Mourning Google
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Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to zero. It turned out hiring great programmers wasn't enough by itself, not many amazing new products were happening. That's what caused Google to change culture toward the corporate norm: the non-normal culture wasn't proving itself.
It reminds me of Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night". When you're young, that book is a tragedy of broken love. But when you're a bit older, you realize it's a tragedy of ambition, of a man who dreamed of becoming a famous psychiatrist but it just wasn't working out, year after year after year. And it wears on him, drives him to drinking and divorce. Simple as that.
But maybe it was just luck.
Well, that was what made Google in the first place. That's a hell of a lot of proof.
What didn't work out was endless growth for the stockholders and "winning in every market".
I'm not sure when companies decided they can't just be fucking happy in their domain (and make the same thing, improve it slightly over time, sell it with a profit, and go on), and have to "win every market" or squeeze that market to death (probably around the time healthy profits became secondary to stock performance and enshitiffication began), but I sure wish we'd go back to before that.
I used to wonder why Google moves so slow to add features and get literally anything done, but after experiencing the monumental screwup that is Google's underlying unified payments infrastructure, it's become pretty clear. The engineers are spending too much time mucking through the garbage left behind by M&A tech merging and code left behind by hotshot college grads on their way to early retirement at 25.
EDIT: M&A
* What is P&A tech?
* How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?
Parent is not talking about Google employees caching on Google stock.
They're talking about acquired company founders, getting the acquisition money from Google and retiring (or having the money to do show) through their "exit", while living Google with shitty startup code, created in "startup mode" with no regard to the future, just to ship, patch it to get enough traction, and exit quickly.
levels.fyi reports a L4 averages $270k/yr at Google. Can sock away a whole lot of that pretty fast.
You don't need to live in a high cost of living area, except if you're competing American Psycho style.
You could live where the other 95% of people working in the Bay Area live.
I'm pretty sure that the baristas serving those Googlers in cafes outside the Googleplex don't make $270K a year, and still get to work in the same area.
If that means more commuting, that's always an option. People commute 1-2 hours per direction too, to make $50K, I'm pretty sure a 20-something making $270K can handle it.
Heck, even a daily two-way Uber would be totally doable, and other expenses added, they'd still get to save over $150K per year still.
As far as I can tell, seems to be a lack of a cohesive vision from leadership and an absolute willing ignorance of existing challenges, as you’ve mentioned.
90% of my personal Google services appear to be tied to the organization one for some reason, but a few recent ones from the Google Store are now tied to my personal one, meaning I need to use the profile switcher to access and manage them. There is no way to move subscriptions between payment profiles and the only option is to close one which will terminate the services immediately and remove the billing history. The one I should remove is the Organization one, as I'm not an organization...
-.-
Meanwhile, I have a single owner LLC that had GCP projects in play before the company was founded. I had tried to set up two separate GCP billing accounts, one owned by my GSuite admin and one owned by my personal account, to bifurcate the projects that fell under the new company.
Somehow that resulted in the one and only payment profile associated with my GSuite business GAIA identity being that same organization payment profile from my personal account! So I can see and manage personal subscriptions on payments.google.com. There's no way to change this that I'm aware of short of working with GSuite support.
You can in fact make a new payment profile, and Google says you should do this when you move to another country, but the help docs themselves note that your existing services will continue to charge on the old one. Which I guess means you are expected to cancel all your Google services, delete your old payment profile so that you can sign back up for all of them in the new payment profile manually, and lose all history of your previous payments.
So there's Billing Accounts which point to Payment Accounts, and Payment Accounts which point to Payment Profiles. In true Google fashion, there's a tooltip on the Payment profile ID which says it used to be called Billing ID. That's not confusing at all.
This is just a few of the utterly baffling things I found while trying to work this out. It reminds me of how PayPal has active subscriptions that it's UI literally cannot manage because they are too old and were incorrectly migrated from one of the zillions of older M&A subscription products that they merged in in their history.
Unfortunately, the approach doesn't work for all product categories. Product design, usability, simplicity, and sheer style were not the forte of the Google of old. As a result they saw themselves fall behind Facebook in social, failed to stop the tsunami that was iPhone, could not compete with Amazon in e-commerce, and ceded heavy ground to it in home automation.
But Google still wanted these things and more, as all exceptionalist mega corps do. So they did the unthinkable. They handed the decision making back to the same product and business overlords that they had once shunned.
As someone who has one foot in engineering and one foot in product design, I know how important product experts are in producing well loved, intuitive, and incredibly successful experiences at scale. However, you can feel it in the experience as a user when the product team is given the keys to the kingdom and left unchallenged. The product becomes soulless and vapid. It loses it's charm and abandons it's loyal customers when the wind shifts even slightly.
I'm not placing the blame solely on Google's product apparatus, quite the opposite. It's clear that it's engineering apparatus has become so careless, so content with the status quo and the cushy paycheck and perks, that they don't push back anymore. Whenever you use a Google product as a software engineer and you wonder how it's possible that its blatantly obvious failures made it one day in the dev process of a company that apparently prides itself on hiring only the best engineering talent, know that it's not that these people aren't smart, it's that they do not care.
It seems likely that Google incentivizes it's engineers not to care. The engineers get the crazy salaries and all the perks, they don't get to decide things. If you want to decide things, get promoted into product. You don't want to do product? You actually enjoy writing code? Then don't complain when your opinions and concerns are deferred. You could have switched to the business side, made less money, and hated your job.
Google used to be an amazing engineering company because it promoted an atmosphere where engineers wanted to care about what they were doing. They have been unable to sustain that dynamic as they tried to make the company good at things that were not engineering, and as a result, the engineers just don't care enough to save it anymore and you can feel it every time you use a Google product.
All the while, the shift in the company began to dull the sharp edge that was their core competency: engineering driven products.
Furthermore, even if that were true, companies (especially ones like Google) look for project and product managers that have CS degrees or other STEM degrees.
Personally, my frustration with project/product managers often comes from (ironically) underspecified requirements and highly unrealistic deadlines. Neither of those I consider a failing of their education or skills, but a failing of the company's reward structures.
This is completely wrong. Their style was deliberate indifference about aesthetics, but their products (maps, search and gmail in particular) were absolute masterpieces of product design when first launched.
Edit to add: even Chrome itself was like this.
Gmail was not actually a particularly elegant product design, it offered an escape from spam and manually managing your mailbox storage. Back then, if you used a free email experience, you were bombarded with banner ads, had 100MB of storage, and 99% of that was eaten by the spam sent directly to your inbox. Features are not product design.
Chrome might be a good exception, though. I still get the sense that it was primarily driven by inspired engineers. The reason for Chrome's success is probably not it's innovative design (it was it's performance), but it certainly was an incredible advance.
It popularized instant search, tagging and threading to such a degree you have clearly forgotten how elegant it was!
Product design is what something does, how it is structured and how it behaves to user interaction, _and_ how it appears, not just one of them. GMail was almost to email what the iPhone was to smartphones.
This is product design.
SUPERCUT Every "And loving it" in Get Smart (1965-1970)
If I remember my thoughts back when Gmail was launched I was clearly awestruck. Gmail showed what was possible to do if one had fast internet connection. All those little interactions enabled through ajax! I think it was the first time, atleast for me, a product was as good as a desktop app w.r.t interactions and usability.
For comparison, with Yahoo mail one had to hit compose button and wait for a few seconds for compose window to open up. With Gmail it was extremely nifty and nearly instantaneous because I think it was done clientside and Ajax.
Mapquest would beg to differ. To me, the interface was the killer feature for Maps. The data and trip planning functionality existed already on the web (as my print outs of driving routes in the late 90s can attest to). But being able to just scroll around a new city was amazing. Every other site required clicking through every North or West button with a round trip to the server.
It wasn’t until later that the satellite data and street view data became the next killer feature.
Well, let's hit up Yahoo! Maps to find the dopest route
I prefer MapQuest; (that's a good one, too)
Google Maps is the best; (true that;) double true!
So yeah, there was a third competitor-
https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2005/12/27/saturday-night-...
[1] https://www.labnol.org/software/chrome-with-adobe-reader/201...
Chrome was dramatically faster than anything else (thanks to v8 which was a total revolution for js engines) and each tab crashed separately, with far better security than other browsers of the time. On Windows (and initially it was only on Windows) this was a big deal and so it displaced a huge proportion of the tech aware userbase very fast, permeating out from there.
The billboards were a thing but not what drove initial adoption to critical mass.
It was remarkable how quickly Chrome spread among the employees. Nothing to do with advertising -- just that it was so much faster and the whole app never crashed.
Whenever you heard someone cursing because their browser had crashed and they lost their tabs and immediate work, someone in the next cubicle would go, "why aren't you using Chrome?"
It really was that simple. It was all word of mouth.
They were then screamed at for being insufficiently "complacent" when they tried to fix those issues by changing the extension model.
Wow. Incredibly that there are people who think this. So only an engineer with no product team input can build products with a soul? Really?
Calling attention to this specifically, because do we want a single 'Google' to have foothold on every ground? Innovation needs a healthy dose of competition, after all.
> Under the engineering first strategy, Google became the juggernaut it is today, with products like Gmail, Maps, Street View and of course Search.
Just by definition search predated any culture or strategy at Google since its launch came before any hiring or incorporation. Certainly it was refined and maintained well for years but I’d argue this is an exception to the culture as refining and maintaining things well are not regarded as Google’s strong suit. Search dominates revenue in a big way so they had to do that for search and made it happen.
