clear, but I guess not.

I'm dismissive of the alt-right usage of cultural Marxism to the point of forgetting how much other people care about it

Re: Mourning Google

#364

Post by ephemeral-life »

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 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.

People want to believe in the genius that conquered the world, because it gives them the impression that success is a function of individual agency. It is much less impressive to hear that some world changing product was made by hundreds of engineers who all have been in the industry for decades working late nights on boring engineer stuff. These Jobs like figures are then chosen by the masses, because they are the only ones putting themselves out there and thus receive a disproportionate amount of the credit.

Re: Mourning Google

#365

Post by varjag »

Apocryphon wrote: post #305
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

I’m sure even an up-and-coming Microsoft was seen as a “good guy” at the top of the ‘90s.

Uh, about that…

Re: Mourning Google

#366

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #320
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

Larry & Sergey were just incredibly naive about this, that's all. You are free to believe as you choose. I believe they were fully aware of the nature of their work and who was funding it before the company was ever formed. And they worked to counter any realistic public perception of it. Email conversations in 2012 between the NSA chief and Google executives, including Brin, were uncovered, inviting the Google heads…

2012??

Google was founded in 1998. 2012 is 14 years later. I'm fine with the argument that they had already abandoned "Don't be Evil" by that point in time.

Re: Mourning Google

#367

Post by QuizzicalCarbon »

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…

Think of it like how an orchestra conductor and musicians work together.

Re: Mourning Google

#368

Post by timbray »

Apocryphon wrote: post #234
throwawaylolx wrote: post #19

>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...

Wow, didn't know about that, thanks. But the query has to be "timbray" not tim bray

Re: Mourning Google

#369

Post by ephemeral-life »

dolmen wrote: post #144
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…

Same as Bell Labs. Having great technical talents is not enough to have a great business.

The situations are nothing alike. At the time bell labs was making all of its world changing inventions, AT&T was a regulated monopoly that was only allowed to live if they made their research open and not compete in adjacent markets.

Re: Mourning Google

#370

Post by yedava »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #111
fidotron wrote: post #42

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…

> floods of people that should have tormented Wall St who all landed in tech instead Hmm, would these people have inflicted more or less damage on society if they had worked for Wall Street firms?

I would say less if they had stayed on Wall St. The past decade has laid the groundwork for an Orwellian society. Digital communication and commerce is now centralized to a few big firms and that is going to hurt us as a civilization.
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