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>Now explain it to me Google - what's your vision

It's a bunch of very talented, bored engineers who realize that launching a product, even if it fails, is better for their career and resume than doing grunge work that might be better for google's bottom line

Basically resume driven development and Google hasn't done anything to prevent it. They probably don't care, they'd rather have them wasting money at Google than leaving due to boredom and potentially creating a startup or going to a competitor that might disrupt Google somehow.

This is exactly correct (former Googler; still in touch with many). This is one of the reasons for the endless usability-destroying redesigns on their successful products -- people need listable accomplishments in order to advance, either internally or externally.

Google has destroyed, or at least nullified, a generation of engineering talent with their unambitious, checkbox-resume based advancement scheme. We should all expect more from a supposedly engineering-driven organization.

Large companies rise, and then fall to clear up the space for the next aspiring large company. It's Google's natural destiny to fall, too.

Interestingly, the lifetime of a company is directly tied to the attention span of its customers. As long people come to the store asking for Coca Cola the company will endure, so this is probably generational. Enterprise software sticks around, so does Oracle. Internet consumer technology promotes attention span that's measured in seconds, Google can come crashing down quite suddenly.

The search engine is still very profitable, though, so that would curb the fall. (Or did I miss some news there?)

My point was rather that Google search may not be that sticky.

Coca Cola is sticky through brand advertising, business deals, product placement, etc. Pretty much all that money spent by people on bottles of the sugary water was pumped into marketing, not into manufacturing. Over decades this created a very firm image in the people's heads, and the only way to dislodge it is to create a new brand for younger consumers (which Coca Cola will purchase as soon as it shows traction).

ERP software is deeply ingrained into business processes, removing it is akin to removing a person's neural system. The only way to dislodge that is to address up-and-coming companies, having them build their processes around a new paradigm.

You can't just beat any of this via superior quality product, they have "a moat" [1]

Google doesn't have that loyalty, and it's not that deeply ingrained. They ride on their default placement in Chrome/iOS and on the search result quality (which stems from quality engineering and superior scale yielding large data sets). If someone used NLP to build a more relevant search engine (of course serving more relevant ads), it won't be long before that new search engine starts using their revenue to pay higher $$ amount to hardware manufacturers to make a new engine the default. It's a shaky ground, and it's why Google is re-inventing itself and AI company - if they don't then someone else will. There is some strength in Google's name itself, but I'm not sure it can match to the visceral reaction to an addictive sugary drink.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/economicmoat.asp

This seems like such an odd perspective to me. If I was hiring a UI designer, for example, a resume saying you worked on the Gmail rewrite would make you an instant pass. Having a product on your resume is only good for you if that product has a reputation for being good.

The problem is not the promotion criteria. That's fine. After all, promoting people for successfully completing projects is hardly a stupid or irrational way to reward people. The alternatives are all worse.

The problem is there are too many Googlers, so they keep inventing busywork projects that don't need to exist (like reinventing messaging over and over) because otherwise there's nothing for them to do. The ideas:people ratio is completely out of whack.

Why are there too many Googlers? Because Google would rather spend money on hiring than returning excess profit to investors.

Why would they do that? Because their stock voting structure prevents investors from forcing their hand, and because of an essentially delusional culture/belief amongst senior management that they hire the world's smartest people, that they will never run out of ideas, that there's always more to do etc etc. Management can't accept that Google might have tapped out, ideas-wise, and maybe its natural size is smaller than today not bigger. It takes quite some humility to say "we're spinning our wheels, the profit we generate could be better deployed elsewhere" and they can't do it.

Watching this process play out gave me a new appreciation for why shares have voting rights.

> It's a bunch of very talented, bored engineers who realize that launching a product, even if it fails, is better for their career and resume than doing grunge work that might be better for google's bottom line

I wonder if, and how much, this plays into the vast number of contractors Google pays to do that very "grunge work".

From what I gather, basically Googlers are only really rewarded (promoted) for delivering "new" things, and iterative improvements, bug fixes and even making different products cohesive are not recognized.

There's lots of good examples of this [1], but from one particuarly recent example [2]:

> I should have done the opposite: figure out what the promotion committee wants, and do that work exclusively.

> I adopted a new strategy. Before starting any task, I asked myself whether it would help my case for promotion. If the answer was no, I didn’t do it.

