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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Weirdly this feels like a non-issue. Google has not felt like it has a "personality" for some time - maybe it's a function of hitting mega-corporate size, but it also feels a bit like when Microsoft (a Computer on every Desktop) essentially achieved its goal, it then spent a decade in "goalless and soulless exploitation" mode - something that one suspects is the next step for the worlds largest personality-free platform.

If the two of them leave (have fun sipping pina coladas on the beach!) I am not sure (from the outside) what difference will be made. This may sound like great corporate succession planning - but I feel without a goal there will be little to stop business plans that boil down to "squeeze every dollar from everyone everywhere"

(Was there a glimmer of light in "unbiased free information to all" - is that a mission for the new decade?)

Edit: Just to emphasise - I hope they have fun spending their billions.

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"Weirdly this feels like a non-issue"

It is.

That page is awful with a hood that keeps flapping around up and down and text that is trying to be true to italics for quotes instead of lots of diacritics and ends up looking badly diseased. Then the letter sidesteps into a memo, which is equally odd and awkward. It's all a bit odd.

S and B (in my very opinionated ... opinion) did create a great thing in Google. I can't fault people trying to make a living and running with the ball to the point where the playing field is not just paved with gold but it nearly redefines what the concept of gold is.

I think they should have retired before "do no evil" was ditched. That would have cemented their status as internet demi-gods. Instead I think their legacy will be

<i>wierdos whot spy on you</i>

> <i>wierdos whot spy on you</i>

LOL. I agree with a lot of your points but this one really hit home. On this one, the spying, I always wondered how odd or awkward it had to be internally to push new methods, techniques, or initiatives for "improving user experience" (I.e., spying). I interviewed for some Technical Solutions Engineer role at Google a long time ago. I really wanted the job but when asked a couple questions about how I'd technically achieve some goal related to spying on users and I always found myself hesitating, looking at the interviewer, and thinking, "is it ethically okay if I say this?" I can't imagine how the work environment transitioned at Google over the years from "do no evil" to actively fostering spying on users. I have to imagine it happened because there were few if any laws around user privacy while Google was up and coming. But I know Google has good internal controls for privacy, but I have to imagine there were many unethical or borderline conversations in the name of better spying on users data. I'm still trying to get away from Gmail because I know everything I send/receive is parses but the struggle is real. This is in addition to Chrome and an Android phone, not to mention Google search results. What's the risk of all this spying? In sum, what is at risk is the loss of free will. People who don't care because "they have nothing to hide" cannot see the forest for the trees. Then again, I need to make some changes myself. As an ancient Chinese proverb says, "To know, and not to do, is in fact not to know."

>I'm still trying to get away from Gmail because I know everything I send/receive is parses but the struggle is real.

There's the spying, but then there are also the numerous instances where Google simply terminated someone's account for completely random reasons that their automated system picked up. And you literally cannot ever get a human to talk to you at that company unless you manage to create a social media circus. Just semi-recently a bunch of people got permanently banned (that includes gmail, gdrive, everything) because they spammed emotes on a YouTube stream (something that is fairly commonplace on Twitch, at most you'll get a small timeout on that stream). I think most of them got unbanned eventually, but it took like a week and the streamer trying to raise awareness on social media. If something like this happens to you and you're alone, your account is just dust.

Using gmail or google drive isn't just giving Google your data to look at, it also means that everything you don't have a local backup for might be completely inaccessible to you on a whim, forever.

I think it's very likely that they wanted you to question the ethics there. I don't know what your interview was like though.

Googler, opinions are my own.

I don't think trying to select for an ethical core really works. Ultimately, you are either going to go along with the people around you or you are going to stick to some principles that aren't shared by everybody, and in the latter case, you're going to be unsuitable for the job, because you're not running the company.

So looking for evidence of ethics in an interview is just looking for a smooth talking hypocrite, even if you think you really want to.

The point is about asking good questions and having a healthy debate not about arriving with a preconceived “ethical core.”

The one Googler I know personally and have talked to about this stuff seems to have a weird blind spot around privacy and data collection. They're super friendly and happy to discuss products and features, but any questions about keeping data on your own device, limiting data access etc. just gets a blank stare, as if the very concept of "data which Google doesn't track" is nonsensical to them.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -Upton Sinclair

I'm just now realizing why I might have failed my interviews that I thought I nailed some questions in...

About "don't be evil": It's still very much in there. From: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

> And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!

