Yeah, this is pretty much it. Though I have met a few poor kids who got a scholarship to an Ivy League and leveraged friendships with rich kids to vault into this sort of sphere
There are plenty of links in the article to "emails released as part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google". I didn't read any of it as saying he was involved in those conversations, they're just conversations that have been made public.
I am directly citing emails revealed in discovery as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust suit against Google. They're all linked in there too! And you can even see who was CC'd. It's a little confusing because some of them are part of one big, fat thread that you have to read from the bottom up.
Google is doing something similar now[0], both from a searchers and a site owners perspective.
Barry Schwartz regularly posts Google updates on his site[1], for over a decade no less. Since August 2023, those updates have been reaching the 500 mean comment range with many updates reaching 700-900 comment range. And this has been happening for 8 straight months!
People have been robbed of their livelihoods and many have caught strays, with the culprit being that Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn have tripled/doubled their traffic.
I just don’t understand why Google can’t create a Discussions panel and let people decide what they want to view as opposed to flat out cutting creators off at the knees.
No content creator thinks to themselves, “let me go write my next article on Reddit”.
Now they are throwing AI in the mix also which is probably the dumbest thing they could have done, but I get why they are doing it.
I hope it clicks for Google soon that they are “fucked” and will never recover users they lost to OpenAI, etc.
Google now uses an ML classifier to assert the “helpfulness” of content. Your entire website gets penalized if the algorithm thinks your site is “not good enough”.
And so far, for the last 8 months, not a single person has had their site reinstated after this penalty.
Those people did everything according to Google's guidelines then Google changed everything and screwed them over. That's what has been happening all the way since 2010 when they issued their first update and penalized all the small sites for following their guidelines. They are screwing everyone for their shareholders' sake.
> gambled with their livelihood
Google owns ~90% of search. Its basically a public utility at this point. On which every small business owner has to rely. There is no saying "Go use a competitor" when using a competitor means you will lose access to ~90% of world search traffic. Imagine your salary being cut down to 10% of what it was last month - that's what using an 'alternative' to google for your business means.
These tech giants have been holding literal unregulated power over the livelihoods of people for decades now. And as we have recently come to see in many examples, they use that power to screw over everyone for shareholders.
The situation we have today is a situation that is as crazy as privatizing the entire road network and allowing an unregulated company to do whatever with the traffic that runs on it.
I feel like google is prioritizing reddit way more than regular forums . Quora is the second most annoying thing , Search for y , Click on top result which is Quora > Either it's a personal opinion or a brand account answering or the real answer is locked behind subscription . Not to mention the dominance of large brands like this https://detailed.com/google-control/ and non existent personal sites . But i am still pessimistic about new search engines like bing has backing of a behemoth microsoft yet can't copy simple features from google.
Quora and LinkedIn are also heavily overrun with AI garbage. Quora does it flat out, and LinkedIn launched Pulse to farm millions of AI generated topics and then invite its users to contribute.
LinkedIn is now one of the top results for topics like metaphysics, quantum physics, etc.
I've also noticed that I'm getting top results from companies who definitely have big AdSense spend, theres likely a bias or ads aren't labeled at all. However, with some companies I sometimes find that the page being listed often doesn't even exist anymore or is simply just a title of an article who's keywords match popular searches but there is actually no content or blog post, just a title..This SEO strategy somehow can get you top ranked on Google these days. Yeah RIP Google.
>I hope it clicks for Google soon that they are “fucked” and will never recover users they lost to OpenAI, etc.
It happens to pretty much all companies. A paradigm shift pulling the rag from underneath the big company, and the big company just can't turn itself to ride the new paradigm. Like say Sun Micosrosystems not able to switch from their super-expensive Big Iron to horizontally [super-]scaled cheap x86. And usually it doesn't "click" - the management just rides the gravy train until it lasts.
I've been for years wondering what will displace Google - I was sure that such paradigm shift would happen as always, I just couldn't say what it will be (my imagination was just failing at how one can displace a trillion dollar gorilla), and now we get to observe that process - the tech like snake dropping old skin and emerging in a beatifull new one - in all its glory again.