> My quality bar for code dropped from, “Will we be able to maintain this for the next 5 years?” to, “Can this last until I’m promoted?” I didn’t file or fix any bugs unless they risked my project’s launch. I wriggled out of all responsibilities for maintenance work.

When you look at their products through this lens, it starts to make sense, such as continually launching "new" communication apps that might as well be from different companies.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16231658

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241

I'd put Google Drive/Docs/Sheets in there as home runs. They just keep getting better and better. I hardly ever think about using a desktop office suite any more. Remember when collaborating on a document meant emailing copies and revisions back and forth to each other? Unthinkable now.

But Allo? My thought was "oh, another Google product I never heard of is shutting down."

They have to, otherwise Microsoft will trample them with their SharePoint/Office online offering.

Apple is currently trampling Google in messaging.

I don't think that true in the broad messaging space (speaking of martekshare), mostly because apple limits itself to the portion of the market that happens to own apple products. Facebook is, though.

Meh, everyone I know uses Telegram. I haven't used Facebook messages in years because the feature is apparently not on the mobile website and I'm not willing to install an app that requires suspiciously many permissions.

Here’s a lil trick: if you have to, you can access your Facebook messages on mbasic.facebook.com.

(And on to the point, Facebook has also, of course, WhatsApp, which is massive)

In the comparison of the two companies, Apple is crushing Google in any context. In the US, it's the same if you include other players. Worldwide is a different story.

I doubt it - like most Apple things, it probably only works with other Apple things. Most things in the world are not Apple.

I think that helps explain the puzzle. Drive/Docs/Sheets probably do have a strong mandate from senior leadership and a coherent vision: beat Microsoft. So these products have effort and focus that most Google offerings lack.

No way do I put all my personal documents in the cloud of a company that doesn't do customer service, gets rid of whole product lines without warning whenever it feels like, and has no recourse to actual human help if you're locked out of your accounts and can't get authenticated.

You would want to back up your google documents offline or on another server constantly, which defeats the whole purpose.

You can pay for G Suite, it's not that expensive. I'm on a grandfathered plan (free) - so no phone support but email support is available, and the agent even called me to check if I was able to resolve my problem.

Drive and Docs/Sheets make for an abomination.

Each one is good in isolation. But for a company whose primary user facing product is searching for things, Google sure haven't bothered to make the that work in drive. The search in GDrive is just plain atrocious.

At work we need to frequently ask someone working on a document or a set of documents to paste the sharing links, because GDrive's search will not surface the document or the drive folders you are looking for. Even with exact words or phrases.

And don't get me started on the latest incarnations of GSuite admin (slow) or Gmail (slower). But at least in those the search feature works.

It’s 1.0-ism. Engineers are apparently most positively rewarded at google for being part of the first public release of a product but there’s little reward for then sticking around for 1.1+ I’ve heard Google PMs complaining how their engineering team mostly bailed after 1.0 to the point where it becomes hard to get even basic stuff like i18n done.

Their worst update was with Google Finance. It was a fully functional product with great features before they updated it. Now, you cannot compare the returns of more than two stock, cannot compare across different custom time periods, no way to get annualized financial results, the portfolio feature is gone. It is a mess.

Straight from the source:

On Google's philosophy versus Apple's: "I used to have this debate with Steve Jobs, and he would always say, 'You guys are doing too much stuff.' He did a good job of doing one or two things really well. We'd like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things."

That would make sense if all the things Google did has a lifespan of more than a few years.

wait till they break Google voice into Google talking and Google Listening

Then shut down Listening part.

Sounds like a wildly successful competitor against Twitter to me

They have shut down the listening part a long time ago by providing absolutely no way for people to get in touch with humans about problems faced by customers.

The lead of Maps spends a large proportion of his time listening to user feedback (some of it even here on HN!). I suspect that's a big part of the reason for the higher quality product.

Is that still Bernie Seefeld ?

Bernie's a genius and super humble guy. I was lucky enough to work close to him during his last months in Switzerland before he left to NY. He's inspiring.

