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)
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.
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.
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.
This is culture, and culture is one of the most important responsibilities of a CEO.