There always seems to be a lack of well-roundedness at Google. It didn't really matter back when they just did search, but now that they're expanding into other fields, they're looking more and more like an expert hammerer than an master of many tools.
I don't think that's actually true. In particular, I think that Google for most of its history was masterful at PR and communications - they managed to maintain a very positive public image all the way through 2011, despite being both far more powerful, more naughty, and more ruthless than the general public saw them as. I think management and UX are also quite strong at Google - they're known for sparse design and UX fails, but there's often a lot of subtlety to how Google products are designed that makes them very effective for their purposes. They did always suck at customer service, though.
Rather, I think Google's hubris is...hubris. They feel the need to have their fingers in everything. It's not enough to be the world's best Search company or even organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, they also need to be the best social network, and best cloud provider, and best AI company, and best mobile-phone OS, and best web browser, and best daily deals site (remember their aborted Groupon purchase, soon followed by a competitor?), and do government contracts for the military, and get into China, and build self-driving cars and robotics, and be a major payment provider and operate half a dozen different chat services.
Most of the PR, communication, management, and UX fails are forced errors. They happen because there's an inherent contradiction in Google's business model. You can't simultaneously market yourself to engineers with "Don't be evil" while devising ways to help the military kill people more accurately or censoring Chinese search results; hell, at some point the military is likely going to have an issue with China potentially hacking into Google's cloud infrastructure through their partnerships. A surprising number of the UX fails also come about because some executive is protecting their turf and won't let the obvious integration & UI simplification happen even though both engineers and customers want it.
Getting into too many fields and ending up all over the place is bad management.
Executives protecting their turfs may indeed be a recipe to getting bad UX, but that doesn't excuse the fact that it's bad UX or that bad UX is all over Google. If anything the latter points towards more bad management.
And as you wrote, customer service has always been bad.
Except there's always going to be some critics, especially when you're talking about a corporation of Google's size.
There's going to be people concerned about privacy, corporate overreach, the nature of some of its activities (such as defense contracts).
You will also get various biased opinions, such as people who were hurt in some way by Google: rejected candidates or businesses that folded due to some Google service grabbing their market share.
Hell, even if Google religiously avoided all the above, you will still get some astroturfing campaigns by its competitors!
Negative commentary on a niche website like HN doesn't actually mean much in the grand scheme of PR. Check what the average person thinks about Google. Most likely you will find it quite positive. If you're looking for a company with serious image problems, compare to Facebook.
I'm glad Google (and Apple and Amazon) got into the phone business, the camera business, the phone service business (Google Voice), the car business (Waymo) and the entertainment business (Youtube, Music, etc.)
The status quo was so awful (remember cable TV contracts with 200 channels you didnt want to watch?) and has finally improved with the tech giants putting pressure in cushy lazy incumbents.
Same for self-driving cars. Where were the efforts before Google and other tech giants go into the game? I seem to recall only incremental innovation for decades.
What I really wish is that they didnt botch some of these things (Google Voice is a great example of an amazing product with massive underinvestment (abandonment?) from Google.)
We also missed out on Google Voice, will miss out on whatever TV play they're making with YouTube.
To be fair, us Canadians are in the same boat. You can be literally a stone's throw from the U.S. and still not get a lot of features available. Voice was never available, Wallet took several years before it was rolled out here, YouTube Red isn't available here either. Hell, most new Home/Assistant features take months to arrive here too.
All that while their primary business is advertising - not generally a well-liked industry.
Their PR management is so great that most people would be shocked to realize they're even in advertising at all.
The company also has a great reputation among engineers, and is among the most desirable employers not just in its field, but in the US in general, at a time of a booming job market with plenty of other great choices.
I also don't know about those "UX failures". The company has several web-based services that have effectively beaten all other services, including desktop-based services in their field. Do people forget this feat was considered impossible back when Google got started?
This was no easy feat - Google realized none of the browsers that existed back then was up to the task, so it launched its own browser (!) with a revolutionary new Javascript engine that was an order of magnitude faster than anything else at the time. This was an incredibly ambitious technology project, and they made it a huge success.
