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The IBM-ification of Google?

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Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#41

Post by blondin »

wrs wrote: post #3
somesortofthing wrote: post #2

Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. People always talk about how big companies fail because they're unwilling to take risks and just recommit to their areas of strength, but this is what risk-taking looks like - you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't. People who think it's a quality product won't be wary of whether it'll get killed - the…

This is not about stickiness. People complain because they liked the dead product . Do you hear complaints about Google+ dying? Reader wasn't a risk, it was a product people loved that wasn't hard to run. It was just too boring to maintain, didn't support the ad monopoly, and Google dropped it for the next shiny monetizable object. Anyway, enterprise products are an entirely different ballgame where product support,…

Google+ couldn't handle spams. Inbox was an excellent execution. one needed the tech that made Gmail, and the other couldn't co-exist with Gmail? we will never truly know.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#42

Post by jeffbee »

amazingamazing wrote: post #13

I remember these types of posts saying Google is done because they shut down Google Reader. Google's stock was about $60 at the time. I look forward to reading this post and chuckling a few years from now. Doomers really do get more engagement, though. I have some friends in real life who complained about reader, and none of them even use RSS feeds anymore. I mean seriously? The one point I will make though is: these…

What kind of sicko wants to read an email thread in reverse order? I worked on gmail for years and never heard the first whiff of this being a thing that any sane person wants.

I would be willing to allow that there are probably some highly vocal people conditioned by OWA trauma who might have demanded this, but by no means a grassroots army.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#43

Post by crowcroft »

jeffbee wrote: post #27

"Everyone hates YouTube" is an argument that has a lot to overcome. All objective indicators suggest it is incredibly popular, and growing in popularity, pretty much across the demographic board.

This is pretty common across social media as well, surveyed sentiment towards it often negative while usage is high. I suspect it's because of the addictive quality.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#44

Post by majormajor »

amazingamazing wrote: post #30
majormajor wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking the other day that it's particularly weird that Gmail is so bereft of features after all this time. It's not that they've left it completely as-is "this is great, there is nothing to do"—but just that the things they have tried have been... kinda uninteresting and quite simple? It's weird to me that with the other AI features they've tried (including suggested responses and such in drafting new emails)…

I honest to God cannot see how someone informed at all could call Google stagnant. Name almost anything and Google is on the frontier. Quantum computing, self driving, language models, network infrastructure, TPUs, etc. It's some sort of delusion on this website that Google is falling behind. Or more likely, wishful thinking.

For self-driving, Waymo isn't technically Google anymore. ;)

I don't know anything about Quantum so I'll defer to you on that one.

In the LLMs/inference/ML space they seem to be great at theory and poor at execution until someone else shows them what the model looks like first. Similar to with cloud. Or with mobile. Or with voice assistants. Or with social (well, they never got there on that one even with the copy attempt.) Which is a classic "decline phase" behavior (see also Xerox, Bell).

If all Google products outside of their research papers and labs had disappeared ten years ago, what product categories would be missing?

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#45

Post by amazingamazing »

shimman wrote: post #39
amazingamazing wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honest to God cannot see how someone informed at all could call Google stagnant. Name almost anything and Google is on the frontier. Quantum computing, self driving, language models, network infrastructure, TPUs, etc. It's some sort of delusion on this website that Google is falling behind. Or more likely, wishful thinking.

Nah, they're right. Google can only afford to do this because there are literally two players when it comes to online advertising. Remove advertising from Google and suddenly they can't subsidize failing BUs. Kinda the point of preventing monopolies. They stagnate actual growth in the pursuit of profits. Americans don't benefit when Google is a trillion dollar company, but Americans would benefit if there was an actu…

Sure, and 20 years ago Walmart dominated retail. And yet, Amazon is winning now. Being #1 is never guaranteed. Plenty of more examples of this happening. Defending your position becomes increasingly difficult. We're literally seeing this right now with AI.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#46

Post by amazingamazing »

majormajor wrote: post #44
amazingamazing wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honest to God cannot see how someone informed at all could call Google stagnant. Name almost anything and Google is on the frontier. Quantum computing, self driving, language models, network infrastructure, TPUs, etc. It's some sort of delusion on this website that Google is falling behind. Or more likely, wishful thinking.

For self-driving, Waymo isn't technically Google anymore. ;) I don't know anything about Quantum so I'll defer to you on that one. In the LLMs/inference/ML space they seem to be great at theory and poor at execution until someone else shows them what the model looks like first. Similar to with cloud. Or with mobile. Or with voice assistants. Or with social (well, they never got there on that one even with the copy at…

YouTube has nearly the same MAU as Facebook. YouTube is definitely social, albeit different. The rest, well I respectively disagree.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#48

Post by majormajor »

amazingamazing wrote: post #46
majormajor wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For self-driving, Waymo isn't technically Google anymore. ;) I don't know anything about Quantum so I'll defer to you on that one. In the LLMs/inference/ML space they seem to be great at theory and poor at execution until someone else shows them what the model looks like first. Similar to with cloud. Or with mobile. Or with voice assistants. Or with social (well, they never got there on that one even with the copy at…

YouTube has nearly the same MAU as Facebook. YouTube is definitely social, albeit different. The rest, well I respectively disagree.

That's fair. In my taxonomy it's media+ads, which was "fewer unique verticals" but it certainly has a heavy social component.

But it's also over 20 years old.

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#49

Post by aurareturn »

raggi wrote: post #38

> Look at the Railway GCP account ban situation. A literally billion dollar startup running on Google Cloud and Google just randomly snaps their fingers and deletes their account. Zero warning. No phone number to call. No account rep. Poof. Gone. It is actual insanity to me. A billion dollar customer gets the exact same automated middle finger as a low effort spam bot. Your B2B business is completely cooked if that i…

I would think that Railway certainly had an account manager, right? Did they say they didn’t have one?

Re: The IBM-ification of Google?

#50

Post by cyberax »

fragmede wrote: post #31
cyberax wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name a good new Google product then? I just can't remember anything recent. I can't even remember any good recent _improvements_ to their core products. If anything, recent changes are more like downgrades than upgrades.

Waymo's pretty good.

That's not a Google product per-se, and it's also not new.
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