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Mourning Google

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Re: Mourning Google

#41

Post by rezonant »

cousin_it wrote: post #38
rezonant wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but Google as a business felt like they could do no wrong, like they were the best at everything, and failed to see that they threw the baby out with the bathwater while trying to chase product categories that weren't in their DNA.

Ah, if that's your point then I disagree. There is no "DNA". A big tech company can and should try to do many things in many markets, look at Microsoft. When they started with Basic interpreters, or even when they launched Windows, would you have said that Xbox is in their "DNA"?

Perhaps DNA is too strong a word, because it would seem to imply that change is impossible. It's more that Google executed the changes badly, after the "PM shift" as we're calling it happened, they continued to fail to see growth in these new markets, and failed to address exactly why that was. Instead they simply got very good at unlaunching their failed products.

All the while, the shift in the company began to dull the sharp edge that was their core competency: engineering driven products.

Re: Mourning Google

#42

Post by fidotron »

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 controversially Facebook broke the old SV salary cap agreement, and with that came floods of people that should have tormented Wall St who all landed in tech instead. That agreement was bad but the absolute avarice among modern tech people is stunningly depressing for those of us that have been around to see the change.

Google mainly remind me of SGI, and it is their office after all.

Re: Mourning Google

#43

Post by sanderjd »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #30
bluetomcat wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't mean to say it was a waste of talent, because clearly some of these things were a huge success. Nothing apart from search, ads, maps, Gmail, Chrome and Android was a huge success. They essentially created their own monocultural ecosystem. Most of everything else was a short-lived fad. Plus, Wave, Reader, Chat and Glass, to mention a few.

The AI research wasn't a commercial success, but it did have a huge impact.

Yep, the parent comment is the part of the iceberg "above the surface", but there is also a bunch of influential stuff "below the surface", like their AI research, and things like colossus, borg, bigtable, mapreduce, and a few others.

Re: Mourning Google

#44

Post by closewith »

robertlagrant wrote: post #14
verisimi wrote: post #10

My opinion is that google only ever presented as a new type of company - without ever being that. It was marketing spin - and I bought into that. I since found out it was funded from inception by inqtel, the CIA's venture capital arm. There are lots of articles to this effect, eg: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo... So, the hype, the free canteen, etc was all just spin to move people from…

I don't think that's true at all. The reason it could be like that was because it was making a ton of money. It's easy to buy whatever utopia you care to imagine when you have unlimited money. I also don't think you can say, in any sense I can imagine, that Google made the internet more "corporate". I agree that SEO is painful, but Google was still based around the open internet, and modifying it only slightly to all…

I think you’re underselling Search and Analytics as surveillance tools. Google added telemetry to the web.

Re: Mourning Google

#45

Post by bsenftner »

rezonant wrote: post #24
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…

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" and "what" needs to be continually redefined. While a "project manager" is an individual specifically selected because they have quality, or at least better than the average engineer, communication skills. It is no wonder engineers and developers dislike project managers: they run communication circles around their developers, and the developers do not have the training or skills to compete, so they lose every debate, including those they should win on facts, but they can't convey their points, so they lose, and we lose.

Re: Mourning Google

#46

Post by fidotron »

rezonant wrote: post #24
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…

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…

“Product design, usability, simplicity, and sheer style were not the forte of the Google of old.”

This is completely wrong. Their style was deliberate indifference about aesthetics, but their products (maps, search and gmail in particular) were absolute masterpieces of product design when first launched.

Edit to add: even Chrome itself was like this.

Re: Mourning Google

#47

Post by rezonant »

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…

> 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.

Re: Mourning Google

#48

Post by jdub »

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.…

You question the phrase "late stage capitalists" and use the phrase "cultural marxists"? Shoo.

Re: Mourning Google

#49

Post by sanderjd »

closewith wrote: post #32
coldtea wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Things were better when I was younger and still worked there" You make it sound like having actually worked there, and knowing how Google was, versus what it is now, is a bad thing, that somehow "taints" your critique. It's, on the contrary, one of the most important prerequisites to be able to evaluate current Google.

The real issue the OP has is that they’re aging and seeing things differently. The Google they remember never existed - it’s just how they felt at the time.

Well put! It's very difficult to know how you'd feel about experiences from your past if you plopped your current self into the middle of those past experiences. It makes me cringe to think about it!

Re: Mourning Google

#50

Post by bigallen »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #11

I have to say, I'm not convinced by all of the AI hype, but it makes a bloody good search engine for a lot of the things I want to search (things where I am in a reasonable position to evaluate the truthfulness of an answer). It's only a matter of time before someone realises that and ruins it in the aim of making money.

I will be devastated when (hopefully if!) this happens. If I use a standard search engine to look up a question, I typically get endless “okay” results with piles of moneygrabbing shit mixed in. If I ask chatGPT, I get a contextually relevant, straightforward answer that is probably as accurate as anything else I could reasonably find. It’s like a breath of fresh air
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