Google has a company strategy, not a product strategy

Incorrect. Google's culture has shifted. Culture-wise, Google is closer to Oracle than what people think is Google.

20% hasn't been a thing in Google for a long time. Exists only on paper.

Source: I worked at Google when we all got the memo that all information access within the company is now on a need-to-know basis, and that accessing information that you don't need to know for your job is a fireable offense.

Default level of sharing technical documentaiton is fully private, so tech docs are not searchable in company search engine (read this again).

Good luck re-using the code without design docs. Also good luck starting a project if your team doesn't own the data.

Hot take: Google doesn't have a strategy, period. Neither copmany, nor product.

And I did actually do the 120% time thing for a few months because there was a specific project I really wanted to do, and it would have been nice fit for Google, but my attempts to stir up interest within the company and get any sort of resources were basically dead ends. One of the reasons I eventually left to join a startup.

It's absurd that there's no Google strategy documents. There's company-wide and division-wide OKRs that get major events to publicize them, with large Q&As and all. It's easy to learn what the priorities are and why. But, usually you just pay attention to what your local group is working on. At a smaller level, every feature has a business rationale backed by customers requesting them or hard dollar figures.

I really don't know what's going on here. Do people think Google runs the same way as it did in its early years? It's a fairly mature company with a good track record of revenue growth, especially for such a massive company. These things don't happen haphazardly.

Stadia, I think, is the biggest example of a Google product failing bc of this perception. But it had other, big problems as well.

> To be fair I also would never use it because AWS and Azure have better support.

This is the salted earth that GCP have to till... Google sucks miserably at customer support and anyone that has interacted with them knows it, from the millions of android users who would flinch at the mere sight of a terminal prompt to the developers that have wrestled with GRPC services and who keep giving their code a chance. We all go through life see the facets glinting in the sunlight, weird error messages, a bad two factor interaction, terrible search results, business destroying story #12 this month from GCP + <some other service at google> ... little reminders of "oh yeah thats just Google, sucking as usual" and continue to remember how bad they are at customer support.

The very earth itself has been salted with the tears of the millions who have had sad interactions with Google...

And this is the ground GCP is trying to grow a business in...

Good luck to them.

They need it.

Cannot upvote hard enough. I have had to work with several Google PMs and SWEs on large contracts for different companies. They all talk down to you, think you're confused, and if you ask for a feature to reduce costs it's always: "that'll take 6 months, but here's the solution we like and you should try it and it's really cheap (and no we definitely don't want to lock you in of course)".

Being Googley is a lot about Googlers satisfying their own curiosities and performing well against their own metrics that they define. Sometimes that's correlated with what the customers actually need and want. Other times, it's really not, and as a customer you should fire your Googler. Don't worry they'll still find a way to keep themselves entertained.

While Google takes way too long to make a hiring decision, all of the people I talked to seemed intelligent and very thoughtful. I did a Microsoft 'hiring event' and holy hell it was a clusterfuck. I got ghosted by one manager, another was extremely disinterested and seemed like they were interviewing me to check a box.

Another asked an algorithmic coding question they themselves did not understand, I had to very politely argue with them, I ended up having to show them step by step how my solution was correct (much to their surprised amazement). The system design interview was done by someone who clearly doesn't understand system design.

I cannot emphasize enough how much their engineering leads came across like a joke compared to other companies. Maybe I just got really unlucky and there are good people who work there, but I'm a bit frightened by what I saw.

I can't speak for Google, or about what Googley is. But I have worked a decade in the Danish public sector, and now for around a year in European Green Energy, and I think there is just a massive difference between Google and Amazon in this regard.

