Does Google need a new CEO?
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At this point, they're doing a very poor job of maintaining their core, legacy products. Search, their bread and butter, has been going downhill for years -- and is practically unusable today.
They've been slipping, bigtime.
I keep seeing this sentiment around here, which confuses me because I think gsearch is better than ever. I find what I need instantly in 90% of cases, and when I don't, other engines don't really do better. Granted, I use ublock, but even with that turned off I'm not bothered by the ads. Can you provide examples of a query which gives unusable results, but Bing (or whatever) works?
On mobile or without adblock though or when trying to do discovery of something new, you really have to sift through pretty much the first 5-7 results as they're all sponsored, ads, or terrible SEO spam.
But it is a hard problem to solve, and no other search engine is better in that regard imo.
Problem is now you get ~6 ad links for many queries (given some ads have 'secondary links' in them).
This now means even on a 4k monitor I only see 3 actual SEO results. It's much worse on mobile.
I don't know what it is, if their algorithm is getting worse, or there is just too much shit on the internet to accurately index. From my experience, Google Search hasn't even just stagnated, it has gotten consistently and steadily worse for at least the last half decade.
Same thing happened to my Google Home, literally got dumber as the days went on, queries that it could answer yesterday, would just stop working the next day. I threw that thing in the garbage.
I run into this for a lot of things beyond just product reviews, such as recipes or "what is X?" etc.
Granted I don't think that is entirely Google's fault.
also, "bestmitersaw.com" or other similar single product review/spam sites filled with affiliate links. Jeez. Kill them all.
ADDED: There are individuals in some domain niches but you pretty much need to know who they are.
Not to mention the transparency nightmare of subreddit moderation.
They dont get to complain there is no content to steal after bthey've pillaged and burned half the web
Currently they have a "caretaker CEO".
Google was sitting on a massive cash cow, so they appointed someone who would just keep it ticking over.
In the face of an existential threat, like ChatGPT, they need someone who can actually drive innovation. Not innovate themselves, nobody expects a CEO to do that, just create a culture which has a hope in hell of rising to fend off challenges to the empire.
They don't have this.
That have a CEO who is only capable in "good times" ... along with most of the company.
Faced with sufficient adversity, they will need a CEO who can succeed in the face of adversity.
But in that ideal world, ads are clicked less.
This is exactly it for me, there's no way to tell the computer "this is what I want you to do." Maybe it's because product designers don't want to tell the user no. If something does fail to work, we couch it in language like "oops, something went wrong, we're very sorry" with no further hint of what to do next.
Sometimes I just want the big database in the sky to tell me what it knows about a specific string of characters; this seems like it should be straightforward but I suppose it isn't.
However once you look for very specific narrow results it attempts to outsmart you can be a real annoyance. When it decides to ignore some rare term and correcting your query while that rare term actually is the thing of highest significance.
So yeah, for 95% of the searches it is great, but on the 5% it feels like modern advances are in the way.
I'm fully aligned on hating ads. It is silly how the top results are all sponsored. Curated, I would like. Sponsored? Not so much.
Perhaps, but that's still a good reason to stop using Google, because other search engines do better.
Which one?
> when I do go back to Google it's almost always to use it as a dictionary
I've also found it great for dictionary + thesaurus + etymology. I wonder if there's something better so I can shed my reliance on google here.
As a user, yes. But based on the extra ads and garbage I suspect that profitability of search is at an all time high. So as long as search keeps “growing” then there’s an opinion that it’s a success. I think that’s dangerous for long term thinking and will lead to Google’s demise (see IBM, AT&T, Comcast, etc) that were profitable with horrible UX, until they weren’t profitable.
My guess is that great PMs and engineers are not into incremental changes or maintaining a mature system. As a result, the sharpest minds for building product would have left the search org over the years, therefore the quality of search deteriorates over time. I'm not saying search org does not have great talent, but I guess their talent is about rearchitecting search infra for the 101 times for no groundbreaking gain.
There also was a change in how PMs began getting hired at Google in the 2010s when they brought a senior ex-McK TMT consultant to lead and revamp the Product team after Marissa Mayer left to become CEO of Yahoo.
For example the audio stack has more bug today on my Pixel 7 on Android 13 than back then on Android 8.
Ffs, a Google phone with a Google OS and Google earbuds, the audio sometimes cut briefly when I unlock it.
In the meantime audio professionals make music with iPhones.
The layer of indirection between you and the calibration committee in Perf meant that maintenance work, since it does not generate nearly so many “artifacts” (design docs, engaged user statistics, lines of code written, code review requests) it was nearly impossible to quantify and reward. Your best chance was to ask people on neighboring teams to give you Kudos or Peer Bonuses for it, so that the committee would say “well it must have been important they got all of these gold stars!”
This is how you get a dozen competing chat apps, “improved the last chat app” cannot appear easily on Perf, “wrote a new chat app and we already have 50 users!” can.
However, though it affords an opportunity for things to be better, the internal rollout of GRAD has also been botched this past year. In the absence of strong leadership, managers are assembling the same data as before “we just must not call them perf packets”, and potentially reinstituting the same biases as before. (I was actually told by my manager that I could not get a rating above a certain ratings ceiling even though he wanted to recommend me higher because his director phrased a general rule that would apply to me, “if X then they should not get a rating above Y,” but hi I am also X on something of a technicality—and my manager was not sure he would have the political capital to argue my case.)
The botched rollout means that these culture improvements from not having to prioritize only what can be easily quantified, are delayed. Like, seriously delayed. Imagine that with really strong solid leadership you could have changed the culture in one year, but now that people are reconstructing the broken familiar process inside of the new process, the culture is not going to change for the next 5 to maybe even 10 years as second order influences slowly nudge it into a better scenario.
> Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture.
