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Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

> it is a strategy employed to slow down development at other companies, and so help preserve the moat.

Worked at Google for 7 years, and your post reminds me it is time to share a secret: it is Koyaanisqatsi* and people's base instincts unbridled, no more. There is no quicker route to irrelevancy than being the person who cares about something from last years OKRs.

* to be clear, s/Koyaanisqatsi/too big to exist healthily and yet it does exist -- edited this in, after I realized it's unclear even if you watched the movie and know the translation of the word

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If they actually incentivized a group to support stability and continuity among enterprise customers, they would probably be able to diversify their revenue away from ads. Microsoft understands this…

The real sick thing is it doesn't matter, right? Like we're commenting on an article about how they won the day yesterday and Cloud revenue continues to skyrocket.

To be clear, I agree with you, and am puzzled by the lack of consequences from the real world for the stuff I saw. But that was always the mystery of Google to me, in a nutshell: How can we keep getting away with this?

> How can we keep getting away with this?

A large part of that is the Google-are-super-geniuses PR effort. Anyone pointing out that Google's products don't reflect this to their boss faces having their own credibility reduced instead.

If it's so obvious, and Google supposedly know this internally, and can obviously tell by others that some are avoiding Google because they're fast at sunsetting services, why are they not doing anything about it?

Imaginary conversation between an honest VP and earnest year 0 me, here's what the VP says: "We definitely care about deprecations: now tell me how to accomplish that with Sundar's Focus™* Agenda over the last 2 years"

* no net headcount increases, random firings, and any new headcount should be overseas. i.e. we have the same # of people we did in 2021 with 50% more to do.

Because it’s not meaningfully hurting their bottom line.

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