And a second bit of pushback - Maps, Gmail and Street View were certainly best in category from a user standpoint but my impression is they are a rounding error when it comes to revenue (actual businesses success) compared with search. Maybe this has changed. But assuming it hasn’t, a common critique of engineering led orgs is that they tend to stop at technical sweetness and fail to fully follow through on delivering great businesses and all that entails (revenue, support, incremental evolution, maintenance). That shoe seems to fit.
Let me explain this a little more in concrete terms: are you passionate about what you do? Do you have pride in your work and want to create great, valuable (to users of course, but also profitable) software? You will probably dislike working at Google.
First, if you’re an engineer, you’re basically not going to be empowered to make important product-level decisions on anything people care about until you’re a well-established L6 or L7. Even then, you’re more of a voice in the room with the Product Managers and Directors/VPs (you might have 5 directors+ VPs who also are on your product) and business stakeholders for the little chunk you’re actually responsible for. Google is extremely hierarchical, not just in terms or a deep org chart but in empowerment, for a variety of reasons I won’t get into. Nobody will listen to you or care until you’re at this point, your ideas and suggestion will be treated like a child at the Thanksgiving kid’s table asking for a glass of wine.
Ok, so become a product manager. Well then you have to deal with the fact that you are amazingly constrained by things outside of your control, like the headcount and capacity of engineering teams who have to handle a bunch of internal migration bullshit, want to refactor or rewrite something for no business reason except because it’s easy coasting material, and handle requests from a dozen other PMs. You have to deal with a ton of bureaucracy and process bullshit just to get your product ideas turned into reality. You have no idea what’s easy and what’s hard because engineering at Google is different than at other companies (the “impossible” is just hard, but the “easy” is also hard). You’re not empowered to step in and code and design even if you can and want to. You are gonna spend a lot of time writing SQL and docs nobody cares about and still need to make it to a high “level” to matter.
Well what happens if you do get to that high level? Then you’re in charge of a million and one things and mostly doing performance management. You don’t have time to care about a product - you are the gatekeeper of it and can have strong opinions, but you simply do not have time to be passionate about it, because you have too many responsibilities and are too far removed from the actual work/product/users. You still have a deep management chain above you to contend with, you play political games for HC and need short term wins to secure it, you’re probably in a different stage of your life where your passion project is either career (not product) and/or family.
It’s still a great place to learn, the pay and benefits are still good, you still probably get to work on something cool. But your ambitions and passion will be crushed unless you can endure a decade+ of being a ~nobody. If you truly want to build something amazing you’ll have to go elsewhere.
Much of what you wrote here seems familiar with those who work for LARGE orgs or companies. The individual simply cannot have much influence when your org is > 10000 people.
I suspect the thing unique to Google is how (or so I hear) the technology stack is more or less a monolith, always designed to scale, and you can't (or are discouraged to) start "small" projects, so you're basically stuck with the huge orgs and don't have a choice to run/join a relatively small and isolated operation where you have more control.
What decline are you talking about? They have hundreds of billions revenue and climbing.
It’s fortunate that they’ve been able to sustain the ad business but the billions they’ve spent developing new products nobody wanted to use had given them the air of decline, our age’s IBM where they have a lot of existing users but few people expect a new success even if the finance guys reliably get fabulous bonuses.
Yes, from an user point of view, Google sucks. But it's making money. Probably it's hard for a company to achieve behemoth status and still do nice things.
The problem isn’t just size but business model: Apple does much better because they have never lost track of the need to have each user actively choose their products. The ad business is different since, say, a Maps user is not who gives Google revenue and that makes it easier not to respect them, with consequences which are not immediately coupled to revenue.
I don't see people commenting on this a lot when they lament the former Google. There seems to be a lot of personal reasons why people prefer how the company used to be run - it was fun, we spent lots of time on side projects, the company had free stuff all over the place, it felt like a fun college and not a job, etc. But little reflection on how productive the company was being.
I do wonder sometimes if a Jobs (or maybe an Altman or Musk) is more valuable than people realize. People like to say, "But those people don't even create anything, they're just taking credit for other people's work!" But just letting smart people gather and work on pet projects doesn't seem to work particularly well either. Maybe having a headstrong product oriented person upstairs is useful/necessary.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/technology/they-promised-...
There are limits to how much tiny teams can do and old Google was pushing those limits too often.
Part of the function of a Jobs type character is to be the defining asshole in the organization that no one has a chance of defeating alone.
It's tempting to blame Sundar for this, but he is the result of this game being setup that way in the first place, and he simply eliminated all possible other contenders, now using the viper pit around him as a moat.
What amazed me was how long it has taken most Googlers to notice that actually their VPs were at war with each other to a ludicrously counterproductive degree, and they were all being used as pawns in this. I heard some stories (and the post linked to here alludes to some) which are just off the charts craziness, and yet many are seemingly oblivious.
Except you don't have to be an asshole to be that person, just in charge.
But to your point you can earn respect without always being an asshole, or being one for no reason at all.
Compare that to just being an asshole in a petty way that doesn't have a positive outcome, and just causes fear or stress in those you interact with.
Is it charisma (whatever that means)? Is it vision? Is it luck and being at the right place at the right time? Is it a few devoted loyal programmers who spread the word about how amazing the Führer is?
I often think it also has to do with the person positioning himself/herself in crowds that appreciate/respect/value him/her. For instance, it's hard to imagine someone like Jobs at an Oracle-style corporation, or imagine Elon Musk running a bank. It seems like these types of people soon understand that certain groups match their "vibe" better, and it works as a positive feedback loop for them.
[0] I've written about this: https://kyefox.com/2022/08/05/learn-to-code-or-dont/
People want to believe in the genius that conquered the world, because it gives them the impression that success is a function of individual agency. It is much less impressive to hear that some world changing product was made by hundreds of engineers who all have been in the industry for decades working late nights on boring engineer stuff. These Jobs like figures are then chosen by the masses, because they are the only ones putting themselves out there and thus receive a disproportionate amount of the credit.
What Jobs did fix (and some claim it was due to getting bitter pills few times before returning to Apple), was to play on the feelings when you buy apple gear. And that you stopped being important the moment you paid, though some support orgs were on life support until income stream became just too stable to worry.
You may want to watch [1] Steve Jobs Insult Response. And you can imagine most people are the guy asking that question.
Yes, but not every CEO is able to give the response he gave. At least, he tried to connect with the developers. When was the last time Google's CEO interacted with devs?
This Q&A is the evidence for why I think many tech people underestimated him, and as you observe such unfiltered Q&As do not occur with other tech CEOs, though he was not CEO at the time. He's not 100% right about how things would go, but he was a lot more right than anyone else proved to be.
Some of his answers to the really tough questions are not stellar, but Apple was in a truly terrible state at the time, and there were not nice answers to give. The fact that he stood there ready to take the hits spoke volumes though.
And if people hate him as an CEO so much, then no other CEO in tech history would get the pass mark.
A subset of people around here don't think that way. Why? I have my own opinion, not very flattering.
By the same logic, our biology must think cancer is pretty valuable because of how many resources it dedicates to feeding cancerous cells. Wealth and value are not correlated.
How is the market saying that the richest man is pretty valuable? Because the richest man owns a significant number of shares in a company the market deems as valuable?
I suppose the todo table could have many columns. What are the great unsolved mysteries or challenges? How useful are they to humanity? How hard are they? What does it cost? How does one sort the rows?
Say each human is assigned a column with the value of the todo item. Most fields would be empty. We would need a column with virtual min-max values.
Then, while expanding the data set, you dump it onto the internet, sit back and eat popcorn for a while?
I mean, isn't that what Bell Labs basically was? Put smart people in a supportive playground and harvest the cream off the top? Lasers, MOSFETs(?), UNIX, C, awk, all those came in one way or another from there.
Methinks Google got too impatient. Something like "hey we launched Google X, build it and the inventions will flow" but the Bell Labs model requires something Google was and is constitutionally incapable of rewarding: iteration, time passing, just plain putting in the boring work, year after year.
Google is forever more in hyper growth mode, like birthing a baby that doubles its size on X months. But an 8 year old is not double the size of a 6 year old like babies do. And same for a 10 year old, you need another 8 years (16 year old) to approximately double the size again, and that process assumes constant focus and maintenance of growth attempts so that the body doesn't have stunted growth.
Google seems to be great at launching new products, then utterly fails to iterate them, because of new shinyism or internal promotion incentives or something. I suspect that bled over into Google Labs / X / other company initiatives.
How do you get this? I don't even know. As far as I can tell, a lot of 20th century Skunk Works and Bell Labs type of stuff was motivated by heavy government investment and individual patriotism in trying to outdo Nazis and Soviets for the sake of free civilization. Bell himself was an interesting case. He only invented the telephone in the first place as part of his research into helping deaf people and he invested most of his riches from the invention back into research for helping deaf people. He rather presciently never even owned a telephone and refused to allow one in his personal workspace because of fear it would distract from the work.
Initiatives like Google Fiber flaming out were certainly not the fault of anyone at the company. Maybe for drastically underestimating the difficulty of the problem. Actually, maybe that’s a reoccurring issue with these moonshots.
At the cultural level, though, during periods like the space race and cold war, there seemed to be a national zeitgeist such that companies, their owners, their directors, were all willing to sacrifice some profit to serve a common national mission. Maybe it was just the fact that the CEOs had grown up in a time when food was rationed and factories were ordered by federal fiat to produce war materiel.