Maps is just so much closer to the ad business than all those glorified ICQ clones and B2C experiments. The traditional web ad isn't terribly attractive for local businesses, but with Google maps effectively filling the role that yellow pages directories used to have, small businesses seem almost desperate to throw their money to Google. And Google carefully keeping maps from becoming a cacophony of virtual billboards only seems to make that urge stronger: "if we can't directly pay for ranking, maybe buying some other Google ad products will make the algorithms more favorable". The two sacrificial offerings comes to mind. Maps must be a core strategical asset for Google, because the aggregate ad spending potential of all those small businesses is huge, even when you are Google.The chat apps etc are insignificant compared to that. Maybe they really are just Google-scale coding katas to the organization.

I just did a ad buy for a small k-8 school. The power of the targeting availability in Google around the map is incredible. AdWords is pretty amazing, as is Waze.

Totally in agreement. Same can be said about their hardware lines. From nexus phones to chromebooks. Terrible.

I was a hangouts guy. That's what has me worried about their cloud services. Are they going to suddenly just add and remove things without any real notice?

I have some Hangouts that I use daily over the last 5 years. I am going to be very sad when they shut it down

You mean just like how the messaging "strategy" that gave us Allo also created Duo? Because adding just one new messaging application was not enough. They had to split messaging into two.

Is Duo also being shut down?

Nope, they're fine with its success.

I've never heard of anyone using it after its launch, felt it was very buggy when it launched and the name implying it only supports two users limits it severely ... but they seem to be happy with it.

... or they forgot it exists.

> felt it was very buggy when it launched

I spent all that time convincing my mom it was just as easy as facetime, and all for nothing after the stream kept cutting out the first time we tried it. Now we just facetime, which is the only reason I have an iPad.

>>Google feels like a company that's run by a bunch of engineers/product managers instead of a product leader with a cohesive vision.

Google is a company that follows a model called OKR. Here, in this model, the company is always supposed to be chasing moonshots.

There fore all incentives, pay, raise, promotions, stock grants etc etc are all attached to such moonshots.

There is zero incentive for anyone for to maintain anything.

The system is working perfectly as designed.

It's always a good idea to expand acronyms that you're using. OKR apparently stands for "Objectives and key results", according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR.

>whoever is running Google Maps is a genius.

Yet waze is still a separate product, instead of a set of features to be enabled in Google Maps.

First of all, Waze was an acquisition and the users/following of Waze is very different from Google Maps. It's a niche product to be honest. Google Maps already absorbs the most valuable information from Waze. I believe that's how they show accidents and road closures.

It's because making a chat app isn't actually that hard... The product has been commotodized. Maps on the other hand..incredibly complicated and we are still far from a "perfect" maps experience.

we - me

It's ironic you pick Google Maps as the one product that "gets it right". Did you hear about the recent pricing scandal? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17570029

I didn't really read that as much of a scandal. Just that they were increasing prices and people got upset.

I'm upset by this because I just got burned by it last week. I needed their geocoding API for a project at work. I didn't realize I was looking at their old pricing page at first, and came to the conclusion it would cost us about $65 a month. Once I realized my mistake, I did the math again and it came to over $700 a month, which couldn't be justified for the use case. So I've spent the last week implementing the functionality I needed myself. While I agree it's not a 'scandal', it's extremely frustrating and baffling to me.

yes, I agree that's extremely frustrating. It was a huge price increase, and probably needed to be justified or at least have a different tiered structure to make it less expensive.

That's only screwing the other sites that integrate with google maps. Not so much the end user that is using google maps directly.

Google maps get it right? so i can download just country package before visiting it? i can just use it as offline navigation avoiding steep roaming fees or even better lack of network coverage in wilderness? i am honestly surprised by anyone using Google maps, that app it's missing basic features other apps had for years

F-droid Maps user

Google map's offline download feature works fine on my phone.

you can select country in list of countries without highlighting some area finally?

No.

Can you select a physical area that you are going to visit and download that you to your phone for offline use? Yes.

Perhaps you can explain to me: what does selecting an area from a list afford you that highlighting an area visually does not? I've even used this, on a couple of occasions, to download the roadmaps for entire, albeit tiny, countries.

it's much easier than highlighting whole area including nearby countries since most of the countries don't have blocky shape and if you end up highlighting whole country you must highlight also unnecessary areas behind border

you must be really fanboy if you need to have explained how it's choosing package of country/region data superior to highlighting some area

you also forgot to answer how it's offline navigation working in these great Google maps