Wow, it had been years since I read a Barry Schwartz post, a SEO authority since back in the day, I didn't realize his forum had turned so nasty.
Funny you mention 'No content creator thinks to themselves, “let me go write my next article on Reddit”'. Schwartz and many other SERP/SEO experts talked about writing for medium, circa ~2013, to raise their Google rankings, back when everyone jumped on the medium bandwagon.
Google is bleeding ends users and content creators alike. If search results are getting worse for end users, many AI price points (free or $20/month) or ad-free paid search (Kagi) are eating away at Google's market share. At the other end, content producers which had a symbiotic revenue sharing relationship are also jumping ship.
As you point out, Google will likely never recover, they dropped the ball at both ends: worse end user experience and worse ad revenue sharing, both of which were their lifeblood. I think Google in a few years will be like Yahoo search or AOL email before it, they will still have users, but most likely not by free will, but rather users landed through OEM/marketing deals.
I also follow SERoundtable (I have worked as SEO/digital marketer/developer for roughly 20 years), but tend to discount many of the comments due to the assumption that many of the people complaining in broken English may not actually have the quality of site that they believe they do, but there are tons of good sites getting caught up in updates-- not just now, but in every update. The past ~2-3 years have had entire types of sites (e.g., useful blogs, data driven sites, useful/non-spammy aggregator sites) get wholesale demoted/deranked/deindexed.
In ~2016 Google started shifting towards optimizing for financial objectives more aggressively than user experience. Timing updates to coincide with beginning/end of fiscal quarters, blending ads, features solely created to drive incremental searches (People Also Ask/Related Searches), various misaligned defaults within GAds interface, branded search extortion, stance against header bidding, etc.. Essentially when they stopped promoting the "Don't be evil." slogan, they had legitimate reason to do so.
If I could give anyone advice with regards to establishing a website that is reliant on Google for traffic-- it would be to be extremely careful. I have one site now that is super high utility for end users, great UX, super fast, high repeat user rate, no ads/tracking/popup spam, great feedback from users and it is -60% in Google traffic from the March 2024 core update. There is 0 support from anyone at Google to identify why a site suddenly loses traffic. There are search liaisons who give snarky replies, but good luck getting any constructive feedback.
Even relying on paid traffic is just as dangerous-- given the black box that is Quality Score (it ties mostly to Click Through Rate, but has adjustable floor to increase effective costs) and Google's consistent drive away from measurable performance that helped them destroy traditional marketing channels so successfully.
All that I can think is that there is absolute panic at Google right now. When >50% of product searches start directly on Amazon (https://searchengineland.com/50-of-product-searches-start-on...), Google can't siphon anything off. With Meta adding things like Llama 3 to FB Messenger, there is going to be another huge hit to Google query volume-- albeit most likely low commercial intent queries (see: not as monetizable by Google), at least initially, but it will help increase user familiarity with chatbots and observed data will probably help improve Meta ad targeting ability in ways that may rival search query intent.
High value categories like home services, banking and finance are among Google's last relatively safe bastions of profit-- but eventually advertisers in these spaces have to reach a level of sophistication to realize they're giving too much of their margin to Google, leading to push-back. Highly fragmented, lower margin spaces like restaurants (or other "near me" driven niches) that have success on GMaps seem relatively safe for Google at this point. If Meta handles the chatbot transition (if it actually happens) well, they stand to gain a lot of ground there, too, given that they do already have a decent amount of small businesses who use FB pages as their sole internet presence, along with associated meta-data like hours/location/menus/reviews.
This is a bit long and histrionical in a ways that can make it seem to lack credibility, at times -- easiest example: maybe there was a joke in 2008 that "Code Yellow" was named after a lead's tanktop. But it's very much what you'd think, there's a "Code Red" and "Code Yellow" and Code Red is DEFCON 1, not Code Yellow. Shorthand for signalling "this is your manager^3 saying its okay to work on this, in case your manager^1 gets in the way"
The thing I'd like to draw your attention as a Xoogler, 2016 to 2023, is this bit:
> Gomes, who was a critical part of the original team that make Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world’s largest and most important search engine, was chased out by a growth-hungry managerial types led by Prabhakar Raghavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume.
