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Comment by gexla | Hacker News Reader

My take on this is that Google has a bunch of "incubating" spaces where they have teams of people building things that may or may not take off. So, when something does take off, it sort of becomes a victim of its own success. It confuses people because it's not a "core" Google product that fits nicely among other Google products. NotebookLLM seems to be another example.

Personally, I would rather Google did this sort of experimentation even if it is more confusing.

Or I could be wrong about this. But following NotebookLLM, it seemed like the team developing it had a lot of autonomy.

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That is so, but the problem this causes is more than just customer confusion - it is a lack of integration and responsibility. There is no "let's polish this and see if it works based on real user feedback", but it's "let's throw this out and shut it down if it doesn't work".

And if it isn't shut down, it is left in that terrible half-documented state, with confusing integrations and terribly integrated into the rest of the product.

Considering I'm confused both as a customer, user and a shareholder, I'd say the tactic isn't working.

If they throw it out and it's great then they get accolades; if they throw it out and it's bad, they don't. If they polish it and see if it works based on real user feedback then they also don't but it took longer. Better to just throw everything at the wall the instant it has the potential to go viral and then move on if it doesn't.

Remember that Google operates at huge scale, so even something any other company would consider wildly successful (e.g. Reader) is a waste of resources for them. That means that if you're ramping up your product over the course of a year you're wasting time and money. Go big or go home.

The teams of people want to get their work out into the public to make a big splash so they can get a sweet bonus before anyone realizes that it's not actually useful or effective. See also: Google Wave, and 80% of their other products.

They don't get a sweet bonus and promotion for helping another team improve a product, so why collaborate? Just create your own chat app according to your own team's vision/goals/available technology and release it and hope it gains more traction than the other teams' existing options.

This will explain everything you need to know about Google Wave:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug

Yeah and they have like 50 coding agents, because everyone in the entire company turned to doing the same thing. There's not that much you can invent in this space.

I've come to realize that life is all about having different eggs in different baskets . Some will go bad and some will hatch into beautiful chicks .

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