So while Google certainly has its failures, and we can expect more of those as it keeps its unrelenting march to become one of the most powerful corporations that has ever existed, describing them as bumbling fools who always botch "human interaction" is simply false and misleading.
For comparison the banking sector managed to take down the entire economy and came out of it virtually unscathed by Washington. That is successful PR and lobbying.
"Unscathed by Washington"? Sure. With a squeaky clean image...? Not so much.
There was Occupy Wallstreet, demonstrations all over the country, and for the vast majority of people, the image of the banking industry has been tarnished.
Also, even though no banker went to jail for fraud, they did get more regulated, and their business suffered from government-imposed restrictions (which they are working very hard to undo).
With emphasis on "was". People where angry for a while, the government let them vent and then everybody went back to their normal lives and government gave the rich a massive tax cut and slowly started to loosen banking restrictions.
Occupy Wallstreet had a huge, lasting impact on the way much of the population views the banking and finance industry.
> government gave the rich a massive tax cut and slowly started to loosen banking restrictions.
The tax cuts are not specifically for the banking or finance industry.
Google however is failing horribly at the "getting rich" part. Sure they are successful, but the EU is taking a massive chunk of their business with GDPR. California is trying to impose similar measures, and if they keep this up others will follow. The hammer of regulation will dampen their profits.
I feel like this is in part because the people that write bad things about other people owned google stock or had many close friends in google.
They made their brand synonymous with the word 'search' - my god man, that's worth billions, minimum.
They've done it in an oddly naive 'authentic' way, by I think truly believing their own schtick, and drinking their own coolaid. And I'm not nearly as cynical as the above posters, Google is way more ethnical that most companies. My god man, if Google wanted to they could change electoral outcomes, simply form a massive hedge fund and beat everyone at investing, do evil things the likes of which we've never hard of. I'm constantly impressed by how actually objective they've been about a lot of stuff given 99% of other CEO's would have abused the data position a long, long time ago. Not to say they are perfect, but ... compared to most, they have been pretty good. Though that's changing.
They've done it without any hardcore ad spends, or any real classical marketing attempts to make us believe things one way or another, so kudos on them.
But yes, they are kind of bad at most classical parts of marketing, communications ... heck even some kinds of product management. But the 'Engineers first' mentality got them where they are, I'm going to doubt that part of their DNA will change.
And they kept that promise! Look at the internet today.
Microsoft is no longer "evil", and the internet is fine, so "do no evil" is no longer necessary.
People assumed do not evil had something to do with privacy, or this or that, or lots of other things people read into it.
It didn't. It was just one thing: Open standards and promoting the open internet.
I'm not sure if I believe DNE was exactly about Microsoft, rather a more general mantra. In 98' the founders were running around giving talks about how 'advertising was ruining the internet' which wasn't really an MS things. So I think MS was just one factor, but yes, most don't remember a time when they were so dominant.
Not that it matters too much, but the motto was the much less ambitious (and more achievable) "Don't be evil".
I am looking. What I see is it being devoured by Google. Search 99%, Chrome 80%, private email 90%, Google accounts for work, for school kids, and Google Analytics tracking in every web site.
I said private email accounts.
The Wikipedia article [1] presents the motto (which is actually "Don't be evil") as being much more than that, from its origin and throughout its use. On second look, it doesn't even use the adjective "open" or mention standards.
So, where's the open standard for Hangouts?
(It used to be XMPP when it was Google Talk. But it's not anymore. And even back when, it wasn't federated, contrary to "the open Internet.")
In general, it feels like you're right, but only in a sense that Google did drive open standards - to bludgeon Microsoft. Which it did quite successfully, and we're all better off for it. But now that they have their own empire, they're not so keen on all that open stuff anymore, whenever they have a monopoly position to abuse.
I don't know why they haven't been punished for that yet after the successful taming of Microsoft some years ago.