This is the dynamic you can hang your hat on as being how Google changed post-Sundar, definitely post 2020. A la Sculley era at Apple.
It's a huge company, there's pockets of good and bad.
But by far and large, unless you're happily settled into a corner of a corner of an org humming along coding on some infra that is both crucial and yet not politically important, 'standard business' decision-making has infected every corner. Scaling meant importing a lot of management from other companies, and not great ones. And the self-induced "crisis" of not growing revenue 20% every year has left them empowered relative to those old dunderheads babbling their opinions about users.
There's all sorts of knock on effects: cliques became much more important, especially as a lot of managers promoted a new layer and withdrew from day-to-day once WFH started. It was shocking to see people unleashed: rampant power abuses, hiring of friends. I was shocked how quickly it turned into not just a regular company, but a bad company. Partially because it had no immune system / practice dealing with bad behavior. Everyone is just trying to get to tomorrow now, instead of doing the right thing, even if it is hard.
EDIT: One more thought: It's a lot harder to fight these effects with the overly-polite-to-point-of-vacuousness I saw the higher up I got. You end up with all these biases that are grounded and kind but get you to the point where you're enabling bad stuff. Ex. "no one person is responsible for failure/success of their product" enables "for some reason Yahoo's ex-search-head is high up at Google, and saying the right vacuous things that rhyme with The New Order: stonk must go up. So now we get more evil."
I'm still sad about the launches I participated in that were straight up lies when demo'd and advertised. Rot went all the way up from what I saw, VPs were more than happy to throw their name on outright lies if it was the hot thing that year at IO. Then when it isn't, they disappear and leave vague instructions, and the real shitty stuff starts, because now middle managers just want the old cool thing as 1 of 6 things in their portfolio.
As a Xoogler from 2007-2013 it saddens me to hear how it's changed since I was there. At the time it was definitely one of the best places to work in tech for me at least.
Sometimes I joke it was me - ex. my first year was the first year with no holiday gift. I'm really grateful I got there when I did, it was just enough to give me a year or two of enough of old Google that I can look back on it fondly.
I did peer counselling for a year or two, before leaving, and still follow along on Blind, and it was utterly depressing to hear from someone who joined the last couple years/post-COVID. 100% just another job now, besides the comp., and given the 1.5 years of constant firings and attendant self-interested behavior, you're forced to recognize this very quickly.
I recently tried Kagi search (kagi.com) just to see what it was all about, and was instantly shocked at how different it felt, and that difference was mostly due to the complete absence of ads. It made me want to subscribe immediately.
There's a simple solution to that: stop using Chrome. It is beyond me why so many people still use a web browser made by a company that wants nothing more than to track you and serve you ads. It's maybe excusable or at least understandable that so many average, non-technical users are still on Chrome, but anyone who knows anything about technology? Shame.
(Yes, I know, some people actually need to use Chrome for whatever reason, but the vast majority of people who use it, do not actually need it, and would be fine using Firefox.)
This is how you get more spam masquerading as content. Ad blockers are useful but with billions of dollars on the line it’s not stable unless you switch to a company with a different business model.
google search was horribly unusable for me yesterday in English from California.. it was obviously changing my search terms and then delivering "popular" content, not at all what I was searching for.. literally not at all..
this sea change is related to the AI rush -- very disappointing and at the same time alarming, due to the previous universal reliability of google search
The tech fluff pieces are wild. And that entire paragraph about how the execs for Yahoo failed horribly, hired a new one, and that one lied about his degrees, and they hired another.
