Hacker News Reader

Comment by culi | Hacker News Reader

when roughly would you place the "old Google" turning point?

Well it's all gradual and diffuse; for that matter there are still pockets of the "old Google" around today. My point here was just about, in a big company, different teams having their own domains that you don't/can't interfere in, rather than a free-for-all where everyone feels part of the same whole and can just jump in. (Which was probably never going to work anyway, so maybe encouraging such a culture in the first place is what Google did wrong.)

This is actually ironic in light of popular HN sentiment in Google-related articles, where many seem to imagine Google acting as a single whole, rather than different teams working in their own interests and not thinking of the big picture. E.g. people in this thread imagining that "Google" thought about RSS support and made a decision based on advertising revenue (or whatever imaginative reason), when in fact the team working on the "DevSite" infrastructure probably barely thought about RSS at all. Maybe they should have, but the reality that RSS (unfortunately) doesn't matter much seems harder to swallow for many, than theories about maliciously breaking it.

Agree with this take.

People always assume some ulterior motive to every single decision google does, but things are often much simpler than that, and mostly all it comes to prioritization...

Hanlon's Razor: Never ascribe to malice that which can easily be explained by stupidity.

Or the corporate corollary: never ascribe to malice that which can be easily explained by a more profitable allocation of resources.

Or Brown's Corollary of Apathy: Never ascribe to stupidity what can be explained by DGAF.

I hear ya but who sets the priorities? Management typically right? So if they don't see value in RSS and move their KPIs it will never be implemented.

And well profit motives push managements decisions so it's no wonder it never got prioritized. Nothing nefarious about it. RSS makes Google no money.

At the team level? Eng lead, pm lead, someone who cares about a problem.

Yes, this tendency of people drives me absolutely insane. I don't know why people so strongly default to thinking of large organizations as a monolith, but it is one of the largest fallacies that I see repeated continuously here.

I kind of wonder if it is spill-over from Apple. Apple is notoriously tight, controlled from the center, or at least was during Steve Job's reign. I wonder if that brush doesn't get applied to every company, even if it is a very different type of company.

But this fallacy make sense. Even the smallest part of the large oranization can't go against organization course/directions.

Yes definitely, if the top says "we're doing it this way" then the smallest parts will have to do it that way. But in a company like Google (and IME most large companies) the top doesn't get that specific. They give broad strategic objectives and let the departments figure out the best way to achieve them. It's possible of course, but seems unlikely to me that the top would say something like, "remove RSS feed support for the developer blog." And if they did, I would expect either complete silence on the issue, or some corporatey Newspeak about it. Since they said "Unfortunately, we don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're actively working on a solution" that to me seems like a top-down direction is extremely unlikely.

I don't think most of the criticisms towards Google literally assert that the top brass demanded specific technical decisions. Rather, "the top brass demanded it" or variations thereof is meant as shorthand for "the top brass set objectives and operational constraints that ultimately led to this choice being made, and this type of consequence was foreseen by said top brass but deemed an acceptable tradeoff".

The workings are much more indirect, the intentions slightly different, but the outcome is the same.

I quit in 2015 because the place was becoming like any other big company and I’d already been there for a decade. Larry becoming CEO in 2011 again probably started it…once he took the helm, Google soon got really concerned about expenses, likely because his net worth was tied to pleasing Wall Street. CFO Pichette left and bean-counting CFO Porat got hired who came from Morgan Stanley with a mandate to cut expenses.

And the culture changed at the same time. Lots of seemingly needless rules to protect rising fiefdoms that started the sclerosis that only got worse over time. Gamergate internally felt like a Civil War waged over Google+.

Google+ itself was the height of Google’s hubris, thinking they could kill a beloved product (Google Reader) to kill a different company’s beloved (at the time) product, Facebook. I remember being deeply disappointed with the release of Google+ like I was when the Segway was released. All this hype and promise for a secret product built with an enormous group of highly-talented people, kept away from the teeming masses of similarly talented people that could’ve told them that it was a dumb idea and here are the reasons why.

Really, if I had to blame one thing, it would be Google+ because of the corrosive effects of social media. Before Google+, my colleagues were just my colleagues who brought their whole selves to the office but we still mostly talked about work. Folks had mailing lists I wasn’t subscribed to where they would talk about their abhorrent political beliefs so I wouldn’t find out about them.

And then, all of a sudden, after Google+ came out, some guy I thought was cool revealed that he didn’t want women to be able have abortions. And some other guy was a randroid, hellbent on not understanding that taxes pay for roads. And on and on…seemingly everyone just spent a lot of time being mad at each other.

Obviously it’s hard for me to point to a specific thing or time period, but the writing was on the wall in the early 2010s (to me, anyways) and I bounced by the middle of the decade.

Are you saying Reader was killed to funnel people into Google+?

It was killed I think because it was a “distraction”. Can’t have two social networks at the same time, unlike messaging services and plenty of other Google products, apparently.

I don’t think it was ever staffed heavily (and that long piece on the product released earlier this year will attest to that) but if Google was going to go “all-in” on social, then to some leaders, everything else that might seem like a half-measure had to die.

It’s why it was killed despite what felt like half the company being willing to volunteer to keep it running.

Old Google would’ve let it live and let folks in their 20% time keep it running.

October 23, 2000. The day Google went from being a search engine to being an advertisement company.

I know they still dabble in search but that’s not the point.

http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/10/google-launches-self...

I've been at Google 14 years and 2014 was around the time I noticed more and more people internally lamenting that old Google was dead.

The timing seems right. A year after that, Google reestructured as Alphabet; three more years and it abandoned the "Don't be evil" motto.

Arrival of Sundar as CEO was the obvious sign, but probably few years before then.

I think this blog post is a good summary: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1

Reply on news.ycombinator.com