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Steve Yegge Quits, Saying Google Is 100% Competitor Focused

cnbc.com

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Re: Steve Yegge Quits, Saying Google Is 100% Competitor Focused

#91

Post by chris_wot »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #26
chris_wot wrote: post #7

I’m afraid his comments on not because my customer focussed enough jibe with my experience of Google. Google has done great UX, but two examples of dreadful customer apps are Google Groups and the Google Admin interface. I have to daily make routine changes to accounts and Google Admin is so unbelievably slow that I curse it every time I have to login to it (which is incredibly frequently). The UI is slow, non-intuit…

Google Groups has been on life support for 15+ years. If they knew what they were doing it could have been a Reddit killer integrated into a functioning G+.

Except it is used as a distribution list. It’s not the same as groups.google.com

Re: Steve Yegge Quits, Saying Google Is 100% Competitor Focused

#92

Post by stcredzero »

cromwellian wrote: post #80
stcredzero wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you believe no one at Google is being allowed to work on disruptive innovation, not even 0.1% of employees? No. But I'm not so sure that Google knows how to get the new thing to successfully cannibalize the current product line. And for the rank and file employees who aren't working in R&D or on super-secret disruptions, things will seem fairly pedestrian. You are telling me this as if I disagreed with it? Why? Y…

I don't think it's true, but in every company that is growing it's existing product lines YoY without burning them to the ground, it will asymptotically approach this. Do I believe it? No. There are large numbers of people working on completely new, crazy ideas, and just like the startup community, 97% of them will fail utterly. The number of new machine learning oriented things has grown exponentially. But how much…

I'd say Google has the opposite problem than what Yegge posed, and that's not enough focus on excellence in maintaining what people are already using.

Given the history of YouTube UI and algorithm bugs, I think that's got some evidence.

The thing is, if you want to work on disruptive stuff, with maximum risk taking, and no politics, you go found a small startup and get seed capital.

Amazon should make it so that another option is, "start a new business group at Amazon." That would give Amazon another qualitative advantage Google couldn't easily match.

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