People failing with golden parachutes, and others failing upwards into even more lucrative roles. I think that's the thing that is eating away at the core of our society: basic contracts like "fail and you won't get rewarded" or "succeed and you'll get rewarded" are just not there. You see people fail upwards constantly, and it eats away at your incentive to do any sort of good work, because it just doesn't fucking matter.
Edit: WIRED is the worst about these useless tech fluff pieces. It's like they make insane money from just fauning all over whatever tech CEO is the hottest right.
At certain company sizes, the direct output of entire divisions ceases to be visible to leadership.
What they receive instead are reports that filter up through management.
Consequently, when they promote people, they're doing so on the basis of what they've seen.
Invariably, this selects for shitty business types who can spend the majority of their time ensuring their name is first on successful initiatives and scrubbed off failed ones.
You know what it would take for a technologist to match that?
200% time: 100% to get the job done + 100% to match corporate politicking
> At certain company sizes, the direct output of entire divisions ceases to be visible to leadership.
> What they receive instead are reports that filter up through management.
Yeah but it doesn't have to be this way. I put in these details that are summarized in 1 or 2 easy to read bullet points, but asked to remove them because 'leaders are thinking about things on a strategic level'.
And don't get me started on promotion. If I find/do something that improves the teams performance by 10x, "that is just doing my job, please don't bring up stuff like that to management." "you need to have impact across teams". So every team is trying to make every other team take on their 'product' and no one wants to take on other teams product because even if it improves their quality / productivity, they don't get anything for it.
> People failing with golden parachutes, and others failing upwards into even more lucrative roles. I think that's the thing that is eating away at the core of our society
And it's not just "people" in general. It's certain people: It's people beyond a certain tipping point in their careers.
If I, as a low level worker bee fail in my job, to the point where I need to leave, I just leave and jump back into Resume Thunderdome to fight for the privilege of doing another 11 round interview nightmare full of code challenges and take home tests.
If my first level manager fails and leaves, he might have a bit of a tough time too, maybe a little easier since he has that all-important "manager experience" that unlocks many doors in silicon valley that are shut to me.
On the opposite side, if anyone in my company who is SVP and up fails spectacularly, they are 100% leaving with an exit bonus of $millions and are probably getting a title bump in their next job: a job that is literally sitting there waiting for them to take, no job application needed.
I visualize it as a hill. At my level, when you leave the company and let go of the rock, it rolls down and to the left, back into Thunderdome. Past a certain crest in the hill, which we'll call "Director," the rock rolls down and to the right when you fail, and you get better and better positions.
People easily see this exclusive club and yea it's demotivating as hell, and eats away at the idea that the world is just, fair, egalitarian. It's certainly corrosive to society.
> People failing with golden parachutes, and others failing upwards into even more lucrative roles.
I read stuff like this all the time, but this take is actually extremely reductive. (Otherwise, every moron out there would be making 7 figures, but they don't.) It's not as if these folks are utterly incompetent in their roles, but in fact they optimize for things you think don't matter (but actually do.) For example, if you can get a promotion just by knowing people, why would you optimize for building a better product, when you could optimize for getting a box and inviting C-execs at a football game?
To wit, sitting on a board is often "free money" and those positions are purely obtained by networking. Life is much more of a popularity contest than people (especially engineers) want to believe and EQ pays off much more than IQ does. We are, at the end of the day, social creatures.
> I read stuff like this all the time, but this take is actually extremely reductive. (Otherwise, every moron out there would be making 7 figures, but they don't.)
Your parenthesized logic is fallacious. No one is saying there's no filter of who gets to make 7 figures. What people are saying is that merit isn't the filter.
> It's not as if these folks are utterly incompetent in their roles, but in fact they optimize for things you think don't matter (but actually do.) For example, if you can get a promotion just by knowing people, why would you optimize for building a better product, when you could optimize for getting a box and inviting C-execs at a football game?
> To wit, sitting on a board is often "free money" and those positions are purely obtained by networking. Life is much more of a popularity contest than people (especially engineers) want to believe and EQ pays off much more than IQ does. We are, at the end of the day, social creatures.
You seem to be presenting nepotism as if it's a feature when it's obviously a bug.