I don't actually think this type of culture is completely dead, for what it's worth. But it's not exactly in vogue. I personally work in defense, I served in the Army, and I make more than enough money but quite a bit less than Netflix likely would have paid me, but I work on products that serve US strategic interests. Entire companies exist explicitly for this purpose, but they're not Google scale and never will be. I don't think very many people on Hacker News would even consider this good, though. Witness the backlash to OpenAI even being willing to work on military applications at all. The readership is so cynical that they can't imagine a military serving any purpose aside from valueless destruction. In the 20th century when militaries saved the world from German and Japanese conquest and mass genocide, that kind of thinking was a lot less prevalent.
I also don't think these are the only two options, either. People can also be motivated purely by the science itself or by the global wellbeing of all mankind. I just don't know that, historically speaking, those bring large-scale resource mobilization to bear quite as well as getting rich and ensuring the continued strategic dominance of a way of life represented by a country of birth you deeply believe in. As people come to believe less and less in their own countries, we seem to be left mostly with getting rich as the only viable option.
The public has had substantial loss of faith in its institutions in the past couple of decades, and the military is not exempt from it. America's foreign policy has come a long way since WWII.
Politics aside, I've also seen cynicism towards Silicon Valley tech from the defense world- USAF vet and commentator Mike Black's vitriolic criticism of Anduril and other defense startups, for instance (e.g. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1575677683211505665.html https://twitter.com/mikeblack114/status/1730453326817276026 https://twitter.com/MikeBlack114/status/1736481633358770353 https://twitter.com/MikeBlack114/status/1741366626006560864). Though that is tangential to your point.
But I don't think all is lost. I'm pretty sure solidly civilian organizations like United States Digital Service and 18F have good reputations, much like the Postal Service does. But all of them receive a pittance of investment compared to defense spending.
Well one component that has changed there is that the marginal tax rate on the inflation-equivalent of a Google Director pay back then was 80-90%, so there wasn't really a point in enticing people with large salaries.
Also, the factory workers you mentioned could afford houses in a big city on a single income. Now a single FAANG eng struggles to do the same unless they get N promotions, and even moreso if you tack childcare costs on top.
Absolutely not: re factory workers affording houses in big city on single income in 1960s.
Was it? A lot of people here think the transistor was one of the most important inventions to come out of Bell Labs. Here's Wiki's description of its creation:
> In 1945, Bell Labs reorganized and created a group specifically to do fundamental research in solid state physics, relating to communications technologies. Creation of the sub-department was authorized by the vice-president for research, Mervin Kelly. An interdisciplinary group, it was co-led by Shockley and Stanley O. Morgan. The new group was soon joined by John Bardeen. Bardeen was a close friend of Brattain's brother Robert, who had introduced John and Walter in the 1930s. They often played bridge and golf together. Bardeen was a quantum physicist, Brattain a gifted experimenter in materials science, and Shockley, the leader of their team, was an expert in solid-state physics.
> According to theories of the time, Shockley's field effect transistor, a cylinder coated thinly with silicon and mounted close to a metal plate, should have worked. He ordered Brattain and Bardeen to find out why it wouldn't. During November and December the two men carried out a variety of experiments, attempting to determine why Shockley's device wouldn't amplify.
It hardly sounds like they just gave a bunch of smart people a playground and told them to have fun. The problem with many historical examples is that people sometimes only pay attention to the fun parts they want to hear (a lot of focus was put on engineers and they were given some leeway) and often ignore the hard work that went into it (a lot of management, structure, and focus). We get left with overly simplistic solutions that sound wonderful, but then fail when people try to implement them.
And growth is not just in physical size but in intelligence. 40 year old me knows a whole lot more even than 20 year old me thought he did.
Sustainability is hard. Would Google still be a favorite if it had never gone beyond a handful of products? Well never know, but has chasing new shiny worked out?
I guess for the billionaires, it has.
In a somewhat-parallel to early Google, it's worth noting that Bell Labs was funded by, and operated in service to, a near-total national-scale monopoly. When that monopoly was deconstructed, it triggered a decline in the output of the research organization as well (there's a clear decline in the ground-breaking output of Bell Labs after the 1984 Ma Bell breakup).
More like Xerox PARC. I wish we could re-create the secret to how productive that engineer playground was. Yes, Xerox HQ (across the country) had little interest in monetizing their output but as an invention factory it was an immense success and we use their ideas every day.
What turned me off tech culture is not just that tech companies became more like banks. It's that there is a monoculture of thought, and highly arrogant thought at that. It's the place where developers are royalty and everyone else is regarded as mouth breathing servants. Of course, most companies, for damn good reason, are not structured with developers running everything, and so you get a constant stream of toxic comments complaining about how every other role at the company is useless and holding back the oh-so-brilliant developers.
That's not diversity, it's not inclusion, and it's not a recipe for actually changing the world for the better.
But the discussion here is around Google's inability to create good products, so I don't think the comparison is apt.
The real innovation at Google is internal and invisible to you -- often secret, maybe kind of boring, but totally transformational. It's infrastructure and its support. And all those moonshot things and stuff were mainly PR, sideshows, and not the primary focus of the company's brains.
And they ke thing is Google doesn't/didn't have to be productive" for these moonshot types of projects. As a % of headcount they are fairly low, even. The real money comes from ads ads ads and always will. The rest (non-ads/non-search) of the company is there to capture SWE headcount from the rest of the industry, not to produce monetary value for Google. The ad revenue firehose is so incredible that it was inevitable it would turn into a swamp of misused potential like you describe.
The real innovation in Google is the stuff that people on this forum don't see. Because it's mostly secret or invisible. It's giant data centres using a pile of custom technology to eek out massive throughput, more fiber and Internet backbone than you can imagine. And the SREs and ops people who keep all this stuff running.
All to keep that firehose running. The rest is all sideshow. I was a SWE at Google, but the real talent there is SRE and infra development.
It’s like an Oil Rich Nation. Pumping oil is the only thing they know. They’ll build shiny cities, crazy buildings, and fund moonshots. But nothing else will compare to the profits of oil/ads, so nothing else can possibly matter.
The only big oil economy that isn’t totally dependent on their energy industry is the US, and only because we had other natural resources that allowed us to diversify early.
To divest Google from ads they need another source of infinite cash. If you can discover that, it’s way more valuable to you on its own instead of within Google. Maybe they can find a few thousand smaller side businesses to supplement revenue, but they’ll always be individually disposable (as we see now) and subject to cancellation.
That said, yes there are a lot of SWEs and projects that are wasting engineering talent.
I’m guessing you were closer to the hardware than me, and also left at least several years ago, but I’m under the impression that the rest of industry has mostly caught up to where Google was in DC tech. They’re still at the tip of the spear with things like ML and unmatched in sheer scale, it’s just that the rest of the world has had a lot of time to play catch up.
(I worked the first couple years in display ads, then some time on Jetstream/Google WiFi then some very brief time in Fiber, then many years in DSPA/Nest, and then for my last year in some Core stuff. So I only got to really use Borg & friends for the first two years and last year of my time there. Left two years ago.)
All the ore reason to mourn as the Bell labs output benefited humanity while the Google innovations are poised to disappear when the company fails.
But also, Transformers were invented at Google, even if they were given away and not commercialized.
I think there was plenty of room for the “old Google” to change the world, if they had not sold out / commercialized. Imagine what 20% time projects could have been created around 2017 with a modest TPU budget per employee?
Elon does the same externally ("visionary") - and I expect internally.
Maybe Jobs' strength was that he had strong visions in multiple areas, and was able to have a few different stacks of people really in line with each and keep them moving separately?
All the researchers at Google still keep their jobs and salaries if their ideas/projects fail. And if they succeed they might get a promotion and a bonus, maybe, and probably only the top people behind the idea/project.
Having great technical talents is not enough to have a great business.
Bell labs, Watson labs, others all had hungry researchers that were passionate about an area of research and simply needed the resources to realize it. That is all, and guess what, they churn out some pretty damn amazing research. Almost like clockwork. Turning that in to an actual product? A product the market wants? That is a whole different can of worms; that doesn’t diminish the research though, and when it’s really done well the research trickles into many products.
A very wise episcopal priest told me once that you should seek discomfort, too much comfort leads to complacency, too much suffering leads to anything that feels like it can end the immediate pain, but just a little discomfort and that’s where you learn, are challenged and grow. I think it is generally true. ESR wrote I the Catherdral and Bizaare that an “itch” is the source of a lot of great software. I’m not disparaging anyone, but you have to wonder when a single “engineer” can earn $120m+ from a company without delivering a product or world changing research. It’s hard to imagine that there is a lot of hunger there, it’s also hard to imagine what some of the really hungry folks that make a lot less than 1% of that think there.
Not saying it can’t be fixed, I expect google to be around and make a lot of money for a long time, but it will be different.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/on...
> And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives.
My theory is A/B testing or other research led then to short term optimization after short term optimization:
- a new design was tested that made ads more like ordinary links - profit increased (I am not saying this was on purpose to trick people, only I think experiments were made and their results guided the design)
- research in some form or another showed that most users reacted positively when search was made less hard core by removing or significantly reducing the effect of search operators like doublequotes
- etc etc
- meanwhile content farms and more legitimate web sites on the other side were also experimenting
- at some points the old engineers started to leave search and indexing and indexing deteriorates
Still everything worked for a while:
- DuckDuckGo were still worse and did all the same things: didn't prioritize results correctly, ignored search operators etc.
- Same goes for Bing until GPT
But at some point Google has optimized its result and its workforce to where we are today:
- results are as bad as the search engines they replaced
- the once clean results have been optimized step by step until most of the page above fold is ads
- search operators are gone
- and meanwhile Kagi and others have snuck up and snatched us that used to tell people to use Google
Google is a sad mess now IMO, but I guess every step on the way to were we are today was a measureable improvement.