The problem was that it was moved from near the top to being near the bottom (though it's own paragraph). Sadly there were lots of very inaccurate headlines like this:

> Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct

https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...

It's there on paper, but is is really still there?

I am a Googler, opinions on my own.

The problem with the phrase is that it is very relative depending on your meaning of evil. It's a shifting over time and varies by person.

At the same time it provides a good guiding principle for Google as a whole. You need to think about users in different parts of the world with different ideas of what is good and evil, and try to cater to all of them. It's a really hard problem.

That code have conduct I linked tries to explain how evil is defined and give more concrete principles to follow.

From my experience, no one tries to be evil within Google, and we try to do right by our users. But when you're dealing with products like YouTube and Search with massive amounts of user-generated data, suggesting good answers that satisfy everyone and doesn't generate news headlines is impossible. We do what we can, but when you have billion user products, some people are always going to be pissed at you.

"but when you have billion user products, some people are always going to be pissed at you"

The problem with this narrative (which has been the official line for almost 7-8 years now) is it doesn't cause exaptation or adaptation. It is good enough to hold on to, if the goal is stagnation (which is what has happened with Search - you can point at things like wolframalpha, alpha go, stackexchange, quora, wikipedia, elasticsearch etc etc and ask why if the goal was to organize the worlds info, these things failed to develop internally - Similarly with Youtube - why did they missed being netflix or twitch, how did they not become the default platform for disney). The answer is the Scale has worked against that goal. So you stagnate.

The initial goal was to scale globally. That goal was achieved. After that new goals had to be defined. That did not happen because its hard to define achievable goals at that scale. The only default goal was empire defense - i.e. hold on to scale by hook or crook. For what? Well no great answer to that has been found. Which is hinting that global scale is counter productive to innovation whether technical or moral.

Its kind of like a football team winning the game and then staying on the pitch. Not playing any new games or restarting play. Then saying but guys we won leave us alone now.

I don't blame Google. But I expect Google to lead not to react and be defensive. And to do that the narrative requires honesty.

> Which is hinting that global scale is counter productive to innovation

I'd say not Global Scale per se, but achieving own goals without further goals to work towards. I.E you've achieved everything there is to achieve, what can do you do more?

Bill Gates reinvented himself by tackling humanitarian causes. Googlers set up further missions, e.g. self driving cars or health improvement, but those seem unimpressive comparing to world dominance.

I'm a Xoogler myself, I understand the struggle.

And I agree that I've never known any individual Googler to be evil, or intend to be evil (Although I've seen questionable decision making at times).

But whilst no one Googler is evil, the larger body that is "Google" has turned slightly further towards evil (In my personal definition of the word evil).

It's still nowhere near what I would consider true evil, I would probably go back to Google one day if the opportunity presents itself. But I would argue the Google I see today is less "good" than the Google I saw 5 years ago.

Individual motivation and well intent has nothing to do with the forces that drive a large corporate entity at scale.

Implementing censored search for an oppressive regime or providing research to killer drone programs is quite a different ball than "pissing off a few users".

Megacorps are only driven by one goal: growth. And Google has certainly proven that a lot is flying under the radar way on the wrong side of the good vs. evil dichtonomy.

While valid take here, I don't think it was ever meant to be taken as a literal guiding principle that needed to be written down so clearly as much as do the second thing you said, act as a guiding principle.

To me, the minuta having to be written down was a symptom of the complexity making the simplistic and guiding principle don't be evil useless, which I think mainly was caused by scale and the way the ad industry and personal data practices everywhere have evolved. No need to dig in there, but basically, I think that the fact it's still there doesn't really say much. This isn't to say the problems and scale of Google are easy, for the record. Also not impossible either of course.

Curious, in your 100% personal opinion, do you disagree that the company has more or less "deprecated" it?

> That code have conduct I linked tries to explain how evil is defined

You don't need to define evil for us. Small children know evil when they see it. People are quite capable of gleaning a person's or group of people's intent from their actions.

When you start needing to define what evil is, you've lost the debate entirely.

Just give me what I search for, no filters, no bullshit.

I saw a 4 to 5 year-old child watching the psychological equivalent of a snuff film on YouTube while his mother was working the kitchen at a warung in Ubud. "Don't be evil" means if you knew this sort of thing could happen you should've done absolutely everything you could to prevent it, or simply resigned your post at the company.

Evil to most people is obvious. But where money is concerned few "Googler" could do the right thing even if they wanted out of fear of biting the hand that feeds six-figure salaries in exchange for obstinate servitude.