I mean, do you not see how building worse products because you can get away with knowing people is worse for society?
If you cause your company to fail but you keep getting promoted because you are good at managing upward, you are incompetent in your role.
Your role is supposed to be making your company successful. Your role IS NOT supposed to be networking yourself into free money.
> You seem to be presenting nepotism as if it's a feature when it's obviously a bug.
I guess that's where we disagree: in my view, it's definitely a feature. When I have kids, I will 100% be willing to give them opportunities over other (more qualified) people. It's not even really a question in my mind. I am much more likely to invest in a friend's company ("friends and family" rounds are a thing, you know); I am much more likely to get into business with close associates, and so on.
...which is why society needs safeguards to guard against people like you.
Applied systemically, your behavior is one of the most harmful forces in our society.
And by the way, at a personal level, I get it. You like your friends and family--everyone does. But if we're going to have any pretense that capitalism works, we need to have a system where good work is rewarded. What you're arguing for isn't a free market, it's an oligarchy.
I'll note that there's a significant shifting of the goalposts between your previous post and this one, too. Before, you were saying that networking is a valuable skill, and that's somewhat true, but now you're admitting that competence never had anything to do with it. If someone happens to be your child, you're happy to give them positions they don't deserve even if they're completely incompetent.
> If someone happens to be your child, you're happy to give them positions they don't deserve even if they're completely incompetent.
Yeah, I'm being a bit contrarian & spicy for the sake of argument (don't hold it against me, my actual position is way more nuanced), but even so: I don't really see how nepotism forges a path to oligarchy. If they are completely incompetent, they'll run the company into the ground and the free market still wins.
I don't think you refuted the underlying point so much as gave cause to it. The idea isn't that simply stupid people rise to the top, it's that people who are capable of gaming a system without providing for or attending to the system they're deftly traversing are floated by their EQ/credentials/jargon straight over the corpses of the things they were actually meant to shepherd or build. I have seen this over and over again, and frankly managed to sometimes straddle the line enough to play along and be the beneficiary of this sort of corporate backchannel -- it's a very real, very human thing.
I've watched wildly incapable people bluff their way up a corporate ladder, fail over the course of two years in an elevated role, and then use that previous title to bluff their way into better positions elsewhere (and then leave those positions before they're totally found out to move on to somewhere else with a yet better title). I've watched people come out of McKinsey into the startup world, talk a major game -- they are the best conjurors of business fantasy at strat plannings and my god, those decks -- but then utterly fail to deliver for years only to end up with SVP roles at major companies on the "strength" of their backgrounds.
I get it: play the man, not the puck or whatever...but eventually somebody has to make sure the puck ends up in the fucking net and not sold off to buttress quarterly earnings.
> To wit, sitting on a board is often "free money" and those positions are purely obtained by networking.
The people I know who've successfully demonstrated their ability to operate at the C level are addicted to the role and have more money than time. I wonder if we can come up with some kind of prestige leveling system and just not pay them after a while.
A physical $100 million CEO coin with embedded connection to a purpose-built government blockchain. The coins are non-transferable.
Wired had a period where they were absolutely excellent, under Chris Anderson as their chief editor. When he left it was like a switch was thrown; wired almost immediately began to resemble GQ or other "general interest" magazines, with the only differentiating factor being asking the interviewee what apps they have on their iPhone
Question : Why larry and brin not caring about it ? They built one of world's best and biggest company and it's dying . Even if they did not care about that , their money is still tied to google stock right ? That should raise some concern from them.
I have impression they just enjoy their billioners lives, and do not have ambitions anymore. Also Larry has some sickness, so, maybe he has other life issues depending on his current condition.
speculation: they care, they know the people involved, and think highly of them.
Larry & Sergey are only humans. They can get bamboozled by people just like anyone. And they are in a situation where the very best bamboozlers are trying to bamboozle them, all the time. The people "failing up" are, in some cases, the Lebron James's of bamboozlement.