[1] https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceo-wartime-ceo/
(credit to the person on the other thread who cited this article)
It's been so obvious Pichai isn't the one to lead Google. Here's a mountain of evidence where you can see him failing to adapt to a risky situation and changing market:
2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25549445
2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588571
2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21819608
2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25986216
2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34484142
Pichai has a history of not being bold, not responding to threats, not innovating, not fixing broken culture, not seeing the 20 year view of the market. He's lost some of the biggest advantages Google once held. He needs to be done. And he needs to be done three years ago.
Now when he's tasked with reversing the sinking ship? Totally fumbling.
Show him out and get a Nadella.
The founders (Sergey and Larry)? Eric Schmidt? Or someone new? Who do you think the "Nadella" or the One who can lead Google?
I don't know much about Oracle's inner culture, but I've heard people always hated it throughout the years.
That could actually play to his advantage if he really wants to be CEO again, it is my belief that in the current geo-security climate all the big US tech companies will become more and more entangled with the MIC (transforming it into a MIC+tech thing, in a way).
But I suspect that at this point Schmidt is trying to play the big political cards. Maybe he wants to become the new government-appointed tech Tsar in case that job will be created at some point? (I personally think that it will be created).
When you step back for a moment, it's utterly bizarre Tim Cook was able to pivot Apple towards being this privacy-focused company who is now able to eat Google's ad lunch from right under them. Tim Cook, the very same guy people called just a boring distributions-focused leader, yet he has a more forward-thinking vision than Pichai. Pichai, the man who once led a team to create Chrome.
It's outright absurd how much one has stalled in comparison.
Cook really understands the customer perspective around privacy, and I view him as part of the A bomb that will destroy the glacier of Surveillance Capitalism. FB is limping, and Google is bleeding. He'll likely be ramming it at Mach5 with the subscription icebreaker which feeds right into the Apple ecosystem. Now, I do think he needs to drop %s and bring them down to reality as part of a long play to make it the best platform and defeat monopoly arguments.
Better yet, break it up. It's clear a behemoth is no longer in shareholders' interest.
- With the exception of VS Code, the Microsoft things developers like are purchased or just catching up with where competitors were 20 years ago e.g. GitHub, Minecraft, OpenAI, Windows Terminal, WSL.
- There's a top thread today on HN all about how much people hate Teams. Teams is an abomination yet forms the central pillar of their collaboration strategy; how can they have executed so badly that people seriously say they'd rather quit their job if it's introduced than deal with its terrible design?
- Windows has totally rotted away on Nadella's watch. The execution failure here is total. Does Nadella even use Windows himself? It's still critical infrastructure for much of the world but the entire Windows platform has no vision, no ideas and has become (just like Teams) mind-blowingly buggy. Absolutely nothing they introduced in the last 15 years or so actually works properly. A good measure of the totality of Nadella's failure here is that Microsoft's new apps are all Electron based and Edge is a fork of Chrome i.e. they institutionally prefer to use Google's code to their own. Also they apparently hand out MacBooks to new employees!
- Visual Studio was once dominant in its space but is now apparently considered a writeoff, so VS Code is a totally different app written from scratch.
- .NET has experienced major product and branding churn that has left anyone not fully committed to the ecosystem confused about what it is and can do e.g. .NET Core vs Framework. .NET isn't a failure but it doesn't seem to be growing or exciting devs either, and in terms of core R&D they've been blown away by the work Oracle is doing with Graal.
- Azure is very successful but is showing worrying signs of the same bugs-and-tech-debt problems that plagues the rest of their products. When I had to use Azure, I was constantly amazed at how even basic things were flaky or did not work. Like even just holding open TCP connections between machines wouldn't work properly. This is despite the fact that Microsoft was able to built out Azure seemingly only by raiding the rest of the firm for talent, hence the Windows brain drain. Also cloud is becoming strongly associated with cost disease, which opens up a possible weakness in future (in fairness, a problem shared with AWS and GCP).
- HoloLens is cool but does anyone use it?
Nadella fixed the monolithic our-way-or-the-highway approach, which allowed them to import tech from elsewhere to fix their weaknesses. But compare that to Apple, which consistently doubles down on its own tech stack and has become even more successful with the monolithic integrated approach and it's hard not to see this as something Nadella was forced into rather than some great act of leadership.
> With the exception of VS Code, the Microsoft things developers like are purchased or just catching up with where competitors were 20 years ago e.g. GitHub, Minecraft, OpenAI, Windows Terminal, WSL.
Yes, but now they're leaders in every one of these categories. And instead of holding back acquisitions, Microsoft has made each one demonstrably better.
> how much people hate Teams
Teams is a beachhead, and they're absolutely going to take it and win.
> Windows has totally rotted away on Nadella's watch. The execution failure here is total. Does Nadella even use Windows himself?
There's really not much need for Windows anymore. Putting a veneer on Linux would do just as well. That said, they're continuing to win gamers and over half of businesses. The future is thin clients, though, and that's where the battle is shaping up.
> Microsoft's new apps are all Electron based and Edge is a fork of Chrome i.e. they institutionally prefer to use Google's code to their own
The entire world chose Blink/Chrome/Chromium. Keeping their old browser around would have been a major mistake. And now they're set to take the the lead. Google will be too busy defending their own moat to keep up Chrome leadership, and Edge will push search margin to zero.
> Visual Studio was once dominant in its space but is now apparently considered a writeoff
The way people write software is changing. Cloud based thin clients are what businesses want. The entire development setup virtualized without DevOps. Fully secured. And beyond that, AI-assisted coding. Of course Visual Studio is a dinosaur.
> .NET has experienced major product and branding churn
Microsoft is busy winning Linux developers and the rest of the world.
> Azure is very successful but is showing worrying signs of the same bugs-and-tech-debt problems that plagues the rest of their products.
It's a top cloud contender and will gain even more market share.
> HoloLens is cool but does anyone use it?
A small, synergistic bet on spatial computing and XR that keeps them in the game should the field pop off.
I think Google needs a visionary leader who can anticipate the future and make strategic investments. I do not think internal structure will change without visionary leader.
