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Comment by siliconc0w | Hacker News Reader

Google has always had great tech - their problem is the product or the perseverance, conviction, and taste needed to make things people want.

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This is a bizarre argument to make for AI, since Google started working on TPUs in 2013 (12 years ago) and Sundar started publicly banging on about being an AI-first company in 2016. They missed the first boat on LLMs, but Google has been invested in AI for way longer than any of the competition.

https://aibusiness.com/companies/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-we...

Their incentive structure doesn't lead to longevity. Nobody gets promoted for keeping a product alive, they get promoted for shipping something new. That's why we're on version 37 of whatever their chat client is called now.

I think we can be reasonably sure that search, Gmail, and some flavor of AI will live on, but other than that, Google apps are basically end-of-life at launch.

It's also paradoxically the talent in tech that isolates them. The internal tech stack is so incredibly specialized, most Google products have to either be built for internal users or external users.

Agree there are lots of other contributing causes like culture, incentives, security, etc.

haha remember Steve Yegge's Platform Rant? [1]

nothing changed...

[1] Ref: he mistakenly posted what was meant to be an internal memo, publicly on G+. He quickly took it down but of course The Internet Never Forgets https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

It's telling that basically all of Google's successful projects were either acquisitions or were sponsored directly by the founders (or sometimes, were acquisitions that were directly sponsored by the founders). Those are the only situations where you are immune from the performance review & promotion process.

They've actually had many very successful projects that make the few products and acquisitions you are thinking of work. It's true most of their end products don't work or get abandoned but it stretches their infrastructure in ways that works out well in the long run

I should probably have said "products" rather than "projects". There's a fair bit of extremely good engineering that goes on in the infrastructure side, but when it comes to consumer products, if one of the founders isn't explicitly sponsoring it it gets killed.

They get killed since ROI of putting more people on search or ads is almost always higher than ROI on the new projects, not because the founders doesn't like them.

Google released their latest chat app 8 years ago.

Odd way to describe the most used product in the history of the world.

Fuschia or me?

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