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Comment by jes5199 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve heard variations on this story a few times, successful company swallows failing company and gets infected by failing-culture. Isn’t that what happened to Netscape?

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Google bought DoubleClick in 2008. Pretty much everything they started after that point has failed because the focus has been on selling ads rather than building something normal people enjoy using.

On the other hand how much of the things Google has built/bought and grew today we enjoy could exist without the firehose of money that ads represented? I'm not sure Youtube happens without the ad money.

AdWords was doing just fine before DoubleClick. That's how they got the money to buy DoubleClick in the first place.

The problem was specifically DoubleClick management, who then got inserted in high levels within the Ads organization, forcing out the very technically & economically savvy people who were there before.

This is a recurring problem in large organizations. People who spend their time learning to be politically savvy will be...politically savvy, and be at an advantage when playing power politics that determines who is in charge. The effort needed to become politically savvy usually comes at the expense of domain/technical/economic knowledge required to actually get the job done. Eventually the organization becomes very good at playing political games and very bad at getting stuff done, until it collapses.

Google had enough 3rd party ad revenue before they bought DoubleClick (2008) to buy YouTube (2006).

I'm mostly wondering if they could have kept it as open as they do to non revenue generating users or would they have had to do something like Vimeo where after a certain number of views they come asking for money or would have had to limit the quality/quantity of uploads from small creators due to the costs of storing and serving their videos with limited ad returns.

Yes, ad money built a lot of the web. I’m not saying it’s evil on a conceptual level, but rather that a lot of companies start failing when they switch from thinking about what their users would like which happen to be ad supported as opposed to building products which are designed around ad revenue first. It’s what gives you things like Google+ but also things like social media sites optimizing for outrage or other low-quality interactions which maximize ad sales revenue.

YouTube has obviously done well, but look at everything they’ve done since the ad sales mentality dominated their thinking. Stuff like Google+ happens when you are thinking “we need X to keep Facebook from cutting into our ad revenue, therefore our users will use X” rather than asking “what will our users like more than Facebook?”.

The other side is what we saw with things like Stadia, GCP, or G-Suite where executives used to the ad model have trouble with other business models. The problem there again isn’t that ads are evil but rather that you need to understand your users and what they want so you can think about the product the right way.

Not a good example. Google reinterviewed every DoubleClick employee and fired half of them.

That doesn’t say anything about whether it’s a good example: even if it’s true, the real question would be whether they looked for the right things and especially who they kept at the management level – at the time, Google announced they were laying off a quarter of the employees due to redundancy, which tends to mean that groups like HR and accounting get hammered more than senior managers. This is especially important to get right when you consider that the most damaging people aren’t comic book villains but rather people who sound like they know what they’re talking about and are charismatic – exactly the sort of people who would make it through an interview process.

The Google interview process at that time was definitely not tuned for selecting the charismatic lol. I was there at the time and I can't recall anyone from DoubleClick management surviving, only engineers. It was a bloodbath.

Who poisoned Netscape?

Collabra, per jwz. See "groupware bad" (not direct linking in case he still has the referer block up).

thanks, I couldn’t remember where I had heard it

Is Collabora not a good product?

Not Collabora. Collabra was a groupware company Netscape acquired to shore up the E-mail portion of Communicator. It didn't work and ended up substantially delaying future development of the browser suite.

AOL

Didn't AOL buy Netscape?

There's a long list of companies that died by being acquired into a bad culture. OP is talking about the opposite: an acquisition so toxic it rots the parent company.

AOL was borgified by Time Warner management post acquisition the same way Boeing was by MD.

You make it sound like AOL was cool before the Time-Warner merger and people didn't joke about e.g. the free trial CD's

They were a successful online service before the internet. Yes. They were just as cool as Compuserve and Prodigy.

By the time of the merger with Time Warner they were a joke among technical people. They were in the same category as Compuserve and Prodigy, but marketed specifically as an "easy" service for less technical users.

Netscape died because browser became a utility in the OS.

It's not that simple.

Netscape died because Microsoft bundled their browser with the operating system and made it free for commercial use, what essentially led to the huge antitrust case.

Only after that did browsers become utilities in the OS, with open source engines like Konqueror's KHTML (which later became WebKit, which later became Blink) and Netscape/Mozilla's Gecko

Microsoft was the overwhelming majority of all installations. So effectively, once Microsoft added it, it was a utility. I'm well aware of that history.

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