Was it ever really there for the entire time period between the founding and when it was moved to a lower part of the page?

I don't know, I wasn't there the whole time :)

Oh, and if you try to organize people speaking up, you'll be fired.

> > And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!

How does this fit in the narrative, when the ones speaking up (right or wrong, that's not the issue here) are being fired?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/technology/Google-union-c...

Google kept deprecating its use of the phrase "don't be evil" and now almost a footnote in its code of conduct.

As if remaining part of code of conduct doc promotes evil. Please ...

> is that a mission for the new decade?

It would be nice to see a focused mission from El Goog. From the outside it feels like they incubate a bunch of random semi-competing products which are arbitrarily terminated or boosted. There's a lot of talent that could be marshaled.

People find the thought of a company with a clear mission appealing but there's no clear advantage of having a mission other than maximizing financial value.

The company mission is just one of the Sillicon Valley tropes, another one is the idea of "changing the world".

Having a mission might be useful for focus and clarity in thinking but if it's taken as something more than that, it's just an artificial constraint. If you can use the company capital more effectively in a completely different market, you should do that, regardless the mission.

I feel that the mission is often constructed backwards from the products. I.e. at Google they looked at their products and came up with a broad description of the user need (organizing the world's information).

Google and it's story were inspirational! The prospect of working there .. free food.. working with fellow like minded people who were supposedly the best of the best(kids from Harvard, Stanford, etc), the 20 percent hacking time they advertised and the fact all was wrapped up in their "Do No Evil," bow made it further an inspirational place to dream to work for or with.

It's "Do No Evil," ethos/mission was important and having one & sticking to it is equally important vs. swiping it under the carpet for the sake of profits. Further it's mission was important to all the women and men they inspired to start up and to get into tech. Yet once they brushed their mission under the rug & focused on money many who they inspired became shocked to learn that many times they do 'Evil," prompting disenchantment. You can see that disenchantment with Google everyday here on Hacker News with the various negative stories and comments about Google. Something I bet if you go back more then five or six years you'd never see here.

> The company mission is just one of the Sillicon Valley tropes, another one is the idea of "changing the world".

Maybe you think of it this way because of how much its abused. At its core, I do sincerely believe (still) that Silicon Valley does represent a unique force of change in this world unlike any we've seen before.

Semiconductors and then Software: it has changed the world (for better or worse, that's another question).

Corporate missions are valuable/futile tools for filtering investors: "we may occasionally compromise between that and Total Profit, don't act all surprised if we do".

They have a mission, to control the interface between consumers and digital business.

All their 'random' stuff makes sense in that context.

Not just digital. In the analog age, all those little "yellow pages" publishers around the world were in a similar position and got quite fat from it as well. Now that entire market is concentrated, with enormous automation benefits, at a single address in Mountain View.

Injecting Google intro the interface for brick and mortar businesses is why Maps and Android exist.

I share the sentiment that Sundar to me feels a bit like an invisible placeholder for leadership that I would argue is obviously lacking in Google lately.

There's nothing wrong with its stock price and revenue and I'm sure from that angle a lot of financial people are pretty happy with the status quo of just milking that cow perpetually. However, looking at it from the technical angle, I see a company that is asleep at the wheel and showing a distinct lack of vision, leadership, and direction across the board of its product portfolio. Perhaps a bit like MS under Balmer ramming out increasingly less popular iterations of windows and office. MS turned things around under Nadella. Google perhaps hasn't sunken far enough that it needs that kind of leadership change yet but it seems in my eyes to be going down that same path slowly.

IMHO all the money making units worth mentioning in Google have their origin in a brief period of the early 2000s perhaps up to the 2006-2008 time frame (i.e. the Android launch) when it was smaller, more creative, nimble, and definitely more capable of translating vision into execution. That includes things like google docs, hangouts, maps, photos, youtube, gmail, android, chrome, google cloud and of course the big money maker ads.

A lot of other stuff launched in the years since has simply failed to get traction or got killed early. This has actually become a meme on HN and elsewhere where people openly wonder when they will kill X at the moment of the announcement where X is a long list of stuff Google tried and failed to deliver or just walked away from despite internal and external enthusiasm (e.g Google Inbox). The list of stuff that they announced in the last decade or so that actually didn't get killed is worryingly short.

There actually is very little of significance that I can name that emerged out of Google in the recent decade that is worthy of being added to that list and only some stuff under the Alphabet umbrella that comes close (i.e. Waymo would be the main success story there that has yet to prove itself as a long term money maker).

