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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

The Google+ thing was a great example of bonus-driven product design. My understanding is that effectively everyone at Google was told that their annual bonus would be directly tied to how well their team's products supported the rollout of Google+.

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I was at G when "mobile first" was the slogan, and it led to "odd" choices such as designing and leading with a travel app rather than the web site. Perhaps locally suboptimal, but in the long run brutal forcing functions were needed to move a company as big and successful as Google into something new. I hear that going all-in on AI was internally disruptive and probably had some bad side-effects that I'm ignoring, but in hindsight it was the right thing to do. When ChatGPT, perplexity, and you.com came out, my immediate thought was "Google is toast", but they've recovered.

Google is certainly looking better than stack overflow.

> I hear that going all-in on AI was internally disruptive and probably had some bad side-effects that I'm ignoring, but in hindsight it was the right thing to do.

That's the opposite in my experience. It is driving long term google audience away from google's paying products.

why? I don't base my youtube subscription or my drive subscription based on my AI subscriptions

Sure I get gemini for free now for a year since I have bought a pixel, but I have no intention to renew, I'll likely just leech of the ones my employer pays for

When YouTube is replacing translations with AI-generated ones or if Drive is using all your personal documents as training data, that can definitely drive people away.

My take away from mobile first G was “sites need to be fast right guys for mobile?” -> amp -> actually let’s hostile take over the web, oh actually well rework chrome auto sign in, oh actually … just a long string of user hostility

That's exactly it. In every large corp I ever worked at, the bonuses for managers always depended on whatever company initiative was happening at the time.

Incentives almost always drive the outcome.

It's almost as if that's what incentives are for. Whether the outcome is the intended one is of course another question entirely.

That is sooo google. Every big tech company has a defining trait. Microsoft is evil. Microsoft doesnt care about customers and never will. Apple is expensive. No matter what they produce, it will cost more than the alternatives. Such things are in the corporate DNA and we should not expect change in our lifetimes. Google? Google is internally focused. Every google product exists to leverage or prop up the others. The value of any product, new or old, is judged only by how much traffic/business/money it can funnel to others. Any product that doesnt support, even if profitable on its own, is a threat.

You look at ~15 year old comments and it's people replying to people that aren't there

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