It's quite strange to see very capable people fall for such types, but it happens, I've seen it - and everyone around saw it except the very capable person.
I assume they use google search at least once after fall in quality and noticed it . Or maybe they got google search founder edition for Them.
Edit : Does any one have email/twitter of larry/brin ? If you have can you try emailing them . Or is it public ? Gonna try emailing them
There was a TGIF where prominent Search leaders (highest level of engineer, not management) openly asked Larry why we were being asked to compromise the quality of Google search to grow Google+ when GOogle+ was such a crappy and unpopular product. Larry just sort of lamely asked "can't you all get along" and then shortly afterwards, abdicated to Pichai (whose main skill was mainly to get all the SVPs to stop shivving each other in the quest to grow revenue). It was pretty clear that Vic had somehow convinced Larry through grima-style wormtonguing that social feed was the future for google, and Larry had fallen for it.
The difference being, there was no gandalf to come along and reinvigorate Larry.
I don't think it was Vic who convinced Larry or Sergey of that. It was Mark Zuckerberg. Google was in a frenzy about the sudden explosion of social for a few years before Google+ came along. Facebook's growth and rampant poaching of Google employees had left upper management despondent and fearful. It appeared (though in hindsight we know this was wrong) that social graph integration was so powerful that adding social to any app would automatically make it win. A commonly cited example was that Google had bought Picasa and worked on it for years only to see it be smoked by Facebook Photos, a product with way fewer features. Then Facebook Messages started taking away all the personal email communication from Gmail, and they got into ads and so on.
So you can see why Eric, Larry and Sergey were afraid. They were worried that Facebook might ultimately do a search engine that somehow integrated social recommendations, and that'd be the end of Google. That fear was shared by other top execs like Hoelzle and Alan Eustace iirc. No wormtonguing was required. They convinced themselves of that thesis all by themselves.
In that environment lots of teams were trying to sprinkle social magic onto their product, often in hamfisted ways. The GMail team launched an ill-fated social network called Buzz that immediately upset lots of users who clicked through the consent popup without reading it and discovered that their address books were suddenly public. Maps was adding their own social features. Orkut was an actual social network popular in Brazil. But, none of these products integrated with each other in any way. They mostly even had their own separate user profiles! Like, there wasn't even one place to set a profile picture for your Google account. It was pretty disastrous.
Given that, some attempt at a unifying social layer was inevitable. Gundotra gets unfairly demonized in my view. Google+ was probably the best that Google could have done to compete with Facebook. It wasn't enough because it was a me-too product driven by corporate fear, and such products are rarely compelling. But it also wasn't terrible. Some users really liked it.
> (whose main skill was mainly to get all the SVPs to stop shivving each other in the quest to grow revenue)
Having once been on an engineering team where we all wound up shivving each other's ideas in a quest to, idk, do good work? be alpha? its been a while - when the company hired a manager who was able to stop the shivving, it was like night and day. I can deeply respect that skill!
Purely speculation of course, but based on what they've been up to since letting go of the reigns of Google: because squeezing every possible drop of revenue out of the product helps fund the things they're now more interested in engaging in (self-driving, longevity, etc.)
The cynical assumption would be that they're just sitting on the extremely vast hoards of money and greedy for more. The (slightly) less cynical assumption is that their interest in Search nowadays is as a piggy bank for projects they consider more important.
Worth noting though the latter has long been the going assumption internally at Google: Search was the cash cow that funded Google's expeditions in finding the Next Big Thing. This plan has been complicated by the appearance that Google seems to not be terribly good at the kind of product execution that would lead them to the Next Big Thing.
Man they used to drop some awesome stuff: Google Maps, GMail (remember the hype over Gmail invites?), Google Earth... then they just stopped improving stuff and started releasing multiple versions of things and abandoned them all, over and over again. Very strange.
They could at least open source all the stuff on google graveyard which will give us so many awesome softwares . Sadly they are now now sitting on some random hard drives.
Not really. The relevant parts of those programs are basically buildable based on a list of their features.
