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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

Watching Google continue to fumble and trip over themselves over the past decade with all their horrendous messaging “strategy” used to be amusing. Now it’s just cringy.

What is going on over there? Why are they not able to make up their damn minds and come up with one app?

Google reminds me of Ballmer’s Microsoft. Factions on top of factions and no leadership anywhere to be found.

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This is why I really think of advertising as tech’s version of the resource curse, where countries with rich natural resources are prone to foundering because even incompetent rulers can stay rich as long as the oil keeps flowing. Both Google and Facebook hit this point where they have an enormous influx of cash to support all of these ventures where people can make all kinds of bad decisions without impacting the bottom line for years, if ever.

As a [very small] shareholder I really think they’d be healthier if Alphabet siloed the finances more so e.g. the messages leadership got paid only if that project worked out. Right now they can just fiddle around and still be in the top couple percent income range without any feedback that they were making terrible calls.

Wasn't this largely the point of creating Alphabet? Trying to separate the money making segments from everything else?

I won't claim to be an expert on that but I think that was kind of the goal in the sense of having companies like Nest or Waymo be more independent, but given how little difference it's seemed to make I've generally assumed it was either some kind of accounting dodge or simply that they were too timid to break up Google itself. One of the reasons for that is no doubt that shareholders would ask why they're funding so many marginal ventures if those were broken out separately.

It was to keep Sundar Pichai and elevate him to the level of CEO of something.

There's definitely a resource curse with the advertising dollars but how would chat/messaging be silo'd? Users don't pay for it (individually) and it doesn't show ads (afaik?). It doesn't make money. The only reasons to build it are so Google employees aren't using other companies meeting/chat/messaging apps, so users aren't lured into competitors ecosystems and... what else? Pride? Ego?

That's basically the problem, isn't it? If it's effectively make-work, you get the kind of decisions we've seen. In the unlikely event that their hiring process failed badly enough to put me in a C-level position, I would have approached it as a revenue-generating service: invest some initial startup funds but have a plan that you're going to build a paid service around it, maybe with an ad-supported free tier but in either case you need a revenue model where the head person's performance is measured on people actively using the service.

There's also the "commoditizing your compliment argument" for building a messaging platform but does that strategy make sense if all your competitors are doing the same?

Yeah, I don't want to claim that I have the secret for how to monetize these things well. My thought was just that they didn't consider the costs either to their brand of letting users down or by providing a path where entire groups of people could influence other parts of the company with no experience bringing in business.

Presumably any new product they are building is to increase revenue somewhere, even if it's in another product. They might expect that getting X usage in a chat app will translate to Y additional ads income; due to better tracking data, more chances to show ads, etc. In that case some of the ads revenue could be attributed to the new chat app, based on usage. Some assumptions would need to be made, but the allocations could be tracked, measured, and analyzed pretty well.

Of course an approach like this would require some amount of direction and purpose, which is not at all a part of Google's core competencies.

Chat and email activity are great ways to distinguish real humans from clickbots. At least in theory you can mine that data for ad preferences, too.

The way it makes money is through Google Workspace.

You have to pay for a higher priced plan (maybe Business Plus) in order to get Meet features like recording and other extended host controls.

> resource curse, where countries with rich natural resources are prone to foundering

Steve Jobs calls this out wonderfully here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

> [...] the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people. And they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. [...] the product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to the monopolistic position gets rotted out. By people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers.

It's like they are their own little marketplace where the currency is promotions.

New apps get created because a new app is a way to get ahead. Old apps and features get abandoned because the small set of people who created them started working on something else and nobody is left to maintain the thing.

There's nobody with vision setting direction at Google, it's an internal game with lots of players that results in products, kind of.

I've heard this before about Google, I've never worked there so can't say it's true but if we assume it is: why wouldn't every other tech company also be like this? what makes google uniquely vulnerable to failure modes like this?

Because Google has unique policies and culture that generate these outcomes?

This is a tautological answer. What are those policies and culture?

Google is really big, makes a lot of money on one thing, does a bunch of extra stuff on the side, and doesn't have strong central control. Those things are pretty unique. A few other large companies could do things like this, but don't.

Ultimately Google is an ad company. Owning Android is a distracting mistake.

owning Android meant they didn't get locked out of mobile. it would be a lot easier for Microsoft, RIM, or Apple especially to set terms if Google couldn't say it would appear on 80% of the world's smartphones regardless.

Owning Anfroid is many things, but saying it's a mistake is borderline laughable.

It’s not unique to them but I think it’s common to companies with a strong cash cow but not a strong culture of accountability - Microsoft felt similar from around the turn of the century until a few years ago because Windows and Office just printed money. If they don’t have some way other than profits to provide accountability, people who are good at playing politics can keep getting promoted because to a first approximation nothing they do will lower revenue.

