Google doesn't innovate anymore. The last attempt at an innovation I saw was Stadia (RIP). But, most Google products have a replacement now; Google can finally die.
What was innovative about Stadia?
Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
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Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
#822Google makes me kind of sad. They used to be so cool, pushing technology forward, making it accessible to the masses, doing things that seemed almost impossible and making it mainstream. Ads were the money stream but they did it tastefully. Now the main page is all ads, dark patterns are everywhere in everything Google does. They've basically become one of the ethically worst technology companies around. Is it inevit…
> until an idealistic founder leaves or dies
At which point they're more interested in maximizing the value of their shares, so they can do other things.
Therefore, they specifically leave their company in charge of profit maximizers.
It just takes a subsequent decade or so for the track record of decisions to finally make that unavoidably obvious to employees and the general public.
Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
#823Between Discord, Twitch, Amazon+Prime, and Google... what's the layoff pattern here? Are we talking about social community teams? Streaming/networking engineers? Or is there no connective thread between these four companies? Are there other corporate layoffs that round out this intrigue?
Intrigue? The economy is teetering on recession. These companies understand macro trends better than anyone, and can plainly see what is coming. Now the play is to protect the war chests they have amassed to weather the storm.
If the companies understood macro trends they would not have hired just to fire everyone later when their growth plans didn't correspond to reality.
Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
#824Google is almost a 2T company. The amount of wealth that big google shareholders hold in the 1T+ tech companies is mind boggling. Perhaps US should consider raising capital gains tax.
When it comes to large shareholders that wouldn't actually do anything. Nobody sells in these new blue chips; they just borrow against their positions. I've thought about this for a long time. If we wanted to actually tax this wealth, we should just make people pay capital gains on marked-to-market positions every 10 years. Now before everyone starts shouting "yea, but the valuations aren't value," you could easily t…
Tax the sale of everything and the entire problem goes away.
At that point, it doesn't matter that they borrowed against their positions because spending the money they borrowed still taxes their stocks indirectly.
Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
#825> laid off employees who worked on ... the Pixel phone. That sounds weird to me. Pixel phones has grown very fast in the last years and I don't se how it can be seen as anything but a great success.
I'm a big fan of the pixel series, if they wind up dropping it or make upcoming hardware terrible its likely to drive me to iphone unfortunately.
The various third party android phones have severe drawbacks in their manufacturers tweaked android or inferior hardware.
Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
#826Google makes me kind of sad. They used to be so cool, pushing technology forward, making it accessible to the masses, doing things that seemed almost impossible and making it mainstream. Ads were the money stream but they did it tastefully. Now the main page is all ads, dark patterns are everywhere in everything Google does. They've basically become one of the ethically worst technology companies around. Is it inevit…
I'm beginning to believe that it's just impossible to do advertising ethically. The hypothesis is that an advertising firm that attempts to do so will perform worse than ones doing unethical things, and eventually lose customers.
Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
#827Google makes me kind of sad. They used to be so cool, pushing technology forward, making it accessible to the masses, doing things that seemed almost impossible and making it mainstream. Ads were the money stream but they did it tastefully. Now the main page is all ads, dark patterns are everywhere in everything Google does. They've basically become one of the ethically worst technology companies around. Is it inevit…
It's just Goodhart's law. Our economy is profit centric. The way public companies are structured, the only metric anyone cares about is profit. Everything else just sloughs off over time.
Re: Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
#828Google doesn't innovate anymore. The last attempt at an innovation I saw was Stadia (RIP). But, most Google products have a replacement now; Google can finally die.
Onlive did Stadia in like 2009. Not really innovative.