I think of “Google and AI”, and I remember hearing more about their work on “AI ethics” than work on actual “AI” itself. Of course, ethics is important, but if you are more focused on the ethics of doing something than actually doing it, that’s scarcely a recipe for leading the market-on the contrary, it sounds rather risk-averse-and, maybe that’s unfair, I don’t know, but that’s just the impression I get from my own limited perspective.
Google has created things like TensorFlow tho, OpenAI is flashy but only time will tell if that leads to real, monetizable results
I really dislike how Microsoft is being considered to "be better at AI" recently. No, they just integrated another AI solution in Bing. They haven't released any big AI product themselves for a long time.
TensorFlow? MobileNet? TPUs? Products like Google Translate, Image Search, Youtube's voice recognition subtitles? Google's done plenty of cutting edge ML stuff.
I'll admit their voice assistant is nothing to write home about - but it was the equal of its mediocre competitors at the time it was released.
It's almost like Google is not immune to the fate of being a massive company.
And just like prior large, market dominating firms (IBM / Microsoft / Intel), managed to miss a new trend (commodity PC hardware / web/mobile / contract fabbing) due to wildly profitable legacy revenue streams whose sheer size masked competitor acceleration.
The problem lies with translating that innovation to long term product vision, and reimagining how these innovations could be made into a product.
I suspect that they announce it to fast too, too soon - before it's proven. Stadia and LaMDA is an example of this. They actually showcased LaMDA last year or the year before that in I/O. The other is that they give up on innovations too soon because they can't think of ways to monetize them.
What? Tensorflow, one of the 2 main frameworks for doing AI work is a google project. Google has domain specific processors to accelerate AI workloads - tensor processor. Google Brain. Id argue they have been making the biggest effort out of all the large tech conglomerates. They just haven't made an effort to turn their developments into consumer facing products, instead of milking the ad-cow even more.
This goes back to way promotions are handled: clearly people are incentivized to build stuff but no one cares if that would have any path to profitability.
Does the world really need fucsia? ChromeOS?
A business needs both and needs to incentivize innovation along with long term commitment.
kubernetes came after the rise of aws, likely to keep google in the game
> Does the world really need fucsia? ChromeOS?
ChromeOS is an extremely popular OS, especially in education markets and there is definitely a need for such an OS. The majority of computers in the world are overkill for what the average end-user is trying to achieve and chromeOS fills that space very neetly.
Otherwise I agree with you that technology needs more than just technical vision to succeed, but my opinion is that AI isn't ready for the mainstage and maybe some people within google thought the same and chose to not rush anything. Then google made a massive blunder by going on the defense with their bard unveiling.
This is culture, and culture is one of the most important responsibilities of a CEO.
They really need to shift their focus a little --- from personalized to more context sensitive ads.
But they really can't do this because they lack the context to base ads on.
Amazon has the context by virtue of being the retail/ecommerce outlet on the internet. And their ad business continues to grow.
Start with a chaotic management style that is constantly reorg'ing and forcing manager changes. I had three managers and four reorgs during my under two years. (YMMV by team but I've heard of others even in product areas who've experienced similar.) You never know when you'll be pulled from a project, projects are developed and then handed-off vs. letting the builders continue to improve them, and promo becomes a political fantasy as you shift around.
Reorgs are a fact of enterprise life, but the frequency of them at Google is a huge sign of lack of strategic direction and bad planning. Absorbing HUGE numbers of new employees into this constantly shifting structure is a recipe for disaster. (OTOH, documentation tends to be very good.) And buying up tons of real estate when so many people either WFH full time or are hybrid? Crazy.
Then there's the way projects are managed. I never thought I'd miss JIRA so much. There are always too many cooks in the kitchen and everlasting approval processes.
To all the amazingly smart, dedicated, and user-focused people still there - you rock. To the board - time to shake things up.
[edit - fixed typo]
If the employees are happy and customers are happy, they don't need a new CEO. CEOs of companies at that scale are largely just PR puppets anyway, it's the ten thousand other engineers who do the real work. If you want to revolutionize the company, you need to swap out the army of ten thousand people, not the puppet.
They shouldn't give a damn about what some armchair critics say about an AI boo-boo. Ask those critics to code something better, if they can push some code commits, then they have a right to criticize, if not, shut up.
Yeah, we as a society need innovation, but it doesn't have to happen within Google, new companies can be established for that. We need a new Google, not a new Google CEO.
And I totally agree on the botched demo; it's just like the stock's unfair punishment after recent great quarters. Expecting that pandemic growth would continue forever just shows the irrationality of markets.
+1 to your comment that it's time for new Googles to rise up.
[edit to fix typo]
Do you think their customers are happy?
Google’s thought leader customers are extremely unhappy with pretty much all of their products to the point that Google is ripe for disruption.
The main thing Google has going for them is their incredibly massive moat that limits viable competitors. IMHO, that moat will only protect them for so long if they don’t reorient themselves.
The only people I know who like Google products are relatively unsophisticated consumers. I realize that this is a large part of the market and is also a very lucrative segment of the market, but they will follow the thought leaders when the thought leaders move on to something else.
But the demands of the regular user and the power user are very different. So before ChatGPT, I'm not sure that also catering to the power users would have helped Google with their regular users.
A CEO's sole responsibility is to deliver value to the shareholders. It literally doesn't matter how that value is delivered, as long as it gets delivered.
A CEO may appear to be rewarded in the short term, and may make short term choices, but, rest assured that they must please all 3 constituencies or they will not have a long run timeframe to worry about. (of course, boards and ceos make mistakes and act poorly and suffer the consequences, too).
How a CEO delivers value is generally by running the company well, making the right decisions, hiring the right people, making sure the company has the right product vision, etc.
If the customers aren't happy, they will buy fewer products and revenue will decline. Since a large portion of a company's stock price is connected to expectations about future earnings, that will put downward pressure on the stock and hurt the shareholders.
Nonsense. Customer happiness, employee happiness and company performance are all related.