Denmark is one of the most digitized countries in the world, and I was there for the transition from self-hosted iron in the basement, to renting space for your iron in dedicated server farms, to going full Azure. Azure was/is the logical way to go for a lot of European Enterprise organisations because it hooks so nicely into the Microsoft infrastructure you undoubtedly already have. There is no real alternative to Microsoft Office in Denmark, Google Docs could (maybe should) have been, but I'll get to that later, and once you're buying the Office365 package as well as Windows licenses, you're going to have massive savings by going with Azure rather than AWS. This is partly because we don't buy licenses directly from Microsoft, but through partners and because Microsoft has some of the best B2B support in the world. I know Microsoft gets a lot of hate here on HN, and maybe rightly so, but it's by far the best tech company I've ever dealt with from a non-tech enterprise perspective. When team was rolled out, it was turned on for users automatically, which is a big no-no in Enterprise IT, but within an hour of it happening Microsoft had given us a custom hack to turn it off in our setup. Not long after, probably because the entire world of Enterprise was on the phone with Microsoft, it was off by default. But compare that sort of support level to Google, where you can talk with an automated form... Google will lose so hard that it's not even considered an option.

Amazon and Google were interesting in this regard. Because the where Google didn't really do anything, Amazon quickly realized that they couldn't sell AWS to Enterprise organisations if they didn't compete with Microsoft on support. Because that's sort of what you sell to the IT department in Enterprise Organisations. One thing is the product, the other thing is the ability for the CTO to tell the organisation that they are on the phone with Microsoft/Amazon headquarters and getting hourly updates when something goes wrong. That's of massive value, and Google doesn't do this. Amazon similarly didn't comply with the GDPR as fast as Microsoft. At first it seemed like Amazon didn't really think it mattered to them, and that we would still pick their cloud products, but it didn't last very long, and within a year, they became more compliant than Microsoft. I remember it well, because we had a few things in AWS at the time, and we needed to help filling out some "red-tape" and Amazons reply was basically "kindly fuck off", and then out of the blue 3 months later, we suddenly had a Danish AWS representative and free legal counseling from one of our major EU focused lawfirms contact us to help us get it done right.

Google didn't do anything like that. They sort of try in Education, but we're currently well into a big chromebook + Google Education and school start "scandal" of sorts here in Denmark. Because one of our cities failed to pass the national GDPR requirements and were basically forbidden from using Google Education at the start of the school year back in july (the school year starts in august). This didn't exactly happen, because it turned out they couldn't start the school year and that parents care more about education than whether or not Google snoop on the schoolwork or not. It was also sort of silly because it was just one municipality out of 98 that were forbidden from using Google Education and chromebooks and there are a lot of other municipalities that also use it. Anyway, that is sort of unrelated to what I want to use the example for, because the interesting part to me is how Google hasn't really solved the issue.

Google Education and Chromebooks are a massive business by Danish standards. The Public Sector is the biggest spender on IT, and if you can secure just half of the schools in the country for Google Education, that's one of the biggest opportunities for IT sales you can get here in Denmark. And Google hasn't bothered solved this issue? I think the very likely outcome is that all the schools are going to switch to Microsoft and Office365 and run Linux on their Chromebooks in the coming years because of this. I think this because Google isn't the first company to fumble the ball on Education. Apple did it first, and where almost every school used Apple products a decade ago, now they use none. Apple's problems weren't GDPR problems, the GDPR didn't exist back then but we did have national privacy laws and they were in perfect compliance with those. Apples issue was instead that their products didn't integrate into Enterprise IT policies, and since they didn't want to offer support or change ways, they were slowly rolled out and replaced by companies that did.

I think this may have been fine for Apple. They don't seem to be big on B2B sales, but for Google it's just so strange.

Google does sell G Workspace to enterprises? YouTube also seems to do well with enterprise-y stuff involving the Movie and Music industry, as another example.

GCP is all-enterprise zero-consumer, sure. But: GCP's got execs from SAP and Oracle at helm, and I believe, it is a problem that, over the shorter-term, they can throw money at (by hiring execs from Dell / Oracle / Cisco / HP / IBM / Qualcomm, as at that scale of spend, enterprise sales is mostly a game of who knows who).

