“Adobe Flash Player is required for interactive charts”

Despite being a little bit more complex than I think it needed to be (I was a junior engineer after all, and this was my first project at my first job) I still think there's more complexity than meets the eye. Like anything that looks simple, there's tons of work behind it.

I'd imagine is a combination of "not built here", pride (google engineers always feel that they can build everything better than the outside world), and performance (Google was investing, and I imagine continues to invest, vast amounts of engineering in speed).

For a smaller (but worse affected) example, look at Wikipedia. The majority of their spending is on management, and "soft jobs" like "PR" and public events. They spend a tiny fraction on the one thing that matters: Hosting bandwidth and upgrading their platform where all of their content they provide comes for free. Till a few years ago they had (IIRC from last time I looked into their docs) like, only 2 or 3 full-time engineers in the entire company for a bulk of their growth until finally adding a bunch more--while adding plenty of other staff. If the majority of their money is coming from those banners, and not outsider backers, there is no excuse for them to spend so much outside their core technology. Universities spend big money outside the college (Football, and grant money)... but it GAINS far more in exchange, so that makes sense.

I would hypothesis that as a company employees more and more "assistants" and "assistants of assistants" and the proportion of administration to engineering/research staff grows, a company bogs down with people who don't really contribute as much as they debate (or do nothing at all) in the company. I've seen studies that show that same problem as one of the reasons University costs have risen so much. There's probably an existing term for it akin to the Peter Principle but I'm not aware of it.

Basically, Google is an amazing company full of amazing people. But while they're amazing in TECH, that doesn't mean they have equally amazing managers capable of stopping the stagnation and confusion that comes with large companies. Lots of their "open" ideas work well on small and medium scales, but do they scale up?

But of course lots of that is more vague than I'd prefer in a comment. So I'd like to emphasis my one real point, as the proportion of # administration to content producers grows, the efficiency of a company drops as it gets bogged down in communication issues and "the usual" office politics. Which I would also hypothesis the majority of politics come from low-end producers (possibly to feel like they're contributing?). We've all worked at companies (and often still do) where we can cite limitless examples of non-producers easily passing HR, but bogging down the content creators by distracting them.

Lots of the "leaks" about Google have happened and almost every single one has mentioned office politics, retribution, witchhunts, and blacklists. They could be false. But they seem to have those as common threads among them. ("Where there's smoke there's fire"?) It also goes in line with Google producing much less "world revolution" products and acquiring mass amounts of startups with new ideas. Kind of reminds me of the story of AOL.

A large supermarket would most likely want something like that. With serial ports, they'd have to design a system themselves, including the boxes to attach to the individual serial ports.

Of course, for a technically skilled individual, a serial port is much preferable.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/google-finance-apis

(full disclosure, that’s the company I work for)

They still use Flash for some parts (like portfolio x-ray), but it's not the needed for the simpler charts.

Free trial version available on our website (website content is in need of updating -- not all features are mentioned on there yet. We're working on a new site)