I used to be a Google shareholder. I got a good return for a while, but eventually I got annoyed enough as a Google customer that I decided that I didn't want to hold Google stock. This was partly emotional, and partly a prediction that their stock price was going to plateau or fall given that they were alienating their users. This seems to have been the correct decision.
> A CEO's sole responsibility is to deliver value to the shareholders. It literally doesn't matter how that value is delivered, as long as it gets delivered.
It literally does matter, because shareholders are not automatons. A lot of the economy runs on confidence. Investments aren't just made on short-term economic performance.
An army of ten thousand people marching in the wrong direction is what you get with bad leadership.
There is a lot of "real" work going on at a company like Google. Leadership really does matter, and there are a number of examples of bad CEOs running a company into the ground (e.g. HP) and good CEOs completely turning failing companies around (e.g. Steve Jobs coming back to Apple). None of those things would have happened if the CEO was just a figurehead.
Some engineers, notably junior ones without a lot of life experience, seem to believe that engineering teams could run the company by themselves and that leadership and other orgs don't provide any value. It's an immature world view that doesn't even work very well at startups, and certainly doesn't make any sense at large companies.
Is there a company that's more dysfunctional?
Any large organization where people have the ability to create little fiefdoms will result in this eventually.
Having watched it from the inside of one through 4 aquire/merge cycles over 10 years I speak from experience.
My pet conspiracy theory is that a significant motivating factor for why some of these big tech companies are so bullish on returning everyone to the office is that otherwise all of the real estate purchases and leases make the executives look like fools.
I do think the reasoning applies much better to executives, though.
tl;dr human stuff
Google's management and leadership tenure is very short relative to other companies and the org structure is intensely unstable relative to peer companies. I lost count of how many "5 year plans" I went through that was summarily reset 1.5-2 years in because there was a leadership reorg.
Google has no product strategy for two reasons:
- leadership generally is much more interested in org-building than products. The nitty gritty of products is left to leaf node teams that have wide latitude to decide what gets built. This is great for individual autonomy and getting ICs promoted, but it's bad for products.
- any leader with an actual product strategy has no time to actually build it. It's practically guaranteed that the winds will shift and they'll be out, to be replaced by the next manager with their own vision and the need for a near-total reset.
I'm at a company now where leadership tenure is shockingly long (at least by Google standards) - and you see the payoff: multi-year strategies actually get built, actually pay off. Reorgs happen but is generally infrequent, and when they occur they are close to leaf node teams - rather than the wholesale "we're replacing all critical leaders" type that happens a lot at Google.
It must be incredibly difficulty to evaluate how well people are doing, and how valuable peoples work is when only one or two departments make any money and everything else indirectly supports that work.
How do you reward people for doing boring maintenance work on existing products? How do you give people the time to build the products, but also keep them happy and well paid enough to prevent them being poached?
How to reward a talented engineer who's job it is to add some small feature to a massive product like Maps or Docs?
I can't help but think I would explode the company into thousands of tiny startups each managing themselves and their own budgets, staff, and salaries, and literately pay bounties for every little feature I wanted implemented. There is no ladder to climb, only bounties to claim.
Maybe start by hiring people who don't find maintenance work boring? I've known tons of excellent engineers who very much prefer maintenance work.
- it's impossible to collaborate across org boundaries. If each org has their own budget/staff/salaries and their sole source of income are claimed bounties, there is no incentive to contribute one iota of work that isn't related to a bounty they can claim. You can of course split bounties but a) then you have interminable fights about the exact way bounties should be split, and b) the meta-game likely still rewards only pursuing bounties that one's org can achieve by themselves, causing orgs to refuse to collaborate.
- orgs will become more and more short-term focused since claiming bounties is critical to survival. A smaller bounty that can be claimed in 4 months is better than a larger bounty that can be claimed with 2 years of work. This is extra true if the orgs compete with each other - your odds of being pre-empted is lower with a 4 month bounty than a 2 year bounty, where you can burn a ton of work only to get beat by another org. The meta-game will almost certainly heavily favor fast small features rather than long-term work, and will absolutely preclude self-disruption type projects that are both time-consuming and risky.
You can, of course, insert some layer of managerial judgment into this to offset the meta-incentive flaws in the system - so you can force investment in long-term projects and force inter-org collaboration, etc. But at that point you've replicated a traditional corporate structure, just with "bounties" in place of "promotions".
But most importantly a bounty-based system doesn't solve the core problem here: who makes decisions about the company's products?
In a bounty-based system like you describe, there would be some kind of central cabal that issues bounties - in essence determining what products and features should be built. But then you have some pretty obvious issues:
- does the central cabal know enough about the product domains to be the most qualified to make these determinations? Or will the products suffer because the cabal doesn't understand the product's domains deeply enough to make smart decisions about it? Does it not make intuitive sense that the people building the product knows more about it than a group of far-removed decision makers? How do you consider the views of those who are closest to the product and most keenly aware of its tactical needs, in balance with the views of those who are furthest, but have more inter-product and strategic knowledge?
- besides the problems of the cabal knowing what should be built, how does the cabal know what can be built? It is entirely possible for the cabal to issue bounties that are unimplementable (give me a system that can diagnose cancers with a 0% error rate!). Besides the challenges of a highly centralized product org knowing what the market wants, they would have little way of knowing what is expedient or efficient for the company to achieve.
Again, you can insert some layer of managerial judgment into this to offset the problems here, but again you'd end up replicating a traditional corporate structure.
Great products are both.
Google tends to suffer from the worst of both worlds: an over-abundance of 5-year plans that do not offer sufficient interim value to justify their continued work.
Part of this is bad projections - Google projects are often highly-ambitious multi-year affairs with some interim checkpoints like growth rate, but those numbers are usually poorly estimated, poorly sourced, wildly overly optimistic, and don't actually pan out. So when the team inevitably whiffs the checkpoints by a wide margin entire products get shut down. This is at least one of the larger causes of the leadership churn I described above.
But yes, if your idea is that you can have a 5-year budget to go do [insert big ambitious thing] and management won't cry about it, that's a fantasy.
