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Comment by bushbaba | Hacker News Reader

i was at google half a decade ago. Multiple SVPs expressed in private a concern of search revenue growth and search being disrupted. That was likely the reason for all the now dead products, to attempt to diversify revenue.

Meanwhile the company was focusing on DEI vs skill, and thoughtfulness over delivery. They preached 10x but refused to pursue 10x ideas. They tried to create an accelerator, a120 which focused too much on me too products.

It was clear to me then that google was repeating the same mistakes of Yahoo, IBM, HP and other prior tech giants. When it was brought up, nobody listened.

I can only think that the reason for this was Sundar, Urs and other executive leadership. They need to be replaced if google is to excel in the future.

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It's been going on much longer. Google's revenue was disrupted with Facebook. Then they scrambled to get Google+ out the door, which had absolutely no reason to exist beyond being a Google-branded clone of Facebook. They effectively lucked in to Android paying off. When the iPhone came out Android was not going to support touchscreens. It was designed for physical buttons only.

That's the problem with Google. They don't have vision. They need someone else to show them the future which usually leaves them racing around trying to find their place in the new world. And then when they do put out a product it's always some half-assed thing that feels like a beta product of some already existing fully-finished product that is wildly popular. Sometimes it works out. Chrome was a joke when it came out. It took many years before Google Maps became a solid, distinct offering. But they want minimum viable products that ape already existing things and want them to be instant hits or they kill them off. It's the Netflix strategy.

> Meanwhile the company was focusing on DEI vs skill, and thoughtfulness over delivery

That has nothing to do with any of this. Google's doom was due to their total lack of empathy for their end users and customers. They launched stuff, then when those things did not immediately produce gigantic profits like the search ads, they just shut them down on the users' face. One can do it once, twice, the third time people wont even bother to use that company's products. Such is the case with Google.

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

The level of distrust in public can be gauged from how the executives of Gcloud are trying to win customer trust by giving all sort of guarantees. And yet failing to do so.

I’ve done consulting at Google and know many Xooglers and I can confidently say Google considers users as nothing more than cattle to be shuffled into products where they can be milked for profit. They have no more empathy for a user than they would have for an animal destined to the slaughterhouse. Remember that next time you use a google product.

Blunt. But feels accurate.

>> Meanwhile the company was focusing on DEI vs skill, and thoughtfulness over delivery

> That has nothing to do with any of this.

I wouldn't say it's central, but it's definitely not nothing. When a lot of your recognition comes from DEI efforts, "me too" and other such efforts, you can't expect proper focus. There are plenty of irrelevant internal drives where just aligning with them benefits you greatly, instead of aiming to quickly deliver an excellent, user-focused product and then making it even better over time.

> I wouldn't say it's central, but it's definitely not nothing. When a lot of your recognition comes from DEI efforts

I suspect that those efforts were a tiny drop in the ocean of the expense that Google was spending on product investments. If they were anything significant that could affect profits, they wouldnt do anything about it but some PR shows...

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