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Comment by stuffedBelly | Hacker News Reader

> becoming "100% competitor-focused" and said the company "can no longer innovate."

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).

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I think a key point Yegge made there is that Google is not paying attention to the customer. Instead, Google is maybe devoting too much focus to responding to the competition.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

Companies change as they get bigger because of increasing risk. The company has more value and making big gambles risky ventures with a large company starts to become irresponsible.

...like the irresponsibly risky gamble of not changing. (Innovator's Dilemma)

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.

I think there's 2 primary motivations for acquisition;

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 your company has multiple business lines that grow at 15% YOY, and you keep hiring say, 10,000 employees every year, eventually, the majority of your revenue will be from existing, not new, product lines and most of your employees will be working on products that either fail, copy, or are not innovative.

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.

you'll say it's innovation, but in reality, probably 0.1% of the employees got to work on it.

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.

And you believe no one at Google is being allowed to work on disruptive innovation, not even 0.1% of employees?

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.

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?

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.

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 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.

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.

Surely large companies should be capable of having some people that are innovating while others are focusing on competition?

Agree. I just don't really buy his "100% competitor focused" statement. Isn't Google X and moonshot projects serve as Google's innovation hub?

those aren`t part of google any more.

They've also been massively cut back on, and anything that doesn't look like a sure path to profitability has been killed by the CFO, Ruth Porat.

Those things exist, but are they successful?

I mean they literally just announced a new company that graduated their incubator.

The parent asked if they were successful. Google "graduating" them (I presume this includes... a party?) doesn't indicate success: They have no product and no revenue at this time. It is a drain on Google's ad revenue profits, and someone hopes it might someday be more.

Chronicle... exists. That's about all it has going for it right now.

It's probably easier to innovate when you don't have the intellectual baggage Google has. You are more likely to think outside the box

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