Back the day Google salesman would drop in like and say “hey, we’re from Google, perhaps you’ve heard of us”. Seemed like their primary gig was apologizing for the death of the Google Search Appliance. They weren’t very empowered - on one project that I worked on, the sales-dude had so little juice that the SE put stuff on his credit card to do a demo.

Now, they seem to have a solid enterprise sales team. The only weak point is they rely a lot on the channel partners. Usually that’s fine, but I prefer one throat to choke.

And I remember a time where it wasn't dominant, where people went out of their way to install it, even when their OS would shove other browsers in their face...

It didn't become dominant by being a bad browser...

I'm not saying it would be easy, but it's certainly not impossible, with the right business model and business and political environment.

* It might be possible as a smart-TV app, though smart TVs tend to suck which is why Chromecast still sells units

I believe they refunded software purchases and in-app purchases too. The only thing that didn't get refunded is Stadia Pro.

The only option is a full download of all pictures, and they do their damnedest to ensure it's uncomfortable. Albums aren't properly labelled and linked. Labels are a mess. Picture naming is broken. Exif data randomly stripped or altered. Duplicates galore. This process ensures that, even if one is diligent and ensures they regularly download the entire database, they'll end up with a completely unmanageable picture library with dozens of duplicates. And most people aren't that studious.

I think you’ll see this change slowly in the next 2-3 years.

I’ve been running a small/medium company for 7 years now, bootstrapped but with a small $1 million seed round in 2015.

During the 2020/2021 bubble, our seed investors were very angry at us for being profitable. (Angry isn’t an exaggeration)

After the bubble bursts, those same investors are now praising us for being so “cash efficient” and profitable.

Founders are heavily influenced by the recommendations of advisors around them. Now that the entire VC community is condoning/punishing high cash burn companies, you’ll start to see more conservative ways of operating a business become more common, since that’s now what VC, PE, etc all want to see right now (and for the foreseeable future, at least until interest rates go way down)

That’s what SaaS shops are doing. many (not all) could show profit. But instead they e reinvested all profits and then some to get accelerated growth.

// disclaimer: ymmv

By Microsoft. GCP appears to be under intense pressure to become profitable and they’re lagging on features. I hear about migrations from GCP to AWS or Azure more than the reverse, and that was before the price increases.

I think is this case Amazon was massively overvalued, the market had unrealistic expectations

In the similar manner oil companies are overvalued - they seem to assume that every last drop of oil in discovered reserves can be burned, when in reality wars and social unrest will break out long before that.

Slightly beside the point, but for people who were already using Ali Express and wanting a faster, slightly smoother experience, this actually increased Amazon's value proposition many folds.

On the credibility part of AWS because of Amazon's overall image, I think the split comes at wether the focus is on renown brands and traditional items (image goes way down), or on items that simply don't exist or are incredibly cumbersome to find through traditional retailers (Amazon appears on the map as a viable Ali alternative).

I'm still playing the game of finding regular electric shavers that charge through usb-c only (no adapter, no charging stand). Traditional makers don't seem to give a damn about that segment and Ali / Amazon is the only game in town.

The denial of those engineering talents to competitors.

It defaults to 'on' though, and maybe not everyone has explored their settings. It took a while for me to find it.

(Pixels also get security updates the longest, last I checked.)

It's basically forced marketing.

So tell me where the 'joke' is?

(and frankly it doesn't matter what 'phone' background they have.)

The 'joke' are those (especially designers) that completely lack the self awareness to grasp their specific and narrow perspectives are not normative and therefore do not necessarily represent a 'Good UI'.

In particular, UI elements that change over time, with every prouct iteration, putting new feature in new locations. Etc..

After having to deal with that and struggling to remove several spyware apps - and unable to remove bloatware apps - it's clear that Android is a second class OS. And FYI it does not matter that Samsung gets it for free - it's Android.

It's the tip of the iceberg, and aside from side-loading and price, I don't see how this thing is in any way competitive with iPhone.

People defending 'Shop At Amazon' planted on their home screen have lost perspective.

Recent, begrudging convert to iPhone, because Google refused to fix 911 calling.