The technology that one would get in an open source situation isn't very usable outside of Google's ecosystem because Google builds software on top of Google's stack. Like, without the monitoring infrastructure they've built or the Borg scaling infrastructure, their software is actually kind of fragile because the ethos is " If it starts to malfunction break it quickly so it can cause a monitoring event and to get replaced by auto restart."
The Google way of doing things is actually not a great way to architect most software that isn't running on a giant data center structure.
That's not something Google invented, it comes from erlang. Systems in erlang (and other beam langs) are designed to fail and die, and get restarted by the supervisory tree.
Good observation. I really need to get around to learning erlang.
It's probably worth mentioning that hypothetically, One could take the source code and port it to third party libraries and kubernetes. But I can't help but think that that would be about as much work as clean rooming it from scratch based on a feature description.
Not that strange if you think about the nature of transformation Google went through. With time they grew, hired more administrative staff and executives with fetish for growth and shareholder value which caused a fundamental shift in incentives and they reduced themselves from an innovative tech shop to an ad selling business.
Sad but common and as old as Jack Welch style capitalism where engineering excellence gives way to corporate greed.
I was there around this time and remember the first time someone said out loud that they were doing project Z because "that's what will get me promoted". I argued until I was blue in the face that it was a bad idea, but they didn't care: they had their objective and knew how to get it.
Unhappily, everyone was right: he got promoted and the project was an expensive failure.
My two cents is that Google has been consumed by its performance review process; the amount of money made by advancing dwarfed the amount of money made by making advancements, and as always the metric was the outcome.
The dominant culture in the company began to mimic the history of Raghavan: failing upwards, short-term gains with long-term detriment. When you get back far enough you begin to see a recurring pattern of it with these MBA/exec types who basically only have a bean-counter, extractive, understanding of running a business or making things.
I agree with you somewhat, having spent ~4 years at Google... though I think "perf-driven development" is IMO a symptom and exacerbating factor, but not a root cause.
Advancement and fulfilling of personal ambitions is a common thing in basically every sufficiently large company. Google isn't unique in having that problem - nor is their promotion process markedly different than everyone else's!
What is different is that Google is extremely metrics and OKR driven, combined with a near-total absence of product leadership. There is often no broader product strategy besides "grow X by Y".
This results in a critical weakness where you can get promoted for shipping Obviously Dumb Shit, because it hits some ill-defined OKR. It's practically an annual tradition within Google's management: creatively interpret pointless and vague OKRs so that you can make a (contorted) argument that Projects X and Y contribute to it, so you can ship it and get everyone involved their promos.
People in other companies are ambitious and want to get promoted too! The difference is that in many other companies there are other sanity checks in place that you don't get promo'ed for shipping Obviously Dumb Shit.
Google's root problem IMO is that there is an extreme lack of product leadership and product vision at the very top levels of the company. This results in a near-total inability to mitigate meta-hacks of internal promotion systems.
At companies with more product strategy at some point someone at a high level goes "Projects X makes no damned sense!" and puts the kibosh on it. At Google Project X will ship, and then after its badness becomes inescapable, get shut down.
They may be concerned, but what can they do? Google has poisoned the well, and the entire web is now a swamp of SEO driven drivel.
Forget about a "Jobs returning to Apple" miracle. As they say, "you can't get there from here". There's no easy path for Google back from the short term profit-driven corner they've painted all of us into.
I have long suspected there is more to it than that, the giveaway being that once you are in what is currently the Alphabet level executive group a fundamentally different set of rules and standards are applied compared to what is considered allowed in Google, and these two did not used to be so divergent. This is a far dirtier game than many want to accept.
You get older, you lose the willpower and energy to fight the machine
They have enormous power, but they are now also up against vast armies of lawyers and executives and lobbyists who will whisper and whine in their ears all day
Do I, Larry Page, really want to deal with all of that with my failing health and depleting energy?
I don't think you need to have a personal grudge to call someone out like in this article. Ensh*tifiers need to be punished (in the game theory sense) