Steve Yegge Quits, Saying Google Is 100% Competitor Focused
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Remember when Tim Cook was criticised for not constantly bringing out new product lines? Yo don't hear that any more - people seem to have forgotten about the idea that Apple might be a company that actually comes up with entirely new product categories. Indeed Apple hardly even releases updates to its computers any more, and was savaged for that a year or two back, promised solemnly that it really does know how to release new computers, but for example the Mac Mini was last updated 4 years ago in 2014.
Amazon is certainly innovating in the cloud space. Sony is having a go with VR. What other examples are there of companies that remain innovative, not just reactionary?
Out in the startup world innovation seems to have declined - reviewing the next batch of startups from any incubator/early stage VC you're bound to see the same types of companies that are fixing insurance, delivering food to people and basically doing the same things over and over.
I feel like the real innovation happens on github but most of the projects don't bother trying to become businesses.
But not to single out Apple- as you pointed out, many startups are doing the same thing over and over again. Guess this is the consolidation and make profits stage of the tech cycle.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/8/16622802/apple-ar-headset...
JWZ once described a "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model of software development, where you get bored with the old codebase and just throw it out, only to make just as many mistakes with the new one.
Lots of open-source projects do that, but it also happens with business. Version 1, written in your garage (or Starbucks, these days), is the best thing ever. Version 2 fixes bugs, improves performance, integrates with 23 popular services, has complete documentation, etc., and then the press roasts you for no longer being "innovative".
(As a budding indie developer, I feel the heat: people buy version 1.0 and expect it to be perfect. Sorry, I don't know how to deliver an Apple-like experience on day 1. I do my best to fix any issues you find, as soon as I reasonably can, though.)
Everything is perennially semi-broken, and everybody is constantly telling me that their idea is going to be the Next Big Thing, and I know that it's just going to be semi-broken forever, too. We complain about micropayments and subscriptions and advertising, but the truth is that no end-user would ever pay what software costs, if they knew how expensive it was to get right.
I spent a week and I couldn't get OAuth2 to work with Google Sheets, at all. There's some cargo-cult guesses on StackOverflow, but nobody even has a good idea for how to debug it. Google's own documentation doesn't even match what their webpage shows, and many of the options don't appear to do anything at all.
I'd be very happy, as a user and as a developer, if everybody stopped trying to "innovate" and just fixed their crap. I love Yegge's writing, but it's a little funny to hear the media complain about lack of innovation while we're still arguing about how best to patch up Meltdown/Spectre. We're so friggin' innovative I can't even trust a CPU built in the past 20 years.
It's something the market wants. It would increase productivity. It might even increase happiness. The world, indeed, would be a much better place.
Hey. A guy can dream, can't he?
Some of the APIs are superbly documented with a lot of obvious effort put into them. Google sheets sounds like it isn't. I think one major problem is that there is a unified interface and docsets for both the good APIs and the bad APIs - while there are starkly different teams maintaining them with different interests and motivations. APIs that make a ton of money for Google are naturally going to get more love, the reverse will likely be abandoned, inaccurate, etc.
The bottom line we have to remember as developers is that we use Google's API at their own discretion. Many popular used APIs are "FREE".
If you want to create a stable, long-term, software product, you need to think long and hard about incorporating third party APIs, no matter if it's provided by a large well-respected organization like Google, or the teenager down the street.
[1]: "https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/v2/auth", "https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v4/token",
A couple weeks ago, I tried to report a problem to Amazon about Prime Photos. It took a couple dozen emails to get their customer service person to read for comprehension and as soon as they did they opened 6 internal bug reports for basic UX problems – 1 that I’d started with and 5 that I found while litigating that the first was a bug not covered in the online help.
Today, I noticed that Google is trying to push iOS users into using a “Smart Lock” app as a new wrinkle on their two-factor support, which seems reasonable until you install it and learn that the only thing it can do is pair with wireless tokens rather than the USB devices most people actually have. I would be shocked if a single person really tested that before they pushed it to production.
