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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

> Google was loosing on many fronts

i believe this trend is a result of management culture and performance metrics that attempt to measure "impact", and correlate pay and promotions along those measures.

It's the same reason why google products die when they don't reach mega-success (thus products getting killed off in spades recently).

Nobody wants to be doing maintenance on projects started by somebody else - so as soon as the lead visionary leaves for better pastures, that project gets languished, and whoever takes over it cannot use it to generate promotion worthy impact.

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I'd go further and bet that those "impact" metrics likely came from a spreadsheet pusher like Schmidt.

Schmidt still takes the gold medal in my estimate for destroying a company he ran by not understanding how the business actually works (as CEO of Novell he decided to screw their channel partners not understanding that the channel relationships were the company's entire moat against Microsoft).

Channel relationships were a boat anchor around Novell's neck. The channel helped Novell grow rapidly in the early days then building a file server and installing an office network took some real technical skill. But then Microsoft released Windows NT and a new generation of hardware came out which allowed any idiot to set up a LAN. Microsoft beat Novell in part by distributing their server software more widely instead of forcing customers to go through channel partners. Of course, it also didn't help that Novell failed to innovate on their products and tried to coast on past success.

Network installers are still used to this day on big network buildouts, simply because office IT departments aren't staffed for that kind of work regardless of how easy the software is.

But it's not like Schmidt had any strategy to bypass the network installers. He just decided to screw them hard so he could make a quarter look good, which lead inevitably to them deciding not to be Novell's low-paid salesforce anymore, which lead rapidly to the vastly premature collapse of the business.

Microsoft stood-up a channel in order to compete with Novell.

Initially, at least, Microsoft was much a preferable OEM. Better docs (MSDN), better tech support, more profitable, etc.

(Microsoft also made embraced application servers. Spearheading switch from workgroup to client/server. But that's another chapter.)

I felt like I could rationalize a lot of Google decisions to kill products, such as Inbox or Reader, but retiring Google Domains really shook my confidence in GCP.

It is actually insane that they did this. I literally stopped recommending people use GCP over this - you can't get started easily because you have to use another platform for the domain. Why even use GCP at all?

It was also incredibly sticky with GSuite. Setting up security and everything was a breeze -- DMARC email records, SMTP, etc all magic -- I truly couldn't believe when this was announced. It was incredibly sad and I still feel upset about it a year later.

Porkbun is my go to registrar now. And I switched my email to Migadu.

also at porkbun for dns, big fan.

saying this as someone who used to work for enom, if that matters.

Google Cloud Domains is still a thing, and you can purchase domains from the console still. The registrar changed to square space, but it didn't really impact Google Cloud's usage.

Even a worse decision then because they're still supporting UI around it.

Did it really come down to some PM not wanting to do registrar paperwork?

Even though I was a Google fanboy, this was a nail in the head. Had a .dev domain which expired and squarespace asked like 6 times more to let me buy it back. Waited till the grace period was over and bought it back for the original price from NameCheap.

Absolutely staggering. Google Domains complemented GCP perfectly and would make thanks to Cloud DNS a stellar seamless end-to-end integration. I'm in disbelief as to why they removed this crucial feature while at the same time going full in with GCP.

I could understand deprecating Google Domains for B2C, but for B2B?! What went through their heads?

Because they couldn't shoehorn "AI" into the product, I guess.

No, some of the folks involved in the decision (literally) previously worked for GoDaddy. Even dumber.

Agreed, such a critical piece of infrastructure, the mind boggles. I'll have to see what I can pry out of our Google account team about it.

> I believe this trend is a result of management culture and performance metrics that attempt to measure "impact", and correlate pay and promotions along those measures.

Meta's performance reviews are also heavily weighted for measurable impact.

I think that the reason why it's beating Alphabet in so many fronts is team culture. Most new product teams are small and have a reasonably flat hierarchy. It's easy to make impact that's both effective and measurable, and the amount of engineering time working in "useless work" is minimised.

Yup, Google MBA'd itself into the ground.

Yeah, i don't want to invest in anything google, i'm scared it will be uselss in 6mo.

That's a big problem, a "support guarantee" could really help things.

Google is now a AD platform with a search engine to sell stuff.

I hoped a little bit in Fuchsia, it was the last one for me.

>Google is now a AD platform with a search engine to sell stuff.

NOW?! They were that for the past 20 years mate.

Yeah but the search engine provided a service good enough that you could overlook that

I noticed today that they get rid of filters in the "products/shopping" tab

FFS

Their search isn't even so great any more. They tend to forcefully switch the user input to some generic terms. More than often duckduckgo produces better results for me. I started feeling comfortable using duckduckgo instead of google.

I’m not sure you understand how ingrained and far reaching Google ad manager is.

Their search could die and they’d still be the biggest advertising player on the internet by leaps and bounds.

Facebook would be bigger.

Not. Even. Close.

You are just ignorant, Google search is 57% of their total revenue, remaining advertisement is just 19%, people really overestimate how much Google ad network is worth when its just 9.2% of their revenue and YouTube is just 10%. In fact if you remove search Google makes more money from selling subscriptions and services than they do from ads, so they would no longer be an ad company!

https://www.voronoiapp.com/business/Breaking-down-Googles-Q1...

Facebook makes much more money than 19% of Google.

Edit: And I wonder why I got downvoted for being right, many here just blindly believe that Google gets their money from ads on third party sites when most of it comes from search.

But I guess your second post is right, it isn't close, Facebook would be much bigger.

Exactly how does Google makes money through search if not...advertising?

Dartos said they were bigger without search:

> Their search could die and they’d still be the biggest advertising player

I said they’d still be the biggest player in the advertising space.

Nothing about their worth or whatever.

Google ad manager is the cornerstone of pretty much all internet advertising.

Even if you don’t buy ads from Google directly, somewhere in your ad pipeline is google ad manager.

> Google ad manager is the cornerstone of pretty much all internet advertising.

That money is a part of Googles revenue, so there isn't as much there as you might think. Maybe you mean there is quantity there but advertisers doesn't pay as much for it as they would for Facebook or Google search ads, then yeah that is possible, but normally in a market segment you count big players by revenue and not numbers sold.

You’re just not really understanding what I’m saying.

Fuchsia isn't dead. Yet.

Fuchsia is a talent retention project. Basically daycare for kernel engineers, to prevent them from leaving Google.

But what do Google shareholders get out of this?

They get to keep those engineers out of the hands of competitors.

It is dead

Firebase (especially Cloud Messaging) is in use by a lot of companies. Killing that off will have a huge blast radius.

Firebase is going away?

Fuchsia is part of the problem not the solution. It was the retirement home to keep a bunch of smart people busy who didn't have any rush to ship anything real for as long as possible. Architecture astronaut porn to the max.

On the other hand there's zero desire at Google to try and build the best phone. They have conceded that to Apple a long time ago.

No desire to be number one in Cloud. They are fighting for number 3 spot.

They are the Xerox of AI with a full stack solution. If they had the drive they would be HYPING THE SHIT out of TPU and making it the best solution to run all the real workloads people have.

Guess what. On average a Googler even still today with low bar to entry is probably 10 IQ points higher than average Amazon or Microsoft or Apple. But no; no drive.

I hadn't heard the term "architecture astronaut porn" before. Seems highly accurate in this context and wondered if you could point me to other resources on this term?

"Architecture Astronaut" is an old term IIRC coined by Joel Spolsky

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

porn is added by yours truly.

Meta is also heavily involved in “impact” metrics

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