That said, the opposite is also not a great way to pursue a product - which mostly rests on the theory that pursuing near-term improvements repeatedly naturally wins.
In reality you want a mixture of long-term strategy with short-term tactics. Product teams that are too heavily in one direction fail for it.
This is because they have a "caretaker CEO".
Google wa sitting on a massive cash cow, so they appointed someone who would just keep it ticking over.
In the face of an existential threat, like ChatGPT, they need someone who can actually drive innovation. Not innovate themselves, nobody expects a CEO to do that, just create a culture which has a hope in hell of rising to fend off challenges to the empire.
They don't have this.
That have a CEO who is only capable in "good times" ... along with most of the company.
Faced with sufficient adversity, they will need a CEO who can succeed in the face of adversity.
The problem with Google is that far too much product authority is devolved into leaf node teams. But this isn't a quirk of Sundar's leadership, this is practically a shibboleth built into the DNA of Google itself. The idea is that autonomous teams of very smart people, given maximum freedom to pursue what they think is necessary, produces the best products.
This is one of the fundamental buildings blocks of Google and long pre-dates Sundar as CEO. And it is the thing that is failing.
What we're witnessing is IMO a repudiation of the idea that if you take smart people and "free range" them, they will spontaneously invent world-changing products. FWIW, I think the strategy has been clearly failing for a long time - the only product that came out of this system was Gmail. Quite literally everything else at Google that has survived the test of time was acquired (see: YouTube, Maps).
I think Sundar may end up taking the fall for being caught flat-footed, and surely as CEO he should rightly shoulder some of the blame, but Google's problems far pre-date him. It's also why I don't think the triumphant return of Larry and Sergey will necessarily fix things - they're the ones who instituted the system of autonomous teams.
Curious on what you [were] using? Something created in house? I am not a fan of Jira but not having it to track issues or create bug requests does indeed sound like a nightmare.
A lot of this reflects the "professional executive" MBA-ization others have mentioned. When folks who've never been engineers, or never worked on shipping products are the ones managing engineers, it creates dissonance (and BDUF[1]). I'm pretty biased, having entered the company after a decade on well-oiled scrum and XP teams - the predictability made it SO much easier to focus on the actual work. I've always believed that fewer things 100% complete are better than many things in partial states. That just isn't the case there and caused issues for me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Design_Up_Front
edit: formatting
On the other hand, Microsoft CEO is saying in unequivocal terms that Microsoft can use low-margin bing to undermine Google search. I'd not imagine such a day, but here it was.
Everything around that product was a summary of how Google handles things now. I can't take any new product release seriously from them anymore.
The Xbox only true competitor is the PlayStation which is much more manageable. Even the first Xbox had a market share of 33% in the US. It's important not to mix up killing a product before its prime and pouring money into an established market for dominance. Windows Phone was the latter.
Cloud gaming (if we believe it will eventually catch on) does not have an established "winner" yet. Nvidia/Xbox/Luna (Amazon) are still trying to make it work and Google had a better approach than all of them with lower controller latency.
Windows Phone started too far behind, and the only scenario where it caught up was "Everyone stops making Android phones."
On the other hand, the path to XBox dominance seemed feasible.
HTC Dream: 2008
There's a reason Microsoft completely ditched Windows Mobile, because it was never in the post-iPhone fight.
Of course, most egregiously, they invented transformers like 6 years ago, and they've had LaMDA for over a year, and only let people see small glimpses of it. Also, Waymo has been around for almost 15 years, and seems to have some really neat tech, but people can't actually use it. Calico has apparently made some massive breakthroughs with ISRIB treatments, and bought up all the patents so they have exclusive access to it, but seem to be keeping everything to themselves.
I feel like Google Code could have easily dominated over GitHub, but then they just let Microsoft have it.
Google does so much cool stuff, and I'm grateful for the services that they offer, many of which I pay for. It just sucks that they've gotten so stingy lately about what they release. I hope that changes soon.
https://sfstandard.com/transportation/how-you-can-ride-new-w...
Could go a guaranteed consistent and stable 720p@60Hz with a YouTube kind of Ad revenue model. You play, you watch the ads every X Minutes and revenue streams shared with developers.
Indie developer's heaven it could be.
You don't want ads? As subscription model could be the way. Best would have been to pick up tons of past titles BioShock, Mafia etc by being the goto place for recent retro games and gradually gaining traction in triple AAA segment.
EDIT: Typos
The Google engineering underlying Stadia is impressive and there's still so much possible value. But Google management launched Stadia in such a way to minimize all of the benefits of online play, and maximize all of its shortcomings. And then price it in such a way to provide value to the smallest possible number of customers.
No amount of engineering talent can overcome a management that's dedicated to self-sabotage.
Google has long been cavalier about their automated systems banning, withholding payments, or otherwise harming users and customers with no recourse to challenge the false positive punishments.
They've made a laughing stock of themselves with product launches and sunsets in Chat (GChat, Talk, Hangouts, Hangouts Chat, Hangouts Meet, Allo, Duo, Meet, Meet Original, Spaces, etc). They're not really any better in payments (Google Wallet, Android Pay, Google Pay, Google Pay Send, Google Wallet but new this time).
Stadia was an amazing product, but I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole because looking at the killed-by-google graveyard made it obvious where it would end up. It's become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Google needs to show that it cares about its customers/users and that it cares about its own products. The willingness to abandon both so casually has hurt its reputation in a way that makes it difficult to trust.
Google claims to operate Pay in dozens of countries with millions of transactions but almost all of them are from India where Google pay is merely a client for UPI
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/technology/artificial-int...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awa...
That’s a little harsh. Google makes great products like the Google cloud and Gmail. To say they are the most dysfunctional and slow moving company in tech is outlandish.
[1] - https://www.techradar.com/news/google-cloud-is-still-losing-...
