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Comment by wutbrodo | Hacker News Reader

People high up are aware of it; nobody seems competent enough (at management) to do anything about it.

They don't care. You as a user (for Google) ain't a customer, you're the product. This is most starkly clear in their customer service. Most of their free products don't even have one and refer to the Google forums. Meanwhile AdWords, AdSense etc. customer service is top notch.

What pisses me off most is that there is no clear alternative if you want to keep your data portable between multiple brands/devices. Microsoft often works poorly. Apple only works on Apple. The alternative is a hodgepodge of services (SimpleNote, HERE maps, EverNote, etc) that requires tons of accounts.

You underestimate how stultifying size can be. When I was at Google, pretty much everyone cared about how the internal incentives were screwed up. There were a lot of attempts at changing structure of promotion and career development, but nobody knows how to do it. To be fair, I'm not aware of any entities of that size who don't have the same problem of with balancing the need for centralization with keeping bright workers motivated and growing.

Why not just place a product manager above each product (Gmail, YouTube, Play Music, etc. etc.) that each report to the master manager who's only job is basically to unify all the services and make them work together in a nice way. He would be the one to force everyone to use the same animations, same icons, same conventions etc.. honestly I never understand how companies with millions of dollars can't come up with the simple fix of 'give an experienced person total authority'.

People lower down are aware of it too. It's bonkers.

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