But
1. so has their processing power
2. lots of the problem (first page of results filled with ads that looks like content, including spam in the results and not giving us a block option) are not related to scale
3. Smaller (search.marginalia.nu) and larger (kagi.com) competitors keep demonstrating that it is possible to implement doublequotes correctly and not include results I didn't ask for - even in 2024.
There are 2 dimensions in this equations (1) best programmers (2) management.
They might have hired best engineers, but not the best management. Maybe the management ruined them, by putting profits above everything else.
Keep in mind, some of those management/MBA people have tendency to put promotion above anything else.
After a decade or two of trading goodwill for short term gains no one trusts google, and pretty much only use it because they think they have to.
Remember the big fuss about no managers?
>not many amazing new products were happening.
And, one of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards for the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it. And I made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. - Steve Jobs
To me Google is simply a technology company, and are constantly innovating with Technology and looking for uses cases with the new tech they have. Apple, or at least Steve Jobs' Apple because the current Apple is looking more and more like Google. Are a consumer company that identify a problem and work backwards to look for a technology solution.
Unfortunately, it turns out Technology, Business, and Consumer understanding is an extremely rare set of combination.
I remember when I was really young I thought batman (the original series) was an adventure show, but watching years later as an adult... lol, it was a comedy!!
That is, I think folks generally have seen, and commented on, Google's rot for many years now. For me the beginning of the end was in the early 2010s or so, whenever Google drastically reduced the differentiation between ads and organic results, and began loading more and more ads into the top or the results page. I felt it was the first actively user hostile change that was solely in the service of revenue for Google. So I feel it's a tad rich that all these posts are coming out from ex-Googlers lamenting Google's decline now that it's really affecting Google's employees personally. I guess in their defense it seems pretty obvious they wouldn't be posting/commenting while they were currently Googlers, but still, it seems a bit lacking in insight/introspection to see all these posts pointing to the demise of Google's culture as when they had "uncaring" layoffs. I'm thinking, no, Google's demise started a decade-plus ago; they could just paper over it for a long time with good food.
It was February 11, 2011 in Tahrir Square. That, as far as I can tell, was the place and moment where 'tech' changed.
Governments and other organizations were very rudely shaken awake by how 'tech' had just toppled an otherwise stable government at a key choke point of a populous country. How all this newfangled communications tech and silly meme culture came together out of seemingly nowhere and threatened everything.
After Tahrir Square, every government and agency and whatever else saw tech as a very powerful and possibly threatening 'thing'. And they slowly but surely managed to change 'tech', work with it, get hired in it buy it off, and make it and themselves more to their liking and plans. The adolescence was over.
Tahrir Square was when the suits woke up and then went to work in 'tech' because everyone could see that was the future.
Big Tech in a nutshell
So maybe people should look for a different "smart" way of describing craziness. Or, if you want to use psychiatric terms, subclinic antisocial persobality disorder is most closely related to business success, as far as I know.
Basically anyone with some personality trait that I don't agree with is now a "psychotic".
At least under capitalism, the decentralized free market eventually erodes the ability of a corporation run by psychopaths to continue to operate, if not as fast as we might like.
Government official roles likely tend to attract those types too, although I don’t think the president of Portugal or any nordic country are more of a psychopath than the past presidents of the USA for instance (like, all of them) “because socialism hurr durr”
Works across many levels, not just higher up management.
This seems to be the real challenge that I haven’t seen any company founder overcome. How do you keep these types of people out? It’s like one gets in, then they let all their friends in, then they overtake the company.
The tech company offices I visited in 2010 were full of nerds—people who rode unicycles, juggled, and learned Haskell for fun. 14 years later, these same tech companies (some which I worked at) are full of investment banking types. They care nothing about the tech itself; it’s simply a means to an end.
Knowing code is the new knowing how to read and write, we should be less tolerant of “non-technical”, “in English, doc!” type people in positions of power in tech companies.
Again, it may be more simple than we imagine :)
Conversely, I’ve worked with very passionate technical people that seemingly couldn’t care less about their share value or even core business metrics (which is ok as long as there’s somebody around that can reel them in if they go off on a tangent and they let them), but just don’t like writing code.
I don’t think there’s a simple, non-gameable heuristic for determining whether somebody is intrinsically or extrinsically interested in the tech part of a tech company, or even the company’s core product.
This is a problem when the decision-maker doesn't act on advice from staff or is incapable of understanding the advice. Now give that leader an ego and abandon all hope.
There are many rungs to fall below "competent, but not passionate". In fact, I think I prefer my leaders to be dispassionate and competent.
I've seen PM's and PO's that claim 1-5 years experience as developers who are shite because they're not very technical.
The underlying issue is that these positions should be filled by senior developers but instead they became their own career track.
Case in point: the Hacktoberfest fiasco.
Thanks for sharing, really insightful.
It's not necessarily a bad thing to structure your career around financial success, but I met many people like her who were attempting to get jobs at Google or Amazon just to cash in as much as they could for a few years, then bounce. At some point your company is bound to become filled with people like this.
Once a company is overwhelmingly infested with folks who are cashing-in-till-they-bounce, should you stick around anyway, even though that'll hurt your career?
There's an outdated saying that goes, "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"
If Google was hiring only the best and brightest, surely they could have come up with something in 25 years besides ads that made money and could stand on its own two feet. Instead, there is:
- Youtube (unprofitable 18 years running)
- Android (dead in the water w/o Samsung)
- Google Cloud Platform
- Google Workspace
- hundreds of smaller projects that were sunset
For all the non-Ads people lamenting the end of the good ol' days, has there been any reflection from them on the fact that all the cool projects they worked on weren't profitable at all?
I know the US is skewed towards iOS, but Android is the #1 mobile OS, presumably due to cheap devices.
Is there a stat showing Samsung is largest manufacturer? I found this, but company market cap != number of devices obviously
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/16-biggest-smartphone-compani...
It looks like there are 20+ manufacturers in the Open Handset Alliance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Handset_Alliance
Samsung makes screens, SOCs, storage and memory. They put Android into every conceivable form factor and distributed them in every country on earth at every price point. That is why Android suceeded.
Google's original Android partners were HTC and Motorola, neither of whom ever had the scale to compete with Apple. Google even acquired Motorola, but spun it off as they had no idea how to run a phone business.
Would very much like even a fraction of these Google eulogies to have a retrospective on the fall of HTC.
As an independent OEM, they were selected by Google to build the G1, the first Android phone. But the touch smartphone market at the time was only in the millions. That's the scale HTC could handle.
When the market started exploding in 2010 onwards, HTC couldn't scale up, so Samsung, LG and Huawei took advantage.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-overtakes-samsung-t...
(… at least until they get shut down for not being as successful as ads)
Not only were they not profitable they wouldn't even get funded if not for the money printer of Ads business.
Nothing apart from search, ads, maps, Gmail, Chrome and Android was a huge success. They essentially created their own monocultural ecosystem.
Most of everything else was a short-lived fad. Plus, Wave, Reader, Chat and Glass, to mention a few.
There's value in scale. The YouTube founders themselves said they couldn't have grown YouTube without help from Google infrastructure and other business functions. In the mid-00s people were just figuring out how to run an Internet business with billions of daily users; this is a service now externalized through Cloud providers (including Google), but back then "not falling over when you got Slashdotted" was a key competency that Google had but many of the thousands of other Internet startups did not.
Isn't that a selling point of Apple ecosystem as well? Everything just works
It also was allegedly a "special" place, where you had autonomy as an engineer, yada yada. From what I hear about openai, that doesn't really apply there. Are there any small-but-large-ish companies (100-1k employees) out there today that have a culture similar to the early google?
Eric Schmidt (Former CEO of Google) discusses it here: https://youtu.be/hcRxFRgNpns?t=2154
Outside the bubble of openai workers, openai is not seen as a particularily great place to be at. Even here on HN that company is increasingly dreaded. Their CEO promotes theft and the workers cheer. If anything, openai is the very opposite of what google was.
Inference is where things get more muddled. If I download a pirated copy of La La Land, that's illegal. However, if I watch it and then explain the plot of the movie to you in detail, that's fair use. It remains an open question whether or not inference via an LLM represents fair use or not.
> The Second Circuit Court of Appeal upheld the District Court's summary judgement in October 2015, ruling Google's "project provides a public service without violating intellectual property law." The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently denied a petition to hear the case.
Actually assessing it is hard and costly, so it gets outsourced.
Everyone seems to conveniently ignore regression to the mean when it comes to the lionized companies because that would break their mental model, and potentially their end goal.
Firstly they were allergic to design and marketers. The whole data driven approach yielded interfaces that were gawky but highly functional, the extreme opposite of today. The iPhone caused them to throw the baby out with the bathwater on that.
More controversially Facebook broke the old SV salary cap agreement, and with that came floods of people that should have tormented Wall St who all landed in tech instead. That agreement was bad but the absolute avarice among modern tech people is stunningly depressing for those of us that have been around to see the change.
Google mainly remind me of SGI, and it is their office after all.
Hmm, would these people have inflicted more or less damage on society if they had worked for Wall Street firms?
And 1000's of non Google and Meta employees have benefitted from this, so I say this is good.
The argument may be that this invited the wrong type of people to VC. I would say, They were already there, just not as obvious.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeremyallison_wither-google-f...
Wither Google ?
FYI. This is my recollection of events, but it's been twenty or so years now, so if my memory is fuzzy on the details, please forgive the ramblings of an old engineer :-).