I also wholly disagree with the viewpoint that Apple's pace of innovation has slowed. I strongly believe that the best products in Apple's entire lineup right now are the Watch and AirPods; what they are doing in these two categories are 10x ahead of competitors. iPhone X? They were the first to release IR-based face detection and authentication. They took what MS did with the Kinect and made it 100x smaller. The A10 and A11 are 2-3x more performant than any competition. They lead the industry in productizing consumer security. These are all innovations.
I simply don't think its fair to judge everything any company does to the iPhone then say "they're not innovating". The iPhone is, without a doubt, a once in a lifetime thing. I compare it to the discovery and application of electricity, oil, or the integrated circuit. It was a core insight into human behavior and the world which marked a dramatic change in all of humanity. Just calling it an "innovation" is a disservice.
What on earth gave you the impression that big companies innovate?
Small companies innovate. Big companies eat the small companies, absorbing their IP, or duplicating it. Or the small company survives and becomes the big company.
AT&T, General Electric, IBM, Xerox etc. The personal computer was invented by individuals and small companies, but the transistor was not, and probably could not have been. The loss of the idea that big companies need to innovate, may be one of the worst pieces of news in today's world for the survival of our species.
For another example the iMac Pro was released a couple of weeks ago. I know what you mean, but your single example is misleading.
Everywhere, the problem is only the good innovations are seen as innovations, the rest are just changes. Windows Vista for example was incredibly innovative, we just didn't like the results. Personally I'd prefer less innovation and more focus put on refinement and efficiency.
Automatic real-time text translation from videos, on your phone. You point your phone at a sign in Thailand and it changes the words to English.
Computer vision systems that index the themes of your photographs. You can search your Google photos for "dog" and it finds all the photos with dogs.
A computer that beats all living humans at board games.
Cars that drive themselves. Not the ones that kill their drivers, like Tesla's, or that can't see stop lights, like Uber's, or that run into people all the time, like GM's. Actual self-driving cars that will pick your ass up and take you to Taco Bell.
An airborne internet service that can be deployed anywhere in the world on short notice.
And, under all of that, a service platform that remains fast, reliable, and economical to operate even after two decades of exponential user growth, which provides free services such as searching all documents ever written, delivering the majority of the world's email, etc, all free of charge.
Get ready for a tidal wave of blockchain apps, most of which don't really need blockchain. But I'm sure some innovative new products will shake out of the cruft.
Not to say that invalidates what he's saying or anything but it's a little humorous.
https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/why-i-left-google-to-join-gr...
I understand that from a nowadays developer perspective, innovation is held in high regard and rightfully so. However, NO ONE can innovate constantly and forever. A competition race such as the cloud pricing Google vs. Amazon he mentioned is actually a good thing for customers from a economic standpoint. At some point, all companies have to slow down innovation and focus more on competitions and it's not necessarily a bad thing. That usually means refining existing products, rethinking strategies, retiring things that do not work and expanding to a new market space with a "me too" product (a "me too" product is a common strategy to tread new territory with relatively low risk).
Chronicle... exists. That's about all it has going for it right now.
There was recently an article on HN that claimed that the cost of starting a new business group at Amazon was amazingly low, and that the process was amazingly fast. Basically, you get the people together/get people hired, and you just start doing stuff. If that's true, then why couldn't Amazon manage to innovate forever? What's to prevent Jeff Bezos from getting together a pool of expertise comparable to that of YCombinator, and replicating the kind of ecosystem YCombinator managed to develop?
I question your assertion that, At some point, all companies have to slow down innovation and focus more on competitions
But yes, in many ways it is less risky for a big company to try to acquire successful innovative small companies rather than trying to do the innovation in-house. But they criticized for that, too.
1. purchase for innovation.
2. market control.
I think the latter is what people squawk about the most. Employees of the acquired will always find it uncomfortable. Small companies often have limited process where larger companies generally need it to function. That being said I don't think larger companies cull/assess the impact/efficiency of their processes on a regular basis.
