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Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

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Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#511

Post by makeitdouble »

miohtama wrote: post #319
eslaught wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was an intern at Google circa 2010, there was a guest lecture from a business professor who described exactly this process. At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." But literally every single prediction of his came true, and I witnessed some of them happening in front of my own eyes even in just the months that I was there (and certainly i…

This is called Scumpeter's creative destruction (to be distinguished from other creative destruction) and why large companies may lose the ability to be innovative and compete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction However. it's hard to see Google's core business dominance, search and ad, to be destroyed very easily. It's also super confusing that no other entity has been able to create a matching service…

I'm not sure what you mean by Visa/Mastercard duopoly, there's a lot of regionality so the picture could be fsirly different depending on what you have in mind.

To me Bing as a minority competitior in search, and facebook on ads for instance would be candidates to the same kind of duopoly.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#512

Post by hotnfresh »

emodendroket wrote: post #174
kevinventullo wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I’d characterize YouTube as a diversification from ads.

It is though. Being an ad supplier is different from being an ad exchange. Or would you describe the New York Times or HBO as "ads businesses"?

By that standard, Search is also a diversification from ads.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#513

Post by thethethethe »

mepiethree wrote: post #400
paxys wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an indictment of Google but every large company in existence. That's just how our current corporate structure works, and is the reason entrepreneurship is a thing.

Yeah, and the other side of the coin is that there are tons and tons of people who left Google to pursue their passions and failed. And the third side of the coin is that there are many people who invented things within Google, were successful in doing so, and have stayed (e.g. Google Meet)

> many people who invented things within Google, were successful in doing so, and have stayed

Yeah there are tons of people like this that are L7-L8 collecting around 1M TC. You'll always have a boss but you can carve out a little kingdom for yourself, which is much more appealing to more risk adverse people than starting or joining a startup

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#514

Post by ljm »

pardoned_turkey wrote: post #86

Ian's post is pretty incisive, although I've read so many of these over the past 15 years or so. And the prescription is always to go back in time. I don't really think that's possible. When you're a newcomer, a disruptor, the whole point is to be different. You're bold, you have a clarity of purpose, you say things like "we're building a new kind of a company" or "the user comes first." But once you achieve market d…

Google fought against Microsoft’s EEE strategy until they could do it themselves. Enter Chrome.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#515

Post by Karrot_Kream »

lapcat wrote: post #309
mkozlows wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this criticism of WHATWG forgets how moribund and ossified W3C was at the time, up its own ass with semantic web nonsense and an imaginary suite of XHTML 2.0 technologies that had no path to reality. Hixie's criticisms of it were correct, and WHATWG was the kick in the pants that the W3C needed to focus on relevant things again.

I think the fact that I'm bringing up the history shows that I haven't forgotten. There are legimate disagreements over whether switching to XML was a good idea. Nonetheless, these disagreements were not a good excuse to overthrow W3C entirely, merely a convenient excuse for the browser vendors. Moreover, I don't think the HTML standards need to move as fast as Google wants them to move. HTML is now a "living standar…

The WHATWG W3C kerfuffle perfectly illustrates that when an unaccountable body's decisions become unpopular, another body can meet popular demands and sidestep the body's work. W3C was not taking HTML, XML, and XHTML in the directions that most users of the Web wanted. The fact that semantic web fans and the web-should-be-for-documents crowd agreed with the W3C doesn't matter, they were outnumbered by the rest. WHATWG met the demands of other devs and pushed the W3C into irrelevance. Sometimes it takes more than feeling right to be right, you need to convince others also.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#516

Post by janalsncm »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #448
antupis wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 years ago it was hard to see , now I ampersonally using more chatgpt than Google.

Is that because ChatGPT returns better results, or because when it returns results, it wraps them in words that make you feel more comfortable accepting them as better

Personally it’s because there’s no ads. Google’s UX is to choke the user half to death with cookies, popups, reminders to use their app, login screens, and banner ads. And that’s before we even get to the content, which is padded with SEO and filler, dancing around the point before finally giving an answer written by who-knows-whom.

(And yes I feel justified in calling these SEO sites part of Google’s UX because this is exactly the behavior their algorithm and business model are encouraging.)

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#518

Post by mathattack »

emodendroket wrote: post #189
drubio wrote: post #117

> Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently m…

It sounds like the generic complaints of everyone who doesn't like their manager ever and frankly I would have thought twice before attaching my name to a broadside that attacks a former manager by name. But hey, what do I know, I never worked at Google.

I would never name names but I don’t have 18 years of Google equity. I suspect he didn’t have any non-disparagement clauses to sign.

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#519

Post by rileyphone »

Andrex wrote: post #449
satvikpendem wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All their revenue came from ads, and they loss-led other projects. Great, market has matured from that. Has it? Seems like Google still makes most of their money via ads and everything else is a loss leader.

Google has been trying very hard to diversify, mostly through Cloud. How well they are succeeding at that is up to interpretation but they are chipping away at Ads' percentage of revenue. It used to be higher than 85% but as of 2022 it's down to only being 58% of operating revenue[0]. 0. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-mon...

That's an article from 2021 that says ads were 80% of revenue

Re: Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

#520

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

dekhn wrote: post #156

There must be a long german word describing the disillusionment of seeing the chosen one, in a golden age, succumb to poor leadership and become utterly banal. It was my dream to go work at Google; after fighting the hiring system I was finally hired into Ads SRE and learned the infrastructure, parlaid that into a very nice role doing scientific computing using idle cycles, and even got to work with 3d printing and m…

That experience sounds so great. How did you get hired?
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