Many years ago, I was working at SGI when the company started to do poorly under the leadership of Rick Belluzzo. In those days the company sponsored the Friday afternoon "beer-bust", when all the employees hung out on what is now the Google volleyball court, drank beer and socialized. Rick cancelled the beer busts as a cost cutting measure.
One of SGI's lead engineers, Casey Leedom (known internally as Mr. IRIX, for SGI's version of UNIX - a codebase he knew inside-out) took it upon himself to self-organize replacement beer-busts with the rest of the engineering staff. We all chipped in to buy the beer, and the Friday afternoon festivities continued as normal.
Rick Belluzzo heard about this, and embarrassed, called Casey into a meeting. "Things aren't that bad", he told Casey. "We can fund the beer-busts again". "No", said Casey. "We know the company is having some hard times, and we're all in this together, so the engineering staff are happy to continue to self-fund the beer-busts".
"There is one thing you could do", Casey added. "I know you are a busy man, but if you could take it upon yourself to occasionally attend a beer-bust, it would be much appreciated by the employees".
"Great idea !", said Rick, and promised to do so. Six or so months later, Rick Belluzzo ran away from SGI over a weekend, and on Monday it was announced that Microsoft had a new VP. "We appear to have lost our CEO" was the email announcement from now acting CEO Bob Bishop.
In the time since Casey asked him to the time he joined Microsoft, Rick attended zero self-sponsored beer busts at SGI.
For some reason I can't see Sundar attending any self-sponsored Google beer-busts either.
I don't see any good reason to stick to Chrome for these. I've been using them without issue via Firefox for years. I used to see warnings on some of those products that "<X> works best with Google Chrome" when using Firefox but those have all disappeared now and even when they did have those warnings I don't remember experiencing any major issues.
Sometimes I find that Dev tools works a bit better on chrome, so I use that for a while. But not consistently.
If so I will be very excited since I want off of Chrome but for work it was broken last time I check and that was like early December.
Can't say I've tried.
> Also google meet no longer randomly fail to load?
Definitely no problems.
Yep, me too. A conscious decision on my part. I run Firefox Developer Edition, though (which is essentially Firefox Beta). It has a comfortable freshness somewhere between stable and nightly.
This is accomplished both by how integratred it is with Google Search, but also by making competing technologies awkward or impossible to use, like bookmarks and RSS feeds, which used to be relatively big back in the day.
But they crashed hard. Almost as soon as I started college, they began the quick descent into evilness (about the time Pichai became CEO).
They're irredeemable at this point, and the only solution left is a breakup or a massive amount of regulation. Still, I think Google is unique among the tech giants because they really were a force for good at one point. That's why I hate them the least, even though they're probably at #2 or #3 in the evil leaderboard.
Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the fact that nerds still use that metaphor surprises me)
Dinosaurs were doing great. They also were not slow or stumbling. They occupied every niche on the planet. The main reason most of them went extinct was a massive asteroid triggering the K–Pg extinction event (and even then birds are still around and doing just fine, thank you). That asteroid's impact resulted in really unusual circumstances where Earth was barely livable for a long period of time because the sky was globally blackened for years and all large plants died. Mammals being already small and nocturnal is what gave them an edge during this evolutionary "funnel" (and presumably the ancestors of modern birds had similar features).
If Big Tech really are metaphorically comparable to the big dinosaurs, then I don't want to think about what it would take for them to go down.
(this is not a defense of Big Tech, btw)
In an absolute sense, probably nothing can, short of society ending cataclysm.
In a shareholder sense, I think we're seeing it happen right now.
As user, I'm pretty ok with Google.
Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day.
Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone. You don't see Google doing business with a company like Cambridge Analytica. They disclose their sub processors, and it's a small list.
Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough. Calendar added scheduling and it works. Gmeet works well enough. Gmail and gmaps remain the gold standards. I recently tried Zoho and it was packed with features but not materials more than Google. Office365 still isn't cloud native and nobody shares online links to office docs, calendar, etc. My wife and I created our holiday card as a Google slide show and 100+ friends replied how much they loved it. Google photos is amazing btw and while there's a few usability gaps at scale, they've continued to close them. The printed photo books are easy to create, very reasonably priced and people love them.
The infrastructure apps kinda just work. Contacts mostly solved scaling, dedup, etc and the integration is awesome. Drive and storage just work. Etc.
Google takes overall Internet security a lot more seriously than its peers and continues to innovate. I trust them a lot more than Apple with their constant stream of zero-day, zero-click iMessage holes. And of course more than Microsoft. Google Oauth won on merit: you can still login with Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub etc but Google is far more popular.
Google contributes more to open source than anybody and especially Apple and Microsoft. Chromium and Android alone blow everyone else out of the water.
Google Cloud remains the easiest to use among the big 3 by a wide margin and it's a joy to use. Take Compute Engine: you spec an instance by its class and capabilities vs reading an AWS eye chart and giving up and going to vantage.sh. when you spin up an instance it already comes with your ssh credentials, no fussing with pem files. The console UI is pretty simple, especially for the number of features.
As employee, Google remains an awesome place to build your career and less scary than other large companies like Microsoft (stack ranking), Oracle (cutting the bottom x%), etc. You could be born in a small village, prove your talent and completely change the lives of your extended family. I know many ex-googlers and can't think of any that regret the choice. As ex-googler, the xoogler.co community is among the strongest alumni groups. There's even a well funded startup trying to provide community management for other organizations (and I'm a #proudinvestor).
As a shareholder, I'm doing fine and when things look bad, I remember that Microsoft looked bad in 1995 when threatened by anti-trust and the Internet. Meanwhile, vGoogle owns Waymo, which seems to be doing self driving right and has zero competitors and not for lack of trying. The value of Waymo alone justifies a big jump in Google's stock price.
Ok enough, have at it. I'm ready. :-)
What you're describing is security, not privacy. Privacy is not determined by how far the data is shared. If Google respected privacy, they would not collect most of the information that they do in the first place.
This may have been true in 2009. It is no longer true in 2024.
Search deterioration has a much longer history than ChatGPT, but nice try. Search is an arms race against a functionally infinite tidal wave of spam, much of which is overwhelming websites beyond Google's control that historically populated Google's top search results. Epistemology is hard, the threshold for financially profitable spam is low, and the cost of sophisticated spam is getting exponentially smaller. And the long-term market solution might be someone like OpenAI thoroughly leap-frogging Google's capabilities. This is a bigger risk than you're making it out to be.
As far as privacy... Google makes an attempt to follow applicable laws, and in many cases succeeds, but it still ends up constantly trolled by regulators for money or clout. Even setting aside fines-as-taxes and legislative opprobrium, I still don't think "our panopticon strips you of way less dignity than our competitor's" is something to brag about. If you believe the nature and incentive structure of the panopticon is diabolical, businesses that function as panopticons are fundamentally untrustworthy. It doesn't stop me from using Google products and services, but in a "least bad" sense - I'm happy to switch search, email, phone OS, whatever, provided someone can make a more compelling product. I think a lot of people feel similarly.
I could argue that Google's open source contributions are largely market suppression tactics to keep the web innovating in a direction that protect's Google's core revenue. This isn't comprehensively a bad thing, as technologies like Chromium and Android are useful. But "our OSS suppresses markets more effectively than our competitors" isn't something to brag about, and combined with those regulatory trolls above, I see this as a big risk factor.
All else aside, Google (and for that matter, most of Big Tech) fundamentally relies on massive volumes of hardware manufactured in Taiwan. This isn't even a black swan, it's a sword of Damocles over the entire industry.
[0] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
Should the worst happen. But I'm optimistic that humanity won't let things get this bad.
https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-fertilization...
Just think where all the new CO2 is coming from.
And where it goes after a plant captures the carbon.
Now read the original comment again. Did you notice the problem?
That wiki page is surprisingly unhelpful. The O2 on the atmosphere mostly doesn't come or go anywhere, but on geological timescales it is mostly created from water and absorbed by rocks. The phenomenon that entire page is about stopped billions of years ago.
Or everything goes to hell in a handbasket and earth looks like mars in a few thousand years. Who knows.
As for what will take them down - all large institutions are failing right now. The public education system. The health care system. The government. The mass media. The immigration system, and general idea of national borders. The zoning / building code / housing system. Childcare. Wouldn't surprise me if we see the financial system, currency, and military go down next. The trigger is part climate change, part demographics, part COVID, and part the loss of trust triggered by the Internet and Big Tech, but all of these are fundamental shifts in the foundations of our society that make our society no longer adapted to the ecological niche it grew up in.
Falling? When was the last time in a developed country when an educational system/heathcare failed as a system? Or the government (other than in Argentina), or Military? As for the concept of borders? No, that is not failing either, it's just people in some countries today became convinced it is not worth to use deadly force to defend borders. See for example Sweden, or France for where this path leads to. It is not a pretty picture, but it is very far from "systems failing". As for reasons, why these systems are under pressure I can definitely agree on demographics, but climate change affecting our education/healthcare systems? No way.
Periods of boom and bust are a feature of our financial system, I'm not seeing anything unusual. Currencies fail too due to mismanagement. But extrapolating this into some sort of overall systemic failure of everything caused by climate change no less is not rational.
On the global scale the biggest challenge in today's world is the growing power of authoritarian nations hell bent on global domination and continued enfeeblement(deindustrialisation, increased corruption, disregard for the rule of law) of the free world. Then demographics, then very far in the distance climate change.
