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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

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Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#531

Post by cercatrova »

robotresearcher wrote: post #414
cpeterso wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "Alexander" refer to here?

'And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.' Attributed to Alexander the Great. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/19/and-alexander...

"It is reported that King Alexander the Great, hearing Anaxarchus the philosopher discoursing and maintaining this position: That there were worlds innumerable: fell a-weeping: and when his friends and familiars about him asked what he ailed. Have I not (quoth he) good cause to weep, that being as there are an infinite number of worlds, I am not yet the lord of one?"

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#532

Post by cercatrova »

cpeterso wrote: post #356
felixgallo wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the "Alexander bias" term -- is that yours, or are you quoting someone else?

What does "Alexander" refer to here?

Alex's Alexander the Great, who was great at conquering but not at administrating.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#533

Post by wutbrodo »

jariel wrote: post #468
wutbrodo wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) A 'cost calculator' will be a hugely sensitive product, that is absolutely in the domain of sales, it has nothing to do with dev. So many sales issues around that - this will be the primary issue with such a product. I can't tell what you're alluding to with "hugely sensitive", and "many sales issues around it". Could you clarify a concrete example these fuzzy expressions describe?

Very few products and services in this world are commodities to the point wherein you just 'add up the cost'. In fact, I can hardly think of a serious product or service quite like this. Not even cars are like this. You have maintenance, resale, insurance and financing to consider. This idea of an easy, objective way to 'calculate costs' is never really quite possible. There are usually going to be some degree of App…

Thank you for the thorough clarification! I don't know much about sales, so the previous comment was pretty opaque to me.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#534

Post by tidenly »

yt-sdb wrote: post #118

DuckDuckGo's rise feels like textbook "Innovator's Dilemma" stuff. By prioritizing privacy, something Google can't do because all the institutional values are misaligned with that goal, DDG were able to make headway into a niche market. Now they're established, and their results are getting better and better, even in the broader market. For example, I use DDG mostly because their results are visually easier to parse.…

Would it be petty of me to say I just hate DuckDuckGo's name? I know that's a stupid thing to pick your search on over privacy but when I use it I can feel myself internally screaming at how lame the branding is - I can't be the only one right?

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#535

Post by lowiqengineer »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #477
wutbrodo wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an anecdotal counter-example, the habits of code maintenance I picked up at Google are 10x better than anywhere else I've worked at. I've worked at small and medium-sized companies (and my current company is research-focused enough that a lot of people don't have a strong engineering background), but this is also what I hear from my Xoogler friends at (eg) Uber and Airbnb. I'd be surprised if this tendency had an…

I haven't moved beyond Google yet (I want to, though, who is hiring... :-) ), but yes, to be honest, better code cleanliness, testing, style conformity, and good code review ability are the major things I've learned in the 8 years I've been there. Most other skills one picks up at Google are not transferrable outside of Google.

My company (Amazon) is hiring fast right now. Somehow I feel like you aren’t going to consider us because you think we are inherently inferior engineers though!

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#537

Post by BeatLeJuce »

inakarmacoma wrote: post #439
hodgesrm wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I wish I had thought of your example first. We have service agreements that go through revisions. We copy the whole directory when there's a new release to ensure we don't lose old templates. At that point search on service agreements brings up a bunch of identically named documents in a listing that does not distinguish the directory location. It's actually caused us to send the wrong doc on several occasions.…

Docs has revision history. For several of the concerns listed, I'm surprised to see how people are using the app. Similar for asking every employee of a company to track their time in same name documents? Perhaps poor processes and poor tool-to-solution matches contribute?

Arguably then, the documentation needs improvement. Most people learned the ropes on MS Word, and never bothered to unlearn habits/explore whatever else docs has to offer. So whenever docs has a feature that isn't present in word, I wouldn't expect people to know it's there

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#538

Post by PeterStuer »

solvorn wrote: post #519
PeterStuer wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Originally this product knwn as StarOffice ws not free. It only became so after Sun aquired it and reeased it as OpenOffice. This was basically a loss-leader not just fr sun but for other companies as well to break Microsoft's capture of the Knowledege Worker productivity which they leveraged into other areas. So the idea was you were the product, "sold" to the non-MS-Windows/Intel companies in te hopes of you being…

Nobody called them “knowledge workers” outside of Page Mill Dr. when StarOffice was made and Sun didn’t compete in that space as much though Microsoft was starting to eat their lunch in other areas, like academia, government, military, and high end computation. I worked on a Sun at NOAA in the 90s in Hawaii and the computer we used for bathymetry imaging was a Sun and the ships used Suns. Most of that equipment was r…

Same experience, maybe few years earlier . We all had the Sun pizzaboxes that had replaced Lisp Machines, and 2 years later we all had Mac's and later PC's.

Latex still had it's place in academia, and would continue to dominate academic publishing for quite some time, but for 'ordinary' daily productivity needs first MacWrite and MacDraw, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and later Word and Excel were becoming the staples.

With both software being ported to the PC/Mac platforms, and Linux starting to make inroads into the Unix compute workloads, Sun needed an answer fast to stop the bleeding.

Their inability to transform their high tough / high margin business model would do them in eventually as the commodity / thin margin model of the PC ecosystem grinded them into dust. But before that, they would try several things one of which was an attempt to 'complete' the offering of a single box solution which would have to include an 'office' package so as to keep the Mac / PC of the desks.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#539

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

tidenly wrote: post #534
yt-sdb wrote: post #118

DuckDuckGo's rise feels like textbook "Innovator's Dilemma" stuff. By prioritizing privacy, something Google can't do because all the institutional values are misaligned with that goal, DDG were able to make headway into a niche market. Now they're established, and their results are getting better and better, even in the broader market. For example, I use DDG mostly because their results are visually easier to parse.…

Would it be petty of me to say I just hate DuckDuckGo's name? I know that's a stupid thing to pick your search on over privacy but when I use it I can feel myself internally screaming at how lame the branding is - I can't be the only one right?

Same here. It feels like a joke website.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#540

Post by aphroz »

Crash0v3rid3 wrote: post #396
aphroz wrote: post #5

They also lost the trust of their users. They didn't drop the "don't be evil" for nothing..

Why does this still get posted? They never dropped 'don't be evil', it's at the end of their code of conduct: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

Sorry for not checking regularly the code of conduct. It still appears that the importance of this motto has been reduced: https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
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