GrandCentral 2.0, Almost Ready to Be Released | Hacker News Reader

GrandCentral 2.0, Almost Ready to Be Released

googlesystem.blogspot.com

22 pointsazharcs11 comments

I have an account from right as they were bought out.

The phone number I got gets a constant stream of weird calls from voicemail systems and collection agencies. I had it forwarded to my office phone for a while, and I only figured out the reason for the calls once I started getting email notifications from GrandCentral about voicemail messages that the mystery callers had just started leaving.

I find it fascinating that Google forces some (all? most?) of their acquired companies to move to Google's infrastructure. It is proof that engineering quality is #1 at Google, even at the cost of lost business (they had sign ups disabled for a while).

It may mean that. But it may also mean that they're intransigent.

"characterized by refusal to compromise or to abandon an extreme position or attitude"

thanks!

Microsoft and Yahoo! do this too, it's hardly unique to Google (e.g. Hotmail, Viaweb).

I work for Microsoft:

I don't even use the same build tools, version control system, or issue tracking database as the people in the office next to mine. As of a recent re-org, my next door neighbors and I report to the same manager. Even before the re-org, we developed complementary products which work towards the same set of goals.

I have also worked for Google:

Believe me, the pervasiveness of Google's infrastructure sharing is unique.

But they did a better job of this when migrating YouTube. It's bizarre.

They were quite self-concious about not fucking up Youtube. They bought it because it succeeded in a way Google Video didn't even come close to. Youtube also had quite a few employees and built-up infrastructure by the time of purchase -- they weren't a tiny startup like most of Google's purchases. They didn't even move offices!

I was working at Google when this was still going down. Pretty much what happened was YouTube came and had a little party at the Googleplex and said "Hey guys, we're growing like crazy and have tons of crazy scalability problems that Googlers love... who's game for helping out?" and if you were a Googler that was interested... you just switched roles over to Youtube. Youtube more or less just trudged along and grabbed the talent/resources from Google as they needed them.

It was kind of the ideal situation for a start up... you have no monetary concerns, as soon as you need talent you can go pick from the brightest engineers in the world and have them good to go the next day, and on top of that you effectively have unlimited computing resources... which is important when you're doubling at the rate that Youtube was.

why is it taking so long? Google has thousands of programmers...and they can't port over a single system in 1.5 years? Its not like they are starting from scratch

Maybe it's taking so long BECAUSE they're not starting from scratch...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com