As for biggest challenges: You _massively_ underestimate climate change, and the way it is entangled with everything else. There have always been authoritarian nations. The so called free world does not seem notably more corrupt than it was 50 years ago, it is in many ways freer than it has ever been (see the annoyance and backlash of those that don't think the freedom should extend to such things as chosing your gender), and it's economic power remains unmatched for now.
But: We already live in a changed climate. This means we no longer speculate about the damages climate change will do, we can measure them in macroeconomic data already [1]. This was a huge surprise to ke. I would have expected economic systems to be much more resilient to the warming already seen.
We are facing a situation where the world's poorest are experiencing reduced growth (meaning not fewer corporate profits, but people fleeing hunger and destitution), while we are all dealing with a massively increased number of extreme events (which _will_ stress institutions not adapted to the new normal, possibly to the breaking point), while we also have to transform or economic systems towards carbon neutrality to prevent even more catastrophic impacts.
This is fertile ground for authoritarians, democratic backsliding, loss of liberties and institutional failure.
[1] e.g.: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-00985-5
We had a decade+ of boom boom boom and the moment the economy dips for a couple years, people start freaking out. Some years, things are more expensive and life is harder. Some years, it's easier. That's life. And that's the economy.
I think mixing France and Sweden on this point makes no sense. France made a deliberate attempt to attract as many refugees (and, at the same time, non-refugee immigrants) as possible in a very short period of time; they understood where it leads to and backpedaled on too open policies but things want a bit too far and they need to deal with the consequences, mainly criminal gang bombings.
As for France, the situation is dramatically different. You have several generations of immigrants already, some feeling more French than the French if I may use this expression. This population is very heterogeneous but suffice it to say than when ISIS planned Bataclan attacks, they had to recruit people in Belgium. Also, the countries of origins for immigrants in both cases are very different and in the case of France related to the history of the country, the Algerian War etc.
So, if you wanted to lump the two together, it would be proper to say "Sweden and Merkel's Germany" (because today's Germany is quite different, too).
Are you saying that Latin is something that is useful to everyday life and because we don't teach it to our children we're depriving them of this wonderous tool?
I personally do not know Latin, but I have never run into a situation where I needed to know it.
And to analyze the idea that, "Well, it's not Latin in specific, but that we are not teaching our children to think for themselves", this too has been bayed about for the last forever, Plato complained that "children today are not learning the things that they should"
I don't know which pedagogy is the "correct" one, stuff children with, seemingly, random knowledge and watch them "blossom" or to stuff them with narrowly focused learning so that they will flourish at whatever work they are funneled into.
But I do know that teaching a dead language isn't the bellwether you think it is, unless you're trying to start a jobs program for all those unemployeed Latin tutors.
> Plato complained that "children today are not learning the things that they should"
Where does he say this? This seems an incredibly uncharacteristic sentiment coming from Plato. If nothing else because his mentor Socrates was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth, and almost all extant writing from Plato deals with Socrates' legacy. When Socratres isn't harassing rulers and generals, he's typically portrayed hanging out with the youth in Plato's writing.
Closest thing I'm aware is a section of The Republic. The section, a hypothetical aside really, deals with the horrors of Athenian democracy (the same that killed Socrates), where fathers fear their sons and children are said to think themselves equals to their parents.
I am referencing a Guardian article that I read nearly a decade ago[0] but he wasn't the only one to have bemoaned the "youth".
With Socrates, him being sentenced to death while for "corrupting the youth" that's a pretty naive, and incomplete, explanation, if you were to dig a little deeper you'll find that the, probably, true reasons for Socrates' trial was political[1]. You forget that the "corruption of the youth" was bound with the accusation that Socrates was denying the gods and introducing new gods[2], not, as you imply, that he was a champion of the youths themselves. For me it's difficult to take everything we know about Socrates as true given the posthumous glow up that Plato gives us. This is partly Socrates' own fault for his, as we're told, ideas that writing things down would lead to forgetfulness. Ironic honestly.
I am tempted to discuss further about Socrates' trial, how most thought that he was going to going to get off due to his ability in rhetoric and hi, basically, not defending himself was pretty shocking in and of itself.
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/education/2009/mar/17/ephebiphob.... [1]https://www.mcgill.ca/classics/files/classics/2006-7-03.pdf [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates
I'm omitting the other charge, because I'm focusing on the charge of corrupting the youth, and the fact that he (according to Plato) associated with the youth much more frequently than he did with the adults. The youths of Athens make appearances in almost every platonic dialogue, and they're almost always shown in a neutral to positive light (unlike the leaders, generals, politicians, poets, etc.) He's portrayed as the opposite of a stodgy old man opposed to new ideas; if any thing he's spearheading an ideological assault on the status quo of Athens!
ok ok flippant but maybe not entirely flippant... I'm used to conceiving of fitness as in fitness for a niche. But I hadn't grasped the idea of "meta-fitness" being the ability to adapt to a highly dynamic niche. there must be a term in evolutionary theory for this.
Conspiracy theory: Birds are not real, they're actually dinosaurs.
From an anthropocentric point of view, though, they seem very dead end. Despite bipedalism and possible warm bloodedness sometimes, they would never use tools. Down so many taxonomic branches, their arms would shrink away and their jaws become enormous. Nothing to motivate any of those lizards to get big brains -- something anthropos value highly :)
Another Trump presidency.
The point being inflection points mathematically speaking don't usually imply a peak, rather a change in concavity (which might still be increasing).
It would be better for people to say something like "...it feels like we reached a high water mark..." to stress they worry about a certain maxima being hit.
The inability to avert or survive through an extinction level event literally proves that they are an evolutionary dead end. Extinction level events are inevitable. Humanity has the potential to deflect or destroy such asteroids (and other such events), thus we have the potential to not be an evolutionary dead end.
1. it's not goopy, bubbling tar in giant cavernous pools 2. it's not dinosaurs, at least in the sense being discussed here
Humans can deflect asteroids, so we've (probably) dodged that extinction, but that doesn't mean we're immune to others.
At this point, there is no conceivable extinction level event humanity couldn't avoid or avert, in principle, given sufficient time/warning, except the heat death of the universe.
So I disagree that there's no point in talking about survivability in the abstract. You can roughly project the growth of a species' capabilities through time, and the trajectory the dinosaurs were on clearly entails they were heading towards extinction due to an inevitable run in with a supervolcano or an asteroid. Humanity's trajectory is conceivably very different due to science and our ability to construct sophisticated tools.
> The dinosaurs as a whole survived hundreds of millions of years, through many extinctions
I'll also note that this is a slightly unfair comparison because "dinosaurs" is a category consisting of many species, where the comparison here is against the one homo sapiens species. Many dinosaur species went extinct through those events you mention, some survived.
Um, how would humanity deal with a supernova going off within a few light years? I am still not convinced it will deal with climate change until billions die.
Enclosed surface habitats, subterranean habitats, generation ships to spread humanity across numerous solar systems, and so on. All of this tech seems achievable within the next 2 generations.
...Antitrusteroid, the extinction event that transformed the thriving tech behemoths into Standard Oil.
Of course that isn't what happened to the car companies, or the newspapers, or most once large sectors, and I do actually think that the same gradual, rather than abrupt, decay will happen to these big tech companies. In fact we see it already. I strongly believe there's a Hayflick limit to companies; even GE couldn't fight it indefinitely.
Also I disagree with "Dinosaurs ... occupied every [animal] niche on the planet." Don't forget arthropoda or the variety in the sea. But maybe that's just a quibble.
Also even then a lot of those comments still miss why I take issue with the "evolutionary dead end" implication, which is that it is presented as evolutionary survivors somehow being inherently better compared to what went extinct. Evolutionary dead ends do exist, but in reality extinction often comes down to (un)lucky circumstances.
> But maybe that's just a quibble.
Heh, maybe, but the quibble is valid. Quibbling over such details is practically how paleonerds show affection, right?
Yes, it a misunderstanding of evolutio, ascribing some sort of teleology on a inherent process as purposeful as multiplication.
This scenario is not new. It is one that has been repeated over and over again --- not just in the history of business but in the history of humanity.
I'm not the only one who saw the big flashing warning signs at the start of the Big Tech/social media era. The distressing and frustrating part is the fact that so many others didn't.
I watched as even my own family ignored my warnings and succumbed to the allure and promise of "free service" without really questioning why or how it was possible.
Some yearning deep inside the human psyche drives people to just "believe" in the impossible without questioning. Those who recognize and tap into this typically don't have altruism as their objective.
"Don't be evil" was really just a diversion --- a seductive marketing ploy that soon vanished --- to the surprise of few even though some holdouts still refuse to accept it out of fear for what it implies about themselves.
I don't buy this. I believe that "Don't be evil" was a genuine desire, but it characterized a contrarian position designed to stand in opposition to traditional corporate culture.
The correct lesson, IMO, is that you cannot ever grow to be a corporation remotely the size that google is and fight that traditional corporate culture successfully. Larry & Sergey were just incredibly naive about this, that's all.
If you want to "not be evil", you must be prepared to remain small, and probably niche. That doesn't mean you're unimportant, but you're definitely not Google as we know it today.
Uh, about that…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
Microsoft were never the good guys, not in the 80s, not in the 90s, not ever.
You are free to believe as you choose.
I believe they were fully aware of the nature of their work and who was funding it before the company was ever formed. And they worked to counter any realistic public perception of it.
Email conversations in 2012 between the NSA chief and Google executives, including Brin, were uncovered, inviting the Google heads to a classified threat briefing.
https://www.grunge.com/640181/the-shady-history-behind-googl...