Search rarely returns credible results and I find myself adding 'site:reddit.com' frequently to at least get some organic discussions about things rather than articles which look like they were sponsored and artificially inflated to the top. They've turned into a joke about releasing something and killing it off a few years later. Android is a nightmare for developers (and users) with how they handle API changes and the Google Play store as a whole. Any kind of customer support is non-existent in basically any of their products. Their hardware is good but software gets worse over time and stagnates (their smart home ecosystem). I still don't trust them for a second with my data.
Gmail is fine, Maps are fine, YouTube is... well, we don't really have a competitor and nobody wants to switch because they wouldn't have access to a large audience. Whatever they release I have no faith in it, not with it keeping my data, not with its longevity, not in its reliability.
For eg. If I search for "rav4", I see "2023 Toyota® RAV4 - Toyota® USA" pointing to toyota.com.
I often wonder why show an ad, why can't you show non-ad version of the same? Is it to get commission from Toyota for the click OR Toyota listing an ad for keyword "rav4"?
It’s almost like when you’re searching for a movie on Netflix and it only shows you similar titles because the movie is not in the catalog. Super annoying.
Sure, Netflix and Google have very different reasons to do that. Bus as a user: you search for A, but get B.
Not even taking into account how annoying it is from a company perspective.
Who cares about HN commentators when as a PM I am essentially judged on P/L and I want a good stock refresh.
And that's why I'll never work anywhere remotely B2C related.
You searched for a product and got... the manufacturer's web site as the top link. And you think that's... wrong? I mean, even if it's a paid ad, it's still a paid ad for the most relevant link to the content you searched for, right?
Are you just complaining that you saw an ad at all? But... surely if there's going to be a good market to advertise RAV4's to, it's to people searching for "rav4", no?
FWIW: I just tried this in an incognito window (to try to suppress ads). The top hit is indeed a tree of links to toyota.com, but they aren't marked as ads. The second hit is wikipedia. The third is a Car and Driver review page. The most SEOish link on the page is a still-legitimate-seeming link to "buyatoyota.com".
I searched "buy rav4" and the first ad I got was Toyota, but the second I got was VW, "Compare the VW Tiguan."
My understanding is that if Toyota doesn't cough up the money to buy a high placement ad for "Rav4," the VW ad might actually be at the top of the list.
By making the "promoted" search results barely distinguishable from the organic ones (they used to be so distinct, now it's just a little tag that says "Ad" or "Sponsored") Google gets to reap the benefits of a bidding war for direct searches for a product.
But, because ads now look organic, there's an increased chance that someone will click on it, so because of that UI change on Google's part, people now have to spend more on ads.
And OH MY GOD DO NOT CHANGE MY ZOOM LEVEL!! I spend so much time trying to find the area I want to search, enter Chinese restaurant and it expands to the entire freaking region. PLEASE STOP DOING THAT!!
What's the competition out there? It seems like every year I scope out Apple Maps and Bing Maps and get disappointed and come back to Google Maps. Is there stuff out there that I'm just not aware of?
https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/05/13/compared-apple-ma...
if (center 50% of screen)
force show the street nameDunno what gatekeeper they have exactly but you can smell him from afar.
Keeping font sizes tiny at high zoom levels is a real anti-pattern against usability for older people.
I wonder if they test maps being used by anyone over the age of 60? Testing a UI on older people (or any group out on the edges) really shows up usability and accessibility flaws.
The first 20+ results were obvious spam/malware type sites with stolen content and crazy nonsense foreign domains.
FWIW: I just tried "mazda 5 wiring diagram", and indeed there's nothing good there. But... I think that's because there's nothing good there. I suspect if I really want that document I'm going to have to buy it.
I mean, everyone in a technical field deals with this. There's stuff out there, but it's going to be on some rando adware site with questionable licenses. Datasheets for old ICs. Repair documentation for consumer electronic devices. Even regulatorily required stuff like MSDS sheets for older products tends to not be available in public places.
But the search engine can't fix that for you.
[1] With the notable exception of software development, where open source has freed us from those walls. But also instilled in us the attitude
But even if there weren't any good results, which I know there are because someone somewhere has asked for a wiring diagram of the tail lights many times, and someone out there has access to a diagram (usually a mechanic).
But regardless of results or not, Google serving 20+ pure spam and malware results less technical users might fall for is insane IMO.
When I test your hypothesis by searching for "2019 honda cbr1000rr wiring diagram" [1] the first results are images of the wiring diagrams and then links to the exact non-SEO optimized forums you're talking about with a post that contains a PDF file available to download for the exact motorcycle I'm interested in.
Its not the exact term I used over the weekend in my original post, but this is a basic enough one. Since it's more basic, it actually has a good result or two first. Then falls into spam upon spam. My original search over the weekend has only spam.
https://www.google.com/search?q=2002+chevy+s10+brake+wiring+...
One problem is that Google can't bear to serve you up no results, because potential delicious advertising revenue.
Rather than say there aren't any results, they'll serve up fifteen ads (barely recognisable as such) that match something vaguely similar, ignore a few words in your search term that would have excluded some profitable results, rewrite your search term into something that it feels like you should be searching for, drop the quotes around your phrases to find more pages, or some other infuriating reinterpretation.
So even if there isn't anything good there, it's hard to get a feel for whether the data are sparse or you're just being funnelled to stuff that's more profitable.
A lot of youtubers (more than I expected, anyway) I see now promoting Rumble and Odysee, and they aren't even the cancellable types who'd have reason to move. Maybe they're being paid better or maybe they're just seeing the writing on the wall with youtube striking tech videos and tutorials, or everyone flocking to mastodon over twitter stuff and I guess it's opened their minds to new platforms.
I think they stand a chance.
I'll give you a reason why it's not just trouble makers getting banned. Let's say you allegedly break a rule of a sub. You feel this is unjust so you complain on one of the other friendly subreddits. This will be considered brigading and harassment. Immediate ban.
Is Reddit really good anymore? It's hardcore enforced group think.
It turns out that I had logged out of my google account and forgot to log back in. Once I did that, I could see the maps again. Not that I really want to -- those sponsored locations are much too annoying to tolerate. So I've switched away from Google Maps and logged back out of my account.
