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Comment by SoftwareMaven | Hacker News Reader

I question the title. It doesn't sound like engineers are in charge, instead, it sounds like smaller operating units will be in charge. That is a very different thing from having the inmates running the asylum.

I have yet to see a large company that successfully treats software as a creative endeavor instead of a production line that still manages to be able to focus on solving customer problems. I really hope that Larry figures this out because, if he does, that will (IMO) be his greatest legacy.

What I think will happen, though, is Google will focus even more on technology and care even less about actual users.

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Not even smaller operating units, it just sounds like things will be organized according to product rather than function. Other HN articles recently have mentioned how Google has a bunch of centralized organizations that report all the way to the top and are not responsible to any product group (Launch, Site Reliability, UX, Product Management, etc).

What's different about Android is not that Andy Rubin has an engineering background; many of Google's senior managers do, even in the big functional orgs. What's different is that Android is a product unit which largely does not depend on these external functional teams and has all its resources built in.

the moment Google has several product teams each having all their own resources built in - like Launch, Site Reliability, UX, Product Management, etc - there would start to appear smart people with great ideas of combining similar functions from different products group into separate function groups to increase synergy and efficiency.

Whomever figures out how build a company with the technical prowess and product aptitude of Google

and have a comparative level of custom service

will have created something truly great

They're clever people. You'd think they could come up with a clever way to solve their customer service problem.

Maybe it would have to be clever for them to want to bother with it.

Didn't mean it couldn't be Google. Just that its something they need to work on and whoever figures it out will get a pretty big spot in the history books

I suspect seeing customer service as a problem is the root of it. there's no algorithm for it, just people.

Here's an approach.

Suppose that Google picked 4-10 different startup-sized groups and anointed them as "customer support organizations". The companies could provide customer support for Google applications to the public (and could charge the public as much or as little as they wished for the service).

For it to work, Google would have to be willing to be more open with these support companies (hence the anointing of a few). The companies could provide care and hand-holding for customers, but eventually some percentage would need to result in actual bug reports and actual technical troubleshooting that could only be done by Google. Today, no one can offer this service because there's no way to open a support ticket with Google -- they're too closed. If they would open up slightly, even for just a hand-picked few, then this might be a way for Google to offer excellent customer service without doing it themselves. The customer support organizations would compete with each other on customer service and would also compete with each other on how easy-to-work-with they are for Google engineers: perhaps Google should even charge them varying amounts depending on how well they do this ($10 for a well-researched bug report; $150 for a poorly researched one).

This sounds to me like a Home Depot -> Lowe's relationship.

I guess you'd have to master "being Google" first, so since G's business model is much much less settled than Home Depot's it will probably be a while. After all, there's still no "Fry's with good service," so maybe it's the B2C tech industry itself that precludes (good) customer service in general.

This is complicated by the existence of customer-focussed companies/sites like 37Signals and Craigslist, so maybe the difference is that customer service has to be a charter goal of the company in order for them to be any good at it. Just spitballin'.

The central problem of B2C tech companies is that their value proposition is to make complex things simple enough that the everyman can have them. When things go wrong, they can go wrong in literally millions of ways, because there are literally millions of everymen. Fixing those one-off problems is not a scalable business proposition.

Companies like 37signals and Craigslist manage to keep a good rep for customer service by ruthlessly pruning what's expected of them. 37signals wants only a certain type of customer, usually a fairly technically savvy small business. If your needs differ from that, 37signals' customer service sucks as well, but they just say "We don't want you as a customer" and that's that.

Craiglist works by managing expectations - they're a classified ad service, no more, and no less. If the hooker you paid for turns out to be an FBI agent, that's your problem. If the contractor you found turns out to suck, that's your problem. There's no expectation that Craigslist will fix it, while there is a widespread expectation throughout the general population that Google is the Internet, and if the Internet sucks, it's Google's problem.

>widespread expectation throughout the general population that Google is the Internet, and if the Internet sucks, it's Google's problem.

I was in agreement until this. I think this is an unfair characterization. The huge problem with Google's (lack of) customer service isn't because they wont fix bad sites on the Internet. It's that they provide incredibly bad service for their own stuff.

I agree that the article does seem a little tabloid, but I think speculating on what will happen to G as a complete outsider is to a very high degree a gamble..

There would be so many issues at play here.. How well can Larry get buy-in from various levels of the organisation? How well will the Google culture evolve around his proposed changes? What will they do to ensure Quality of service goes up?

At the end of the day, Google right now is a one trick pony. General consensus in this thread is that Android is successful within Google right now. I don't buy into that though primarily because it's a business unit that does not make any money...

I think there's a long way to go and a lot of forces at play

Organizational culture is one of the toughest things to change! Larry has his hands full

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