Google was founded in 1998. 2012 is 14 years later. I'm fine with the argument that they had already abandoned "Don't be Evil" by that point in time.
I'll assume you just skipped over the part in the reference where their graduate research done in the 1990s that went into Google was funded by the CIA and NSA.
They knew what they were doing and who they were doing it with all along. Suggesting otherwise defies rationality.
I feel fairly confident in saying that even though the facts of the MDDS grant that was helping to fund Page & Brin's graduate student research are clear, I do not believe that the involvement of the US military and intelligence services would have been particularly obvious and/or significant in their minds.
Saying "They knew what they were doing and who they were doing it with all along" defies everything I knew about university CS graduate student research. I knew several UW graduate students (including one of my best friends) who were recipients of grant money that originated with the military/intelligence services; they were highly buffered from donor contacts and even donor requirements while working on their research. Most of them would joke to the effect of "our grant donor(s) would have a fit if they knew what we are actually working on", and would often have to struggle to explain how their research fit into the ostensible goals of the donor. I've also known many graduate students over the years for whom, especially in the early phases of their PhD research, it wasn't even clear to them precisely what they were doing, let alone "for whom".
Sergey Brin dropped out of the doctorate program at Stanford in 1995 to spend more time working on his search engine. He and Page founded Goggle a few years later. Their and their company's close relationship with 3 letter agencies is well documented.
Draw your own conclusions but to claim he didn't know what he was doing defies credibility IMO.
My own analysis and that of others would note that MDDS was not in fact interested in a web search engine - they were interested in ways to identify individuals online.
Google's services did indeed provide this, but not at the beginning - that had to wait for as much as 14 years later, and came about through google becoming the utterly dominant search engine. But that wasn't part of Brin's research, and I'm not sure that he & Page even recognized at the outset what "the set of things searched for by someone" would even mean. In fact, I see no evidence that the intelligence or law enforcement agencies saw that either, certainly not in 1995, when frankly the web was the domain of a bunch of tech first-adopters and appeared quite unlikely to become the platform it was by, say, 2012. Very, very few people saw the potential of the web in 1995, and the idea that intelligence agencies had people far out ahead of CS (and physics!) departments is laughable to me.
I was also the #2 employee at amzn, and the amount of crap I read where people speculate about what was being said, thought and done at that company during its earliest days is laughable. I have no doubt in my mind that early google is similarly serendipitous: a hacker/grad student project, partially funded by MDDS, that mushroomed into initially an insanely powerful tool for web users and because of this then became a system of intense interest to intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
The giants of today weren’t particularly giant back then, but we famously had the balmer era, Cisco’s decline, and Yahoo’s slow death.
Presuming that interest rates stay high, it will be difficult to justify speculative bets in tech. Even SaaS models may see investors discount future cash flow potential. This means investors will look for higher payouts from existing firms, and underinvest in new firms - a few new firms will have special privileges due to who invested in them and what they do.
I really wouldn't recommend looking to LLMs to evaluate truthfulness, they aren't built for that and have no way of knowing what true is.
They're much better as a tool for summarizing information, with the usual caveat that any summary is incomplete and can only be as truthful as the original source(s) used.
On the other hand asking it the population of Azerbaijan is problematic. I'd have to Google whatever it told me.
A confidence level could be helpful to know how much competing data was considered by the LLM when predicting each word, but it would say nothing of truthfulness or even accuracy relative to the original training data.
Search costs nothing to run relative to ad revenue. Microsoft makes each query require 100x the cpu usage because users expect an LLM answer for results.
Microsoft’s share of search goes from 1% to 5%. Their cost go up but their sale of ads increases and they get valuable IP.
Google loses 5% share of market but its costs go up 100x.
Google can no longer finance its other bets like Cloud so effectively.
Microsoft meanwhile has a more compelling cloud offering.
Google starts to lose more ground on Cloud.
Amazon (not an AI company) lose ground to both.
Classic Art of War, if your opponent is strong, attack somewhere they are weak.
However, they will force Google's hand into moving their whole search load over to LLM to avoid loosing market share to Bing. This will cost Google a lot more as search is a much bigger part of their business.
It's an interesting theory but I wouldn't know enough to evaluate how likely it is.
AI has many other profitable uses for Microsoft but specifically using it to compete with Google Search seems like a poison pill.
> But those Ten Blue Links surfaced by the PageRank-that-was had a special magic. I found them intensely human, a reflection of the voices populating what remains of the Web, the only platform without a vendor. This was true when I was there and I said so, but was laughed at.
Ten blue links are great on desktop, not so great on mobile, where websites take longer to load and the cookie banner takes up half the page. There's a reason that kids use TikTok as search engine on mobile.
Search engines should work completely different on desktop and mobile. Give me ten blue links on desktop, give me an AI generated answer on mobile. This might be true for other websites as well. Maybe responsive design was a mistake.
That's because kids are dumb and have no attention span to read anything.
Source: I am from the same generation you talk of.
Attention span is a separate issue. I lack the attention span to watch a short youtube video, but I can easily read long essays.
Granted, reading PDFs is harder. But reading webpages is mostly fine.
When I started using phones, I didn't have the luxury of high speed internet and multimedia-focused apps. I should probably be thankful for that.
Capitalism will start to really work its magic when Google’s operating profit and stock price start falling and all their best developers jump ship to better companies (this part has already started). Then they will fully follow the model trailblazed by such erstwhile innovators as Polaroid, Kodak, and Xerox.
Couldn't agree more, and the ironic thing about this phrase is that it's really more reminiscent of the pre-depression era of robber barons, price fixing, no workers rights, Panic of 18XX where companies really got too powerful and ran wild because there wasn't enough regulation yet
That's why they liked google.
If they're working at a company and they're just watching it drift to the mean, we can safely conclude that they're in it for the money. Nothing wrong with that, but let us not get distracted by razzle-dazzle on the side. People work because they get paid.
Google was - still is - a lot more responsible than most companies with that responsibility. But the risks are high and obvious. How good are these people at assessing this "plus"? I'd rather just be in it for the money if I were involved in Google. Being in it for the money is a respectable thing.
It's more "pays the bills plus doesn't consider you merely a cost center", "pays the bills plus lets you try weird stuff of your interest with ~unlimited infrastructure at your disposal". _That_ was the appeal of Google. Not anymore.
On the other hand, the advertising machine (however you want to characterize it) is still alive and kicking, so that part isn't gone.
No. We were losing all our staff to Facebook and embarking on Google Plus, giving ourselves bonuses for 'success' in social. The last major successful google products had already stopped being produced (last one was android, which deliberately siloed itself off from the rest of the company). Wave team negotiated a huge bonus with no success criteria and then left the company. We threw serverless away because the App Engine team didn’t feel like doing their jobs. It was fucked by then too. Maybe everyone else just didn’t know it.
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-o...
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-t...
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-more-a...
Oh yeah. I did do some work, too.
Really??? Bezos only left the CEO role in 2021. I've already seen tons of posts and commentary talking about how "It's well into Day 2 and beyond at Amazon", and the founder has only been out of his post for not even 3 years.
Perhaps in plain years he kept things going longer than at Google, but that's just because he held the reins more directly.
Fair point. It is ultimately CEO's responsibility to shape a company's culture, as culture is really just "who gets rewarded and who gets punished". After a CEO steps down, it will be hard to uphold the same standards, for good or for bad, at the highest level.
Reading this it wasn't clear if this was a recent inside view, at outside view, or a historical inside view.
Other companies that are highly corporate, and have never tried not to be (or at least in 20+ years), are not having an identity crisis -- Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft.
This is my approach. I used to really like google products. Not I keep chrome to run the google products I haven’t gotten rid of yet.
How many people do you genuinely know who are actual well.. engineers or at least creative minded?
90% of the people I meet these days (I’m in Bay Area) who work in tech just want to get these companies on their resume. People whose bio is basically I’m ex meta ex Amazon ex google.
When most of your employees are only in it for the money and prestige, and nothing more, imo this dullness and stagnation is what you get.
It’s quite toxic.. a culture focused on TC instead of creativity and earnest. Just people chasing a check for the sake of it.
Compare that to the innovations that came out of these companies prior to the mid 2010s. Everything “cool” since then has just been to support their massive scale and not really to promote new and interesting things.
Just my opinion.
> You Either Die a Hero or Live Long Enough to See Yourself Become the Villain
I dislike that term, but do think post-war optimization of management and finance have built toward… something, which we are now in, which is different from how things were earlier in this process (50s, 60s, at least part of the 70s) and certainly different from pre-war American capitalism.
Calling it “late” seems silly though.
Stay tuned. One of them will be first published in a few months here.
Blaming “late capitalism” for google’s institutional problems provides absolutely zero insight. Rapidly growing orgs have turned rotten since ancient times. OP’s other comments on institutional dysfunction are more informative and it made this well worth the read.
Sorry for your loss OP, it sounds like google was once a great place and I hope you find something like it again <3
The executives including the CEO are also way overpaid.
My suggestion:
anybody who wants to be a decision maker (executives, CEO, middle management) need to do actual technical work on a continuous basis otherwise they're more of a liability with their out-of-date knowledge than an asset
If you're interested in contributing opening hours data, but learning OSM's quirks sounds too hard, try https://streetcomplete.app (for Android and soon maybe iOS).
Of course, if Google decided to fight it as a copyright issue you’d still probably be screwed, even if you were in the right.
have you enabled manual uploading (that needs to be done in settings and warns about need for triggering regular uploads)?
or have you edited just before and after air travel, and enabled plane mode before changes had chance to upload?