In other words, I think of Sundar as a caretaker, not a leader. He's greasing the wheels of the money printing machine that is ads but maybe not really the best for coming up with the next big thing. Maybe now is a good moment to start looking for a real leader to replace the founders that clearly just announced their permanent retirement from the industry and any other meaningful involvement with tech (tu un-sugar coat this announcement).

"maybe not really the best for coming up with the next big thing"

But does any huge successful company that ends up having a second act really do that, go and find a visionary* to rejuvenate the company? With Nadella, wasn't it more like, Microsoft did a lot of random things, and when one of them was particularly successful, then the leader of it (cloud, Azure) rose to the top? Not that they picked him and then he decided the direction of the company.

*Jobs isn't really what I mean, because he was the original visionary, not a replacement.

I think Nadella is a clear case of MS getting lucky. They picked a leader from their own ranks that transformed the company in a few short years. Given the names that were circulating for that role at the time, I don't think they could have done better. It's current valuation would not have happened ever under Balmer. Not even close. That's why he was pushed out. MS was down a path of slow decline and now they are not. There are plenty of big tech companies that technically still exist but are shadows of their former glory. E.g. HP, Oracle, IBM to name a few. MS was on a track of joining that list of has-beens.

Google is in a much better shape than MS just a few short years ago when they replaced Balmer (certainly financially). But yet I'm calling out that now is a good moment to prevent Google from going down that path any further. Sundar is in my view simply not the type of leader Google needs to prevent that.

I think the decline of Microsoft in the mid-2000's was mainly caused by them missing the boat on the two massive shifts in computing -- from desktop software to web and mobile. Google, on the other hand, is firmly entrenched in both web and mobile. Until there is a similar shift (if there will ever be one), I don't see Google stagnating the same way that Microsoft did.

They missed that boat because of a lack of vision. They lacked viaion because of their leadership. Nadella drove through some big changes in short timespan and demonstrated a keen sense of what was important for MS. E.g. applying embrace and extend to OSS is a classic MS play that neither Ballmer nor Gates was prepared to make happen long after it was obvious it needed to be done. Enter Nadella and we now have vs code, ms github, and an actual ff-ing linux kernel that actually comes with windows 10 ready to run docker and a lot of other stuff. Also Azure is now runs mostly linux and things like sql server can run on linux. To top it off, MS is now once more exciting developers. I've not seen that level of excitement about anything they do since the mid nineties. That's leadership.

Google at the same time seems to struggle to convince developers that they need to drop their fancy languages for a bastardized and outdated thing called Dart that basically can only be explained as a ginormous not invented here syndrome combined with sunk cost fallacy. Just a minor example of things Google tries that have an obvious ticking clock in terms of them killing it in favor of something else. Also what's up with having 3 operating systems for devices and dragging out picking one out for half a decade? That's Conway's law in action right there.

Microsoft didn't miss the boat on either web or mobile, they were one of the first to both. They just fundamentally misunderstood the value proposition of each because of how successful they were with Windows on the desktop.

For the web, they thought the browser was key to the web and would be what would hold all the APIs because the browser was like the OS for the web. The most valuable thing about the web ended being the graphs and connections you can create through data rather than the browser, which is why Facebook, Google, and Amazon had the most success because of the internet.

For mobile, they released Windows Mobile in 2000 but it was just a slimmed down version of Windows on the desktop. They didn't understand that mobile required a completely new UX experience and just tried to fit what they knew (desktop UX) into mobile.

They viewed both opportunities through the lens of the desktop, which makes sense, that's what made them so successful. But because of their success, they weren't capable of looking at the opportunities with fresh eyes.

Google missed cloud computing, they are only 3rd behind Amazon and Microsoft.

Ironically, they could find some focus by no longer being a one size fits all search engine, and instead offer different search products for different types of users, or focused on different types of information. They do to an extent with travel data, financial data, scholar, but their product just isnt great at crawling the web anymore.

They, like Apple and Microsoft, also need some consumer experience advocates, who take a step back and ask how the consumers entire experience is across the whole suite. All of them have products that are often less than the sum of their parts.

> Ironically, they could find some focus by no longer being a one size fits all search engine

Or just fixing the search engine that they do have. It really has become shockingly poor.

I don't think they can. No matter how smart the people working on it are there well always be a group of equally smart people on the opposite side trying to game it.

What makes you think they're retiring to sit on their asses all day and "spend their billions"? Maybe they have new and interesting things to do.

