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Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree that this is frustrating for erudite tech users, but I'd say calling Google a "disorganized mess of a company" is kinda stretching things. The last quarterly earnings for GOOG were up 21% year/year. That's pretty insane for a company of this size.

The way they operate is annoying when it's one of your favorite products that isn't pulling it's weight, but it's hard to argue that the strategy isn't sound.

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To play devil's advocate, we don't know how sucessful they would be if they followed a more orderly model.

Not saying they wouldn't be, but it's entirely possible that they are successfull in spite of, not because of how they operate in much of the business. Given that the vast majority of their revenue comes from just one place, advertising, which seems to be run in a much more cautious manner, there is an argument that this might be the case.

They keep showing more and more (or bigger and bigger) ads. At some point, they'll hit the law of diminishing returns.

I'm disappointed I had to go this far down into the comments to read an actual sensible rebuttal. I stand by my calling it a disorganized mess, but you'll notice I never actually say this strategy isn't paying off for the company...

Agree that "disorganized mess" is a stretch. But pointing to a company's success doesn't make them immune to criticism either. My project often gets compared to a competing offering from Amazon. When discussing this with coworkers, I will point out the drawbacks and trade-offs of their design and why that's a WAY bigger deal for my company's customers than it is for the typical AWS user. "But they made $X last year". Yes. And we're less vulnerable to data loss. Thank you. Next.

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