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Comment by liberia | Hacker News Reader

What kind of game are Google playing at? They’re like evolution at play and routinely prune and trim away anything not working for them. They’re so Darwinian.

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When I was there (2007-2008), there was a popular phrase among the management class along the lines of "We like to measure things in the billions here." Meaning that if whatever project you're working on is going to last (e.g. get more funding, get more headcount, not get killed, etc...) it better have some extremely large and impressive internal metric (or have a credible growth plan to get there). Billions of users, billions of downloads, billions of dollars in revenue, etc. If something doesn't have that kind of metric, start the countdown timer...

When joined in they were on the tail end of sunsetting Google Code, which they explained was the smart thing to do because Google doesn’t want to waste its time on opportunities that aren’t measured in billions.

Google then sat on the sidelines as GitHub grew to a tens of billions dollar business, and now Google spends billions trying to get more developers on GCP which they could have gotten for free if they still owned the portal to the code all the developers use.

A lot of Google wisdom sounded a lot wiser before we saw how it fully played out.

Google Code was great but the reason it sunset was because GitHub ate its lunch (just like Google Code ate Sourceforge before that). It would have distracted their resources to focus on that and the billions their spending to get developers on GCP are not influenced by the presence or lack of Google Code (which you can tell because Microsoft owns GitHub and that doesn’t meaningfully impact Azure)

> If something doesn't have that kind of metric, start the countdown timer...

I can’t. They killed that feature.

Let's not sully the name of a good man [1].

Darwin was a balanced, caring and conscientiousness, highly complex figure who placed immense value in emotion, family, and ethics.

Google is cold, callous calculating machine that chews up its users and other businesses to sacrifice them on the alter of money.

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean...

The difference is that evolution is the only game in town (well, until humans started bio-engineering).

> well, until humans started bio-engineering

Nope, evolution is the only game in town. We can not replace it, we can only play it.

That's not true. Evolution happens under certain conditions. Rampant bio-engineering, of certain kinds, would remove us from the conditions under which evolution has any effect.

it's perhaps interesting to speculate in the possibility of a post-evolution (at least at organism level) regime in future, but mLuby said "started" so I think the correction was fine, if a bit at risk of falling into semantics.

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