They recently acquired Fitbit so I expect we should see some brand new product developments within that category soon enough in the future. I do feel they have not participated as much within the IoT market which still has so much potential unrealized. Perhaps the market is not ripe yet without 5G availability? It's incredible that we have all these new AI and ML tools and still they don't really have a lot of meaningful impacts yet in improving our daily lives if we really think about it. The main opportunities still remain mostly unexplored.

I wouldn't expect to see a new kind of product coming out of Google. They have 0 track-record of product innovation. Their main innovation power is in the back-end, on the implementation side.

Internet search existed before Google, but they came up with a newer and much better way of implementing it. Internet email existed before Gmail, but they vastly improved the offering. The iPhone already existed, but they came up with an alternative in Android. Same story repeats with GSuite, Chrome, Chrome OS.

YouTube was sort of new, but it was an acquisition, so I don't know if it counts.

When they do have ideas for innovative products, they fail to deliver.

Waymo is a new kind of product coming out of Google, as was Chromecast, as is the so-far-successful Stadia. I'm there there are others, but those are a few I can think of off the top of my head that are delivering very well for the technical challenge they pose.

Waymo is so far unproven, but you're right, it may turn up to be a successful product.

I forgot about the Chromecast, that's a good point.

Stadia is close to being new, though there have been similar efforts for some time now. However, it is by no means successful so far, most reviews I have seen from the gaming press have seen it as impressive, but ultimately not a great way of playing games, and Microsoft's offering is likely to quickly outshine it by sheer force of games catalog.

>stadia

Stadia is at best an incremental improvement to PS Now or OnLive afaik. Other companies, notably MSFT and Sony, have been developing this same stuff for years, and Nvidia even has their own version I think.

You can say the exact same things about the supposedly 'innovative' companies. Did Apple invest desktop computers? No, they copied the concept from Xerox. Same story with the iPod (Rio), the iPhone (Blackberry) and Watch (Garmin).

Sure, there are no completely innovative products. But the difference I see is this: going from a clunky, ugly, essentially business-only phone like the Blackberry to ubiquitous smart-phones is a more close to a difference in kind. Essentially, before the iPhone, most people did not believe they needed a smartphone. On the other hand, most people before Gmail did know that they need a mail provider, Gmail was 'just' a much more convenient mail provider. Most people did know they need a browser, Chrome was just much nicer. When Android rolled out, people already knew they want a smartphone, Android was cheaper and less walled-in.

A good example would be if Google's Stadia succeeds. Even though there have been attempts in the past (e.g. OnLive), the mind-share is so low that they are almost irrelevant. If Stadia gets anywhere near console-level market penetration, I would consider it an innovative product that Google created. I don't expect it to succeed, though, based on the track record.

> Essentially, before the iPhone, most people did not believe they needed a smartphone.

I think that's way overstating it. Long before iPhone people were asking for more software features out of their phones. Browsing, email, music, etc.

Even the touchscreen and the development model were things tried in the past with many attempts by various companies to make the PDA a success.

Apple did exactly what you say. They took a few ideas whose time had come, ideas that just happened to be in their wheel house from the work they did on iPod and presented them better than anyone had before.

Lets just say I am hoping. I am clearly projecting my desires onto people I don't know and have never met, but at least it is a nice goal.

(yes of course they and I would get bored of a life of endless luxury - but I would like to at least try it and see how long I can hold out ;-)

"All I ask is the chance to prove that money can't make me happy." - Spike Milligan

Because they historically have done new and interesting things under the corporate protection afforded by the Google cash cow.

Why spend their own money on a risky capital intensive venture when their cash engine let them do it unopposed?

Sundar lacks that maverick charm that founders of legendary company usually have.

He feels ... reserved and safe.

Maybe that is what Google needs at this moment

What ever happened to digitizing all of the world’s information?

That still feels like at least a 100yr mission.

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/how-google-book-search-got-los...

They got sued, prevailed in court, but by then the 10 year battle sapped energy out of the project. With antitrust and other scrutiny, I doubt Google will attempt other massive forms of digitization that need it like academic journals. My personal opinion.

"unbiased free information" was never a goal because it's impossible.

> Edit: Just to emphasise - I hope they have fun spending their billions.

Meh (time for my socialist side to come out) they could try and do the Bill Gates Foundation thing. Don’t be cynical — it is making some much needed positive change!

Money = Power = Responsibility (with wisdom).

Exponentially true if you are a super billionaire.

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