As an avid OpenStreetMapper I’m sorry you’ve been shouted at for something that is „not recommended“, but not really a big issue. This should not happen in our community! At most someone should have told you to try to avoid large bounding boxes as it is much easier to review geographically small changesets.
Sometimes large ones happen, especially if StreetComplete is set up this way, as matkoniecz mentions in another comment.
It's really the kind of thing that municipal and state governments should come together on and build common protocols so when Google is inevitably forced to break up we can take the pieces of Maps and make it less of a lever for monopoly power.
I don't know how much of it is a perspective thing but it's probably a decent amount.
You make it sound like having actually worked there, and knowing how Google was, versus what it is now, is a bad thing, that somehow "taints" your critique.
It's, on the contrary, one of the most important prerequisites to be able to evaluate current Google.
Is 2024 Google better than 2010 Google? How about 2001 Google?
“When I was a boy of 18, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 30, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in just twelve years.” *
There is real change, and having experienced its evolution first hand – the stumbling path, wrong turns, compromises and victories – does have value. Beyond merely acknowledging the distance between {start, end} states.
One of my regrets is I didn't query my grandparents more about their pre-WW2 and WW2 experience while they were still around. The way societies (and companies) breathe and evolve is hard to reconstruct from just books and official records & ex-post propaganda. Our lives are too short to internalize multi-decade patterns.
* Ages adjusted from 14 and 21 respectively, to account for maturity inflation since Mark Twain.
I'm not the OP so I can't say for sure, but I consider it a near certainty from my own (similar) experience that he's both viewing his time at google through the rose colored glasses of youth and novelty and is correct about the negative changes to the company's culture.
This is a kind of gaslighting ("Google was always the same, your experience of it in a previous state is irrelevant, you see things that never existed because you're older").
Tons of real world changes have happened to Google, the people, the culture, its reach, its products, its business practices, between 1998 and 2024. Things obvious even to people who weren't there - and of course more obvious to people who have been there, but in any case not things that are subjective as to whether they happened, but concrete things, documented in news reports and press releases, shown in the product line, and so on.
And many of the things that changed between 1998 and 2024, changed in the part between 2010 (when TFA's TB was hired) and 2024.
Similar to how Apple was different in 1977, different in 1984, different in 1992, different in 2000, different in 2008, and different in 2024. That's not some personal subjective hallucination, it's a hard fact.
You can say "Google was good/shit then to be that way, and it's equally good/shit now, even though it has changed in several ways".
But you cannot say "Google was always the same, it's just you 'seeing things' if you see it as having changed", because that's absolutely and objectively wrong.
Or do you have some unique mentalist-style access to the "real source" that drives him?
And even if I use an alternative, my friends, family, and workplace do not. So I'm still fighting the use of Google products after I stop using them.
I wished the author had elaborated on both of these points. Can people say what are the things that Google can't find? What do people consider the compelling alternatives in 2024?
That sounds pretty negative about people who were “good at business”.
How is that different from engineers who join because they wanted to be cool?
I remember everyone wanting to work for them, back in their cultural heyday...
At one point it felt like Google cared about defeating SEO spam. Now it feels like they actively encourage it.
Using a different browser for different websites doesn't make sense because of links.
As web user and web developer, a browser that's made by a web company is aligned with my interest, not a browser by a company for which the web is a kind of tax haven, a way for companies to avoid paying the 30% tax they're supposed to pay when selling to their users.
Lot of that, going 'round...
A pseudo-communist critique of Google.
>But those Ten Blue Links surfaced by the PageRank-that-was had a special magic. I found them intensely human, a reflection of the voices populating what remains of the Web, the only platform without a vendor. This was true when I was there and I said so, but was laughed at.
A nostalgia-driven critique of Google.
This post is a bit of a mess. There is valid criticism too, but it sounds like the author doesn't know exactly what he doesn't like about Google anymore.
I can also say I used to find better articles on HN but clearly the userbase of this website has changed, despite the guidelines trying to insist HN doesn't change and it's just a "semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills". No, HN is worse just like most of the tech space.
Tim Bray has been shared on this site for the last seventeen years:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=11&prefix=false&q...
What's happening to the term "late stage capitalism"? Feels like it's becoming a meme like neoliberalism. What does it even mean to say that it wasn't tech's fault, it was late stage capitalism's fault? Kind of dodging a particular responsibility with a generality.
I think LSC came to prominence through cultural marxists like David Harvey and Frederic Jameson. (People I read and liked btw). But the people I now hear regurgitating the phrase make me wonder what happened. For Marxists I think the implication is that capitalism will soon die with its host. Which like all prophecies will probably be proven ironic in retrospect, but who knows.
But I'm starting to think the way people use it now, it's like they sub-consciously think there was a good capitalism time just like there was a good Google time.
Hegel observed that the US was founded on greed. When I look at tech, I see greedy people. That's more general and just as specific as the ambiguous term "late stage capitalism".
There will be a new phrase for these same groupings that we'll all get upset about in a few years once these get fully played and become taboo.
After the next few media cycles of AI doomerism and fear mongering we're probably going to see the same thing with AI where any minor risk is intolerable to gov technocrats so they'll make controls where only some megacorp like OpenAI or Google, who has friends and lawyers in the right places, gets to operate with a green light and small players will need to hire a team of lawyers and developers to enforce an ever growing list of controls.
I think maybe you mean just "Marxists". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
To your question, I do think the term is becoming heavily watered down as I see it being used frequently by people who clearly lack the context on Marxist thought to be able to use it with it's original meaning. More often, when people use the term, I infer the sentiment that the "capitalism" we live in is regressing into oligarchy or corporatocracy.
I dont and i dont know an alternative since cognitive biases slowly take away the ability to freely reason about contradicting statements; their ability to reason in general.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Marxism
> Less concerned with economic analysis than earlier schools of Marxist thought, Western Marxism placed greater emphasis on the study of the cultural trends of capitalist society, deploying the more philosophical and subjective aspects of Marxism, and incorporating non-Marxist approaches to investigating culture and historical development
I thought Western marxist would be obscure to hn readers and that in the context what I meant by cultural Marxism would be clear, but I guess not.
I'm dismissive of the alt-right usage of cultural Marxism to the point of forgetting how much other people care about it
fwiw, "late stage capitalism" feels to be a phrase that's been around as popular parlance since at least the mid-2010s. It's even brought up in the Wikipedia article for the term:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism#Modern_usage_o...
It's cliche by now. They should probably move on to a new buzzword. Actually, in tech, it does exist: enshittification is a good replacement as any.
In contrast to that corporate profits are off the charts but there's the sense that they are getting that by squeezing everything else too much and eventually something is going to give and it's just a race between whether what breaks is the planet, the labor force, or the broader structure of society.
Take this all with a bit of a grain of salt though as this is just why it's caught on in the particular circles I run in.
Capitalism is great in growing, greed is not per se bad but these capitalist incentives start to cannibalize everything once growth hits deminishing returns. The "good capitalist times" end exactly here. Thats what makes it "late stage" (e.g. after the european conquerors took the americas, where growth was still easy. Or consider the chinese development).
You think this incentive structure, which actually explains well enough recent developments and can be seen pretty much everywhere -- you dont even have to actively look for it -- is just a meme!? To me, this smells like your bias to unreasonably dismiss the far-radical-left explanation. Your loaded language (like mine here) lets me suspect a distorted perception.
I'm critiquing Tbray who is obviously not a radical leftist from the left. And I'm questioning the implicit claim made by some Marxists that capitalism is now on its last legs, not from left or right but as a question of fact.
It's pure delusion. Capitalism isn't coming to an end any time soon. None of the candidates for the 2024 election are even close to being anti-capitalist.
Would a different corporate structure have different outcomes? (i.e. not mimicking medieval fiefdom structures that allow peasants/individual contributors to make bank) I think if massive profits and growth are the goals then this will always be the way things go when those goals are achieved. Look at any other large corporation and you'll see the same things. In Big Tech the massive money one can make via stock/bonuses means the gas pedal is on the floor as the car speeds towards dysfunction.
It was marketing spin - and I bought into that.
I since found out it was funded from inception by inqtel, the CIA's venture capital arm. There are lots of articles to this effect, eg: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...
So, the hype, the free canteen, etc was all just spin to move people from a more messy handmade internet, into a corporate one. A way to dominate and intercept everyone's actions online when searching. And you have to say, it was a good strategy! Do the younger generation even know that there are pages outside of the corporate held companies?
I also don't think you can say, in any sense I can imagine, that Google made the internet more "corporate". I agree that SEO is painful, but Google was still based around the open internet, and modifying it only slightly to allow websites to add in advertisements. It's the Facebooks and OpenAIs of the world, creating walled gardens and curated datasets, that are corporatising things.
I'm still not sure I'd call it corporatisation though, as they were working within the confines of the web, and the monetisation ability of that large-scale but precise user interests tracking meant ads could pay more to enable individual websites to thrive.
But agreed that it didn’t close the web into isolated portals like Facebook, which was in opposition to indexing and the business they were building.
I would say Google has been bad at handling results from semi-open spammy walled gardens though, like Pinterest, Quora, and Reddit. Maybe even Stack Overflow.
It's easy to think you've bought a utopia; money buys a lot of blindspots.
It just occurred to me - it's almost a too stupid theory to be true, but you should never underestimate this kind of corporate stupidity - the name change to Alphabet, maybe that was part of telling the actual alphabet agencies, "We're on your side"? One thing is sure, Schmidt really, really wanted to have a good relationship with Obama's state department.
It was and is a factory. Like chrysler and ford before them, and the mines before them.