I think you're onto something about strong cash cow being necessary but not sure it's sufficient by itself. Culture of accountability is interesting. It sounds like you have some experience, what does culture of accountability look like vs. not having one?

I think the cash cow creates the situation where this is possible: if all your company does is one thing, everyone _knows_ that they have to keep selling whatever that is to stay employed. Where I've seen things run off the rails is when managers’ personal compensation and career trajectory aren't linked to something measurable like that.

When I worked for a modest (~30 person) web development company in the late 90s we had much smaller version of this problem where we had regular customers who would pay us for design and new features on their sites but only one of the 4 founding partners was directly generating revenue (one of the best designers I've ever worked with, who was also good at managing a group). That wasn't Google-level cash flow but it meant there was no question of making payroll, etc. because we had major companies who liked us and were doing regular site design updates, marketing campaigns, etc. all of the time. Unfortunately, we also had two partners who loved haring off after whatever cool idea caught their fancy and weren't as good at negotiating deals as they thought (e.g. one guy would ask us for estimates and then tell us he signed the contract at 60% of what we quoted, with our actual cost inevitably being around the original estimate). They could get away with that for years because the company was cash-flow positive and money was pouring into the field from all of the companies moving their business online and/or burning VC funding (I still remember one guy bragging that they had several million dollars of Sun hardware & an Oracle license before they had started an application). Unfortunately, that let them tell themselves they were better at business than they actually were and that meant that they were really unprepared when the market got harder: there were many stories but the one which epitomizes it for me was one of them _turning down_ a massive monthly retainer from the local NFL team to create new designs, content, and games on their website because the team didn't want to put _our_ logo on _their_ homepage — at a time where layoffs were imminent in the next month or two! What could have avoided that would have been judging performance deal by deal rather than company-wide — if you're losing money on 80% of your contracts, the fact that you have a few which are very profitable doesn't mean you should rest easy.

I've seen similar situations in .edu and .gov where the problems were different but came back to the underlying problem that how you got favorable reviews and promotions was not coupled to the mission, and as a support service there wasn't a direct negative feedback signal from that.

Thanks for sharing, that was insightful

Eh, have you followed Microsoft in the past?

It seems to be par for the course for very big companies. Apple's been doing strange things as well. IBM in the past.

IDK if they are unique, but Google is really big and feels like it lacks strong leadership and vision. Google has also never struggled or had a catalyzing moment that brings clarity to vision.

Apple makes tons of money, but they still have many people in leadership positions who were around when they almost went out of business.

FB has always been a bit paranoid, probably b/c they knocked off MySpace. They are having that catalyzing moment right now.

MS has had a few of those moments over the years.

As an outsider, it seems like Google makes it easier to start something new. And, it's also heavily encouraged through promotions, "20% time" that doesn't quite exist anymore, etc. There doesn't seem to be a process anywhere that stops people from making another messenger. Or stops a lot of other things.

Working at other big internet companies, it was a lot harder to get a new thing going, and promising ideas would get abandoned after a while unless there was a way to work it into an existing product.

This is what you get when there's an infinite cash cow (i.e. ads) that just keeps pumping money into a system. Like a particle simulation for which you set friction to zero, and keep injecting energy into it - there won't be a steady state, just all sorts of chaotic self-oscillations.

In iOS there's still a "Google Duo" and a "Google Meet". If you install "Google Meet" it installs as "Meet (original)".

They need a product manager manager.

I think that's called a Program Manager.

Until the money dries up, being an incompetent organization is perfectly fine. They are driven by Ads, not good products, and their Ads are all over the place; your email, your phone, your apps, your maps, your search engine, your videos, on websites peppered all over the internet. It's like panning for gold with a billion pans.

Search is still their bread and butter, so they couldn't give a crap if a chat app is embarrassing. They won't lose a cent from it. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-money-a...

It's frustrating experiencing all these changes. Naming confusions aside , many features I was using in the older apps kept getting dropped as the new hotness would be released. I've all but stopped using their messaging platform due to all these changes.

Honestly it makes way more sense now than it used to.

They have the enterprise GSuite brands that are actually kind of successful there - Google Chat and Google Meet - and they try to merge everything under those umber. And they gave up on consumer-specific branding.

I … think. At least.

I'm pretty sure google jumped the shark 5years ago but somehow the pandemic caused googles stock to :rocket-ship-emoji:

Google's latest earnings were less bad than most of it's competitors - Facebook and Snap choked hard, while google just slowed a bit (and less than was expected), so it's not just the stock that did well.

> Ballmer’s Microsoft

"Google Meet Premium v3.1 Personal Edition - 2022 August Update™"?

Huh... I guess it actually could be worse.

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