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Mourning Google

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Re: Mourning Google

#451

Post by hnfong »

opportune wrote: post #407
rezonant wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Completely agree with this. Did you work at Google? Let me explain this a little more in concrete terms: are you passionate about what you do? Do you have pride in your work and want to create great, valuable (to users of course, but also profitable) software? You will probably dislike working at Google. First, if you’re an engineer, you’re basically not going to be empowered to make important product-level decisions…

(I don't work for Google)

Much of what you wrote here seems familiar with those who work for LARGE orgs or companies. The individual simply cannot have much influence when your org is > 10000 people.

I suspect the thing unique to Google is how (or so I hear) the technology stack is more or less a monolith, always designed to scale, and you can't (or are discouraged to) start "small" projects, so you're basically stuck with the huge orgs and don't have a choice to run/join a relatively small and isolated operation where you have more control.

Re: Mourning Google

#452

Post by ksec »

fidotron wrote: post #430
behnamoh wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You may want to watch [1] Steve Jobs Insult Response. And you can imagine most people are the guy asking that question. Yes, but not every CEO is able to give the response he gave. At least, he tried to connect with the developers. When was the last time Google's CEO interacted with devs?

For those that haven't seen it the whole thing is worth it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ16_YxLbB8 This Q&A is the evidence for why I think many tech people underestimated him, and as you observe such unfiltered Q&As do not occur with other tech CEOs, though he was not CEO at the time. He's not 100% right about how things would go, but he was a lot more right than anyone else proved to be. Some of his answers to…

Exactly. Most people on HN dont commenting on Steve Jobs not only has never worked directly with or under him. They dont even bother to actually research into his real personality. Instead they rely on hearsay or very selective reporting or comments.

And if people hate him as an CEO so much, then no other CEO in tech history would get the pass mark.

Re: Mourning Google

#453

Post by EasyMark »

Apocryphon wrote: post #274
bluetomcat wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their successful products are vertically-integrated to provide a walled "convenient" experience to users. You use an Android smartphone to open their browser, searching for stuff and viewing ads, using Maps to find the location of businesses appearing in the ads. The rest of their contributions are welcome side-effects that have enabled running that software and hardware infrastructure.

Amazon, Apple, Meta, heck Microsoft and IBM in their heydays all do this. All of tech does this.

Meta doesn't really belong in there, not much vertical integration there, it's very horizontal with instagram, whatsapp, facebook, threads (lol!) serving similar and sometimes overlapping audiences. They don't really provide a service beyond social media (unless you count the OSS / free software they release for devs)

Re: Mourning Google

#454

Post by EasyMark »

baud147258 wrote: post #31
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.

I'd add Youtube as a huge success, even if I don't think if ever brought in much money

With all these other video services adding frequent commercial breaks, consuming youtube premium is looking better every day. I absolutely hate-hate-hate commercials while I'm engrossed in a movie, may as well just watch short content on youtube premium.

Re: Mourning Google

#455

Post by YoshiRulz »

osmsucks wrote: post #285
YoshiRulz wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It violates copyright, yes. If you're interested in contributing opening hours data, but learning OSM's quirks sounds too hard, try https://streetcomplete.app (for Android and soon maybe iOS).

Be careful when using StreetComplete. It's by far the most user-friendly OSM editor out there, but it bundles edits together in one big changeset. I didn't know that, so I used it on occasion to fill in information about places I was visiting, and right after to fill in information about places far away that I know intimately (where I live). This created a very geographically large changeset which got reviewers to sh…

Name checks out? But thanks for the warning. I think my current usage patterns incidentally stop me from hitting that behaviour. I happen to know the sibling commenter contributes to the app, so hopefully it can be fixed.

Re: Mourning Google

#456

Post by Rebelgecko »

jra_samba wrote: post #432
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…

My take on this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeremyallison_wither-google-f... Wither Google ? FYI. This is my recollection of events, but it's been twenty or so years now, so if my memory is fuzzy on the details, please forgive the ramblings of an old engineer :-). Many years ago, I was working at SGI when the company started to do poorly under the leadership of Rick Belluzzo. In those days the company sponsored t…

Coincidentally that's pretty much what Sundar has done to TGIF

Re: Mourning Google

#457

Post by Rebelgecko »

kmac_ wrote: post #374
renegade-otter wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but for now . ChatGPT results will also be enshitified, and since the cycle of everything is much faster now, it will take much less than 20 years.

Nah, the fruit hangs very low here, I bet that fine-tuning with ads is in MS and Google backlogs already. Try to ad block that.

OpenAI has some hiring reqs out for people with AdTech experience too

Re: Mourning Google

#458

Post by m463 »

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…

> When you're young, ... But when you're a bit older, ...

I remember when I was really young I thought batman (the original series) was an adventure show, but watching years later as an adult... lol, it was a comedy!!

Re: Mourning Google

#459

Post by habi »

osmsucks wrote: post #285
YoshiRulz wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It violates copyright, yes. If you're interested in contributing opening hours data, but learning OSM's quirks sounds too hard, try https://streetcomplete.app (for Android and soon maybe iOS).

Be careful when using StreetComplete. It's by far the most user-friendly OSM editor out there, but it bundles edits together in one big changeset. I didn't know that, so I used it on occasion to fill in information about places I was visiting, and right after to fill in information about places far away that I know intimately (where I live). This created a very geographically large changeset which got reviewers to sh…

> […] which got reviewers to shout at me multiple times about it

As an avid OpenStreetMapper I’m sorry you’ve been shouted at for something that is „not recommended“, but not really a big issue. This should not happen in our community! At most someone should have told you to try to avoid large bounding boxes as it is much easier to review geographically small changesets.

Sometimes large ones happen, especially if StreetComplete is set up this way, as matkoniecz mentions in another comment.

Re: Mourning Google

#460

Post by osmsucks »

matkoniecz wrote: post #383
osmsucks wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful when using StreetComplete. It's by far the most user-friendly OSM editor out there, but it bundles edits together in one big changeset. I didn't know that, so I used it on occasion to fill in information about places I was visiting, and right after to fill in information about places far away that I know intimately (where I live). This created a very geographically large changeset which got reviewers to sh…

> t bundles edits together in one big changeset have you enabled manual uploading (that needs to be done in settings and warns about need for triggering regular uploads)? or have you edited just before and after air travel, and enabled plane mode before changes had chance to upload?

This was a while back so I can't recall precisely. Yes, I think I was travelling at the time, but I don't think the changes happened just before stepping on the plane, and I did have connectivity.
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