If and when, a product group becomes a major hit and rockets to a billion users, you'll say it's innovation, but in reality, probably 0.1% of the employees got to work on it. Everyone else will feel like there's no innovation going on in the group they work in.
You cannot have a company continually hitting iPhones every year. Even Steve Jobs said he only worked on three disruptive innovative products: The Apple 2, the original Mac, and the iPhone, and those were spaced out by very long periods.
You can't grow a company to billions in revenue and tens of thousands of employees and have all of them working on new stuff, and no significant overlap with existing product categories of competitors.
This is irrelevant. So long as the new innovative product succeeds and is allowed to cannibalize the existing products, the company stays on top, riding the new wave.
Even Steve Jobs said he only worked on three disruptive innovative products: The Apple 2, the original Mac, and the iPhone, and those were spaced out by very long periods.
It's not relevant that there were only 3 products spaced out by a lot of time. The significant point is that someone was allowed to do the disruptive innovation, and that the new products were allowed to cannibalize the existing products to some extent.
The point is, Apple, Google, FB, Amazon, Microsoft, et al are all trying to find the next big disruptive thing. They all invest billions in R&D, but they also have to run their main cash cow businesses.
In every company, there's going to be politics, risk aversion, and symbiotic copying with competitors. This is no different at Google, Amazon, or Apple. And for the rank and file employees who aren't working in R&D or on super-secret disruptions, things will seem fairly pedestrian.
Yegge's claim that Google is 100% focused on competitors is a vast exaggeration.
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?
Yegge's claim that Google is 100% focused on competitors is a vast exaggeration.
From what you've written, it would seem that you think it's 99.9% true, so missing that 0.1% is a huge exaggeration.
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 innovation do you need in order to prove you're company is innovating? Justin the last 2 years:
Google Photos, clearly innovative, bringing ConvNet's to everyone to reduce the pain of photo management.
Tensorflow, now the dominant platform for ML
Kubernetes, now the dominant platform for container management, and from experience of systems invented internally
SmartReply system (first launched on Inbox, now ending up in many Google products)
Tango, eventually rolled into ARCore
Neural Machine Translation launched on Google Translate
Loads of Google Maps stuff, mostly invisible to people, except for the keen eye (https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/)
GCam in Pixel2. A ton of research and innovation is behind the low light and portrait segmentation in this
Waymo
Cloud TPUs
AutoML
WaveNet/Tacotron2
Instant Apps
Spanner
Those are just the small list of public ones. Yegge worked on internal dev infrastructure, I work on Gmail. Both are maintaining important needs. Someone has to do it. 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.
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. And even then, a huge number of startups are merely clones of existing businesses. "Uber for X", "Slack for Y", "Blockchain for Z".
Innovation, disruption, and copying are a continuum, and all too often rants take an extremist position and try categorize things in one of the other.
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.
Starting with uncovering and serving customer needs and desires is a great impetus for innovation. Following what the competition is doing and one-upping them is also a viable strategy but it also means you'll be one or more steps behind.
Still, I think some things like Google Home and Google Assistant are pretty innovative and perfect for utilizing Google's strengths. I think if they keep pushing along that nexus of mobile, ai, and natural language technology there's a lot of new territory they can capture.
On the other hand, I feel like Google is gonna have a tougher time fighting off Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud market. Google doesn't seem to be as good at serving enterprise customers [as MSFT and AMZN] and that's where a lot of the money is. Google also doesn't have much advantage, if any, in developer tools to entice people to use their platform over the others either.
The problem with that strategy is that you're essentially allowing your competitors to dictate your roadmap - with products they have already shipped.
That can't be long-term sustainable.
I do however believe that it is increasingly difficult at Google to enter new markets as an individual contributor. Nearly all new products require executive support before they can be meaningfully commenced. There are definitely increasingly strict controls on any public releases (even silent ones) centered around protecting the Google brand.
It kinda seems like Yegge was ready to move on and created post-hoc rationalization for it that was too broadly sweeping.
I also don't think the fetishization around innovation is really that useful. It's an ill-defined and abused buzzword.
Google Home is the exact embodiment of a "me too" product. And it's not even a good one.
