> "At Google's scale, the external world ceases to exist and is only rarely and carefully allowed to enter their walls"
OK Google... now I get why you behave that way with your users (no support, product graveyard...) ! ;-)
OK Google... now I get why you behave that way with your users (no support, product graveyard...) ! ;-)
It's more that almost all of Google's features are ad-funded, and the company has chosen to make lots of (apparently) free, but poorly supported and uncertain products, rather than a smaller set of well supported products. It's a tradeoff, and Google has made a good tradeoff for both themselves (who collect more data and have more ad supply) and the majority of their users (who get a wide variety of "free" services), but it has downsides, of course.
Unlike some I think PM roles can be very useful, but they build in failure if they are used as a firewall between dev and customers.
This is something I’ve noticed among dozens and dozens of Google engineers. The smug self superiority has leaked into the water supply.
I guess the answer is God's perfect omniscience is massively concurrent on a scale unfathomable to human computational models and, by existing outside of time, he also avoids the possibility of race conditions. But Google can't do that, so they need to face this problem like the rest of us. I think they have really, by admitting it's impossible at that scale to provide service to all customers, so they simply don't, but their users have not yet accepted that.
What makes you so sure that "the company" doesn't exist? Sounds like you've discovered something almost axiomatic to have that level of certainty since there isn't a state-of-Deleware for the perfect being.