When I use the quotation marks "xyz" to ensure that the result contains the string "xyz", goog no longer gives me results that have "xyz" in them.
It's not for all cases, but is most noticeable when trying to debug a program. I'll get an error, then search for that error online, putting the outputted error in quotation marks. Granted, these tend to be obscure errors and I'm not exactly expecting to find an answer.
But goog will return a bunch of SEO spam, ads, and then ~2/3rds of the way down the page, finally some real answers. But! These 'real' pages/answers don't contain the string that I made sure to specify to return. Often, it's very badly related to what I'm searching for to begin with.
Like, I'm okay with goog not returning anything. That helps me know that the thing I'm trying to do is headed in the wrong direction.
But goog is very much not okay with not returning anything.
I imagine that some KPI was set by some manager at google that they have to decrease the number of pages that don't return anything. So to do that, some check was implemented to strip the quotation marks away if a query doesn't have a result. And I just so happen to get caught in this a lot. I understand, google get more money when that happens, as it makes sure to show a lot more ads to me when it does this (pretty certain of this, but not 100%).
Still, yeesh!, it's so frustrating when I try to use the tool and it just ignores me!
No, that's started sucking too.
I'm sure I'm missing another success story, but really, when was the last time Google hit a home run?
Or Hangouts (the massively online public video space) -> Hangouts (the chat app inside GMail) -> Hangouts (the private videoconfering app) -> Google Meet.
These all sound like the same thing. If they are different, then I guess it would be confusing.
I'm not a defender of Google, but my sense has always been that tech generally slowed around that time. Would like to know if I'm missing something
Apple M1 Apple Watch Airpods Their streaming service
Apple also shipped the M series chips, revitalized the Mac line as a result, and been giving proper attention to the iPad, finally.
Amazon has been innovating in logistics and Alexa is (was?) a genuine innovation when it came out. I think, ironically, AWS lacks a lot of innovation to pivot to more user friendliness and understand-ability, but its its still growing strong.
Google has been more flatfooted by comparison, with more product closures than successful projects, period, let alone hits.
Amazon also has a more decent content strategy (eg why they bid on the NFL rights) than both Apple and Google.
Moving to a completely different architecture is a big deal, launching their own architecture is an even bigger one. I am astonished at how readily it was accepted, how well it seems to have delivered (I don't own any of their newer products yet), and how smooth the transition seems to have been for OS users and software vendors.
It's a huge deal, far more interesting than individual products like the watch or earbuds (successful though those are, they're not paradigm shifts).
Where’s google latest acquisition and what happened to their M&A arm?
source: Androids: The Team that Built the Android Operating System
Google strikes me as a place with too much money and no focus on how to productively use it, and now there are viable competitors popping up to challenge them.
I'd like to see Google give MS a run for their money. For one, create a state-ful GUI markup standard that's business-oriented, not crap like Bootstrap. Second, open source key products so users don't fear getting the plug pulled. (The GUI browser/pluggin could be based on the Tk or Qt kits to avoid reinventing the GUI wheel.)
Works for managing large corps through "business-as-usual" peacetimes but as soon as change & innovation is needed it's a no-go.
lol how do you expect to program if you don't know how every common subroutine works in exhaustive detail?
Calling for Sundar's head during the hype phase is premature.
But calling for his departure for an abject lack of corporate strategy (unless you consider "partially bankroll moonshots across Google etc. with ad revenue" a strategy, which it isn't) is fairly overdue.
What's Google's north star, their vision for 2035? Have you heard it?
I haven't, not from Google. But given Microsoft's trajectory with cloud and AI investments, I know theirs well.
Apple and Amazon are friendly to each other. Microsoft and Facebook have been longtime partners despite Microsoft owning Linkedin. but Google manages to enter everybody’s industry and fail.
But the hype will eventually calm down, and people will eventually discover what LLMs are good for. They will be out of the news, but they will still be essential for search. I don't know what Google has on that subject, but if they don't have any good answer by then, they will be done.
Reminds me of the line from The Godfather 2: "You're not a wartime consigliere, Tom."
These aren't wartime CEOs.
Times have changed. It’s funny that literally every tech company’s response has been to lay off low level workers who could be re-deployed in different projects but to keep their leadership the same.
Now they’re all making the same mistake which is gonna bite them hard a couple of quarters down the road when product development grinds to a halt due to overtaxed and burned out engineers.
People expect it to act like a (or rather 50) small, nimble, innovative start ups. But it isn't that. It's a large mature corporation in a stable market (search/advertising).
This is why there were layoffs recently: Google's future is not growing (where people are an asset) it is Efficiency (where people are a cost centre).
This is also why Google struggles so much with innovation, new product lines etc. The same things that stopped GE or AT&T becoming big players online will stop Google from being a big player in <Insert New Thing> (remember before ChatGPT when it was Crypto and Google didn't have a coin? Or before that when it was Quantum computing and Google were totally definitely building one, it just still doesn't exist?).
And all of this is A-Ok. This is just the corporate lifecycle. There are very good, economically sensible, pragmatic reasons why big companies do not innovate and why efficiency is more important there.
Whether Google needs a new CEO or not depends entirely on whether it's current one can deliver that. But Layoffs are a sign the current guy is doing his job, people just don't understand (or don't want to understand) what his job is...
I am sort of sympathetic. The same thing has been happening at my company over the last year. We are a startup but we're up to 180 people now and when you're looking to raise and starting to think about a buyer/IPO etc then things get more and more efficient. That's just life.
I think Google (and other FAANGs) did really well to remain innovative and start-up-y for so long. But "gravity always wins in the end"
It must be a bit bitter for people who recently started at these companies. I think a lot of people worked very hard for a long time to "get in". They expected guaranteed employment for life, perks galore, etc. They had "arrived". And now its all evaporating. That's not fair really. But I don't think anyone did it on purpose. I think people just forgot that middle age comes to all companies eventually...
Not anymore.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/microsoft_ai_bing_err...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23599007/microsoft-bing-a...