Reading the blog post, it seems curious to me that much of what his startup is predicted on is lack of any kind of governmental oversight, standards, and enforcement. It actually seems to be more taking advantage of an undesirable 3rd world situation than improving it.
As much as I respect some of Steve Yegge's writing, there's some serious delusion/justification that seems to be going on. "[...] people are generally pretty clever about optimizing their income" is flat out wrong, and to base your view of the morality of an industry on such shaky foundations is a recipe for a rude awakening.
People work for Uber because it's a job. Not necessarily because it's a well paying job or a job with anything resembling a future, but it's an easy-to-obtain job.
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-intuitive and confusing. And for a search company, it’s ability to search for Group addresses is appalling. And don’t get me started on Collaborative Inboxes...
Google has innovated in the past, but it seems there is no polish and no attempt at fully developing products. They aren’t terribly great for enterprise management, which is sad for me because they have so much potential.
Perhaps the real flaw was abandoning the federated architecture of USENET for the centralized architecture of say Reddit or Facebook.
Maybe we should bring back UUCP. :)
For things involving open source or standards processes, it's really transparent when this has happened - Web Audio is the most notable one I've had the misfortune of interacting with, but there are some other cases where a pet project or prototype was kicked out the door and handed off to someone else (or no one).
Grab is a ride-haling app that is identical to Uber and Lyft. Where is their innovation exactly? And Grab is obsessed with their competitors Go-Jek and Uber.
Also being a developer, he is qualified to comment on the business directions of some of the large companies in the world because ...
Even in all my hubris, I would feel compelled to add several "just my opinion" caveats.
Does anyone have a link to the google lunch lady's blog? I heard she has some great tax advice that a lot of CFOs should hear.
Note that Facebook massively profited from people integrating with their platform both internally and externally, bringing games in (Google did try this... poorly) and bringing Facebook right into their own websites.
> Even after almost 20 years of operation, Google is still one of the very best places to work on Earth, just about any way you care to measure it.
And I'll echo it - Google is an amazing place to work. It's a company that puts very serious efforts into making its employees productive and trying to help them stay happy and healthy. It's got a quite amazing collection of very talented engineers. While I haven't worked at a huge number of companies, it's the best in this respect that I've ever seen.
(None of that means it's the best place for any given person - I know several people, including at least one of my former Ph.D. students and several former undergrads - who left because they wanted a more hard-charging startup environment. And I know others who took such a move, and returned. I don't think they regretted either decision. Everyone's mileage will vary.)
I have a lot of good stories saved up that I’d love to share. Google corporate didn’t much care for my blogging, and even though they never outright forbade it, I received a lot of indirect pressure from various VPs. So eventually I stopped. Sad.
But that’s not where my mind’s at today. Those stories will have to wait for my book.
I can completely relate with this. I used to work at S2 games on Dota 2, and at Matasano as a pentester. Both cases led to a lot of interesting stories, and I have often thought of writing a book collecting these into a single work from the perspective of a programmer, simply putting thoughts to paper.
There is a book, With the Old Breed https://www.amazon.com/Old-Breed-At-Peleliu-Okinawa/dp/08914...
It's the perspective of a WW2 solider, and simply chronicles events one after another with very little personal flair. Simply a linear sequence of events. The end result is fascinating, and works like this seem rarely published.
My question is, how can I do this without ruining my career prospects? Is that a valid concern?
All of my stories are generally positive, and I don't think any of them would cause drama. I just want to reminisce about the good times, and collate the perspective of fellow devs and pentesters.
Obviously, sharing specific details that were covered under NDA is out. That's not what this is about. But I do want to be careful not to gain a reputation as someone who will reveal company secrets if you hire me.
Any tips? It's a scary prospect, but it seems worth doing.
Put yourself first. If you do have a desire to share that stories, shatter then with some friends in private.
Now CNBC takes it and puts it on steroids.
> GOOGLE CAN NO LONGER INNOVATE!!! says former big shot employee
I won't be surprised if this also affects their stock price.