Thankfully, unless they remove IMAP access it isn't something that I have to deal with most of the time.
This is an overstatement. Yes, they want to stick their fingers in all the pies but they don't try very hard and cancel products on whims too.
Search and its revenue is all they cared about. I would actually commend Google on that focus where most others would lose themselves in the mix. Search, Gmail, Docs were their major contributions. Chrome browser is based on Apple's WebKit.
It takes serious PR expertise for a company doing so much harm to enjoy such a consistently positive image with the media and general public. This is starting to change, but it’s a very recent development.
PR on the other hand, I think to be more of a mixed bag. They've always used marketing to deflect away from poor PR. Historically in the early days their PR was better, but I think that can be attributed to the company just being better. These days, well, this whole G+ debacle can be seen as a failure in PR.
They managed to turn a minor oversight of leaking common information that likely impacted nobody into a major data breach front page announcement on every major news publisher. Pretty big PR failure if you ask me.
That's rather frustrating thing is: they've done some creative things, but it doesn't seem to be so that they've helped anyone. My guess [from their product launches and behavior] It looks like they reward people who make publicity waves and ignore the fact that nothing comes of it. Google wave? Duo/whatever the next chat app.. etc. (Now Google+)
The world of advertising is all about eyeballs. That might explain it.
What engineering brilliance? Their only non-trivial product is search, and it sucks and keeps getting suckier every year.
Their ad business is no better than the competitors.
I think most people's point is some where in the mid-2000's they quite literally were the ahead of the crowd by a huge margin when it came to in house engineering. Google in many ways was the first mega web scale company. The scale of their servers, data centers, in-house research, things like MapReduce, BigTable etc etc the list is endless. Google indeed was a hub for very smart people to work pre-2010's.
Not sure what changed. I also hear their engineering driven culture has faded heavily if not totally dead. 20% time projects are no longer there, and even if they exist by a miracle they are largely hated by the internal cartels and power structures.
Arguably the biggest slip in an engineering driven culture happens when your big products come through acquisitions not in-house work. That's the first indication that bureaucracy has taken over, and no real person worth their salt is running their show. The reason why start ups can disrupt the market and not big companies, is because 1 - 2 people with a good team are what do the disruption. Its a mistake to assume that companies or your average middle manager Joe can do much in that area.
Actually, product-wise, there's some other high points as well. At any given moment, Chrome is usually the best browser, and it's certainly the one that pushed quality forward the most.
The reality is that excellence in all areas is ideal, but very few company leaders or cultures can manage this. Most excel at one or two.
I know three different PMs at Google in a non-work capacity, and these three people in particular are the most 'intellectually self-righteous' people I have ever met in my life. Basically they're total bullies. I really hope this isn't exemplary of the rest of them, but your statement leads me to think that is not the case.
I get the impression that people claiming that companies like Apple are "engineering-driven" are only talking about their new, non-core projects. But then my perceptions are only colored by the folks I know working at those companies, so whatever.
They have very intelligent and capable folks trying to "do no evil", but ultimately they're a business, not a charity. They rarely actually care about their engineers' opinions unless it helps with public image or maintaining a competitive edge (no matter how artificially) or helping them start a new product line (or close one that isn't paying the bills).
Thankfully I will say that it sounds like there is just enough blowback over the past two or three years that it's not all bad. But it's certainly not a place that I would call "run by engineers", and hasn't been for at least 4 years now.
They could be a bit blind about some things -- and blindsided. But once you actually made your point, they'd do something about it. They actually cared. (Or, enough of them did, to make a difference.)
Now, we have a corporately curated behemoth.
Although, it is interesting that internal pressure still occasionally produces an appearance of change, such as publicly stepping back from death robots and Wintermuth off its meds.
Which is it's own kind of rot.
Being able to read email is useful. Seriously though, Gmail added the snooze ability, which was the one feature from Inbox I used regularly.
I for one think the opposite. They're the best at giving me exactly the ad which I may like. (I'm not saying I like the idea of an ad)