Recently they hired an exgf of mine with a degree from a school that accepts anyone, who gets confused watching TV shows, and has trouble doing basic math.
lol
If colleges don't matter, I'm not sure why so many successful companies paid attention during their starts. Its a pretty good metric to estimate intelligence, not knowledge IMO.
I'm sure she's a great project manager though!
She was a scrum master for 3 years at another company. One day I asked her what the term scrum stood for? I wasn't in the field at all so I had no idea. But it was an obvious question IMO. She didn't know. Next day I looked it up and learned it's just a rugby term. It came up a month later, and she still didn't know. I cared enough to look it up. She didn't. And it's her job. Now she's at Google. If you think that's not a bad sign, you might work at Google too.
Dont get me wrong, you may be right, but those above are not reliable
like... you can change your whole life within 5 years, wow.
>If colleges don't matter, I'm not sure why so many successful companies paid attention during their starts. Its a pretty good metric to estimate intelligence, not knowledge IMO.
my personal opinion is that anything below top e.g top3 is more or less similar mess. I know grads across various topX levels and it never felt like a school was important factor. Top people are top
>She was a scrum master for 3 years at another company. One day I asked her what the term scrum stood for? I wasn't in the field at all so I had no idea. But it was an obvious question IMO. She didn't know. Next day I looked it up and learned it's just a rugby term. It came up a month later, and she still didn't know. I cared enough to look it up. She didn't. And it's her job. Now she's at Google. If you think that's not a bad sign, you might work at Google too.
Haha, actually not getting familiar with scrum seems like a good choice :) devs hate it with passion
I can't think of any one. Perhaps the increase in the size of the industry from 2007 to 2023 might just come with a lowering of hiring standards so positions can be filled.
Sundar has the CEO title because he's so meek that grandstanding politicians feel bad being too mean to him during congressional hearings.
Google's priorities 1 through 10 are to avoid anti-trust messing up their money geysers.
Their entire existence relies on GoogleAds. That's it. Nothing else comes even remotely close to GoogleAds revenue to their bottom line. This is why they can be so cavalier discontinuing products, as they don't make money so get cut without a second thought.
Search has been so co-opted by this model and dependency on revenue that they are literally killing the one product that makes them money.
My take from the outside at least is that GoogleAds revenue is no longer carrying the business (maybe less business, maybe the company grew too fast, maybe market pressure), and now they are forced to make some tough decisions.
Although I'd love his paycheck, I am glad I am not Google's CEO. That is a really awful position to be in, IMHO.
And the times I might want to (driving a car)... I used to be able to simply ask maps what my "E.T.A." was and, shock!, it would answer... that's been broken for years now and I'm fairly sure that will never be fixed.
They had been pitching AI for how long and now they have to sustain themselves on openshift sales.
I have no idea what the fuck that actually means, but I would think resignation and being replaced would probably be a reasonable way to take responsibility for his reckless gambling with peoples' lives.
Google is in a bad spot, and was in a bad spot well before ChatGPT appeared in the news.
I think Pichai is a CFO/accountant, this is not what they need at this point.
In practice, I'd like to see Google lose its position, their dominance has been detrimental for the whole tech ecosystem.
On top of that you have the Microsoft Loves Linux initiative which saw them finally stop pushing their shitty OS everywhere and embrace being a cloud provider which was a smart move.
All of that not to say that he's some. kind of god-tier CEO, but he definitely is above-average and above Sundar Pichai who got the CEO role at about the same time (2015) but saw no such "good business move" in the same timespan. He's been mostly content milking the ads revenue.
Sundar is a politician. He's a fixer and back room power broker. He doesn't give a shit about tech or product.
They need someone that can turn around GCP and productize their self driving platform. I believe the privacy regulations about their search business are now unstoppable and so they should let it happen and adapt
Market pressure will turn Alphabet into a real company.
- products: will be buried in the graveyard soon, so NO
- tech: might get abandoned or rewritten at any time (angular JS anyone?), so NO
- trying to make adblockers and privacy tools harder to use: this is it.
yes, I can count on google only on the last part. I only need to de-google from gmail in the coming months, then I am ready to see it burning.
the search UX, especially the top bar where you switch between search types is broken for nearly a decade and they are not able to fix that.
I truly wonder what fool decided that it would be a good idea to change the UI depending on what the results were. It's hard to recall a company making such a big bet on dumbing its own products for long.
When you combine the declining quality with a lack of innovative new products, the public’s privacy concerns, and potentially the awakening of advertisers to poor ROI, there’s a clear picture of trouble ahead for Google.
engineer: well, yeah, we've got something. It's OK. But it has limitations and needs to be used very carefully.
engineer's boss: we've got something. It's OK.
AVP: we've got something.
VP: We've got something!
SVP: We've got something. It's great!
CTO: We've got something. It's great! It's just what we need to counter the press noise!
CEO: Phew. Great. Get it out there.
None of which exonerates Pichai. Given the significance of the threat to the firm, the "code red", the knowledge that he's personally going to take heat, he should've been all over this. Imagine Steve Jobs in a similar situation. He'd have been over it like a rash.
So no: Pichai doesn't get away with blaming someone else. His job.
no.
Um, not a fan of either system, but pretty sure this has been shown to be patently false...
There was a c-acm post on here just the other day about this. This is some click-bait.
Something seems way off here.
Google's problem is that i searched for "Cape Code VRBO" this morning and couldn't get my answer without scrolling past a full screen of ads.
When you have "showdead" enabled in the settings you can see all the "dead" posts.
A dead post is one that has been marked such that it only appears if you have the above setting enabled and prohibits replies to it. This is usually because it's deemed too off topic or otherwise obnoxious to have value.
The post in question was probably marked dead and because it wasn't particularly offtopic or obnoxious then a shadowban is a reasonable assumption. This could be further verified by noticing that that person's comments are almost all dead. This suggests either they're shadowbanned or are remarkably consistent at producing offtopic/obnoxious posts without getting shadowbanned.