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Comment by hknd | Hacker News Reader

These are different teams within Google, and it's kinda not fair to say that Google is not truly behind open web standards.

Their whole web developer advocate team is behind open web standards, and pushes it forward everyday. The engineering team actually working on Chrome is behind those standards, and pushes it forward. They work closely with other browser vendors. and try to make everything work everywhere.

Then there is the Chrome marketing team which has to goal (OKR) to increase the reach of Chrome. They might still support the open web, but their goal is to get more users using chrome.

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Okay, I get it, but in that case the marketing is doing engineering a disservice when they implement needlessly aggressive and redundant advertising of Chrome on properties and user agents which ought to be almost 100% identical functionality in Chromium based (if not web standards compliant) browsers. To put it plainly I can understand if Google promotes Chrome when there is a genuine technical feature on one of their properties that needs Chrome to function, but in most cases this is not so, which means the marketing is not for technical reasons but merely to capture more market-share for its own ends, which would make sense if they were selling their browser but that too is not the case, so why? I mean, the ultimate aim of all companies are to grow and profit, but the playing field is neither infinite nor the audience stupid, so they should take care not to keep damaging their reputation.

> marketing is doing engineering a disservice

I've never seen a company where both marketing and engineering agree on something. Marketing thinks we are a bunch of nerds and we think marketing floors have a much less density regarding neurons per square meter (so, in way we are both right).

By the way, marketing always win. They are closer to upper levels, the credit for success is (supposedly) theirs. They suggest all the bad tactics, technically and commercially. I can bet that a move like Chrome suggesting to ditch Edge is purely their idea, approved by upper levels and executed by engineers that can't say no.

Do they even know that Edge is Chrome based?

Good question. Probably all they know is that Microsoft released a competing browser and just asked the engineering team to do them a tool for showing annoying messages to the users based on the browser. I am sure marketing doesn't know/care if it was done with Chromium, 1994 Mosaic or matchsticks.

This is Google we are talking about. I would imagine they started working on competing strategies even well before Microsoft announced officially they are going to use Chromium.

You people seriously undermine the tech awareness of marketing teams, of Google no less.

This reeks of smug engineering superiority.

I promise you the marketing team does serious competitive intel and probably knows more about the competitive landscape than the engineers themselves. That's true at my place of employment (also a bay area tech company), and I'd be shocked if it's not true at Google.

> so why?

Presumably so users get Google as their default search engine, which translates into more revenue. Google isn't running a charity with Chrome.

This is a naive view of how things work in big corporations. They work hard on many levels to make sure different teams are aligned under the strategic interests of the company as a whole.

Sure, different teams might get in the way of each other now and then. But not at a strategic level and the managers don't let the veer too far off the main course. Unless I miss my guess, Chrome isn't just any product to Google. It had great strategic importance to them just like Android. I'm not sure if the main purpose of Chrome's existence is to drive open Web standards.

I'm out of the loop. What is "OKR" in this context?

"Objectives and Key Results", that is how Google organize their priorities. Every level of management creates OKR's for and every employee can see the OKR's of their team, the product, the org and entire Google and are supposed to align their efforts with this.

The upper OKR's are usually things like "Product should make XX% more money", or "Become the foremost user-choice for task X". The lower OKR's are usually just things like "build feature X".

"Objective and Key Result". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR

When leadership acts unethically, the employees who stay tacitly approve. You can't tell me that Google engineers are hurting for opportunities.

it's kinda not fair to say that a large org should have enough internal coordination to align incentives and coordinate between different teams? It sounds reasonable to start with, but really gets to the whole making-excuses-for-them kind of thing if you think harder, no?

Google is very bottom-up and hence super uncoordinated, that is a part of who they are. Leaders sets some vague goals, but lower rung people still have a lot of freedom in how they go about things. The last time Google did some large scale coordination we got Google+, I don't think they want to try to repeat that anytime soon...

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