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SPYW: "Search Plus Your World"
Thanks. I've spent the last 5 minutes trying to figure out what the oft-referenced acronym meant.
It is quite the jump from “This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else" to "Agree with SPYW or GTFO". One is an admirable goal for a whale of a company and the other is a stubborn denial of contrary opinions. I thought Pando Daily was suppose to be a "different" tech news site.
You don't have to get a job at another company. You could also start your own.
This seems like the perfect time to relaunch "Larry and Sergey won't respect you in the morning." http://ycombinator.com/ad.html http://www.flickr.com/photos/martindavidsson/96160482
It is quite the jump from “This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else" to "Agree with SPYW or GTFO". One is an admirable goal for a whale of a company and the other is a stubborn denial of contrary opinions. I thought Pando Daily was suppose to be a "different" tech news site.
That depends totally on the context (what question was that an answer to, how much ranting had there been on other internal fora before that, what was the tone of the answer, etc).
My suspicion is that Google is going to treat us to a very painful object lesson: what happens to your business when you compromise the values of a beloved core product.
Here's the thing: having the most complete, most accurate, most relevant search results means never having to say you're sorry. You can add ads, you can do additional products, you can add a kind of clunky single-signon, whatever. Because at the end of the day, the user needs the thing you have that no one else does.
Now, Google had this. But one day, maybe around 2009, something happened. Where once I was delighted with Google's search, it started getting annoying. Things like automatically showing you a SERP for a different spelling of your query, because Google thought you were looking for that. Then they started matching to synonyms (tear and rip, say). And so this tool that used to do exactly what it was asked became too clever by half.
Meanwhile, SERP quality began to deteriorate as well. We suffered for something like 18 months under the regime of those Stack Overflow scrapers and their ilk, with plenty of equivalent nonsense in other verticals (hello, ebooks!).
So, already, Google took its eye off the ball for the one thing that previously had been inviolable. And now there's the comically titled SPYW.
Google's not stupid: they get that the rise of mobile and specialty apps/services that go with it are going to whittle away at the searches they'll be asked to do.
They've bet the company on Android and Google+ giving them an out. Android was a good call, as it puts them in the driver's seat for a lot of this mobile action. But they need the web, too. Can they get away with compromising their search with this nouveau portal strategy?
My hunch is that they're going to pay dearly in the process of finding out the answer is no. They're too big and too smart not to make the transition to whatever the next big thing is after search.
But boy – screwing with the golden goose that earns both reputation and cash?
Well, give 'em this: they're willing to take risks.
You don't have to get a job at another company. You could also start your own.
Larry certainly does seem to have take Steve Jobs admonishment to heart. Which can give a company tremendous focus. Its an interesting time.
I used to remind people at the Googleplex that they were walking around in SGI's tomb. I found that was rarely appreciated :-)
So here is that challenge for this decade: Leave Google and kill Hollywood. Seems like a reasonable goal to me.
To be clear: "This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else" != “Fuck off”.
There is plenty that could be said about the sad state of tech blogging but some of the blame falls on Google because they are losing the PR battle. It’s obvious that PR staff from Twitter/Facebook and others are doing a much better job at selling their rhetoric to these tech blogs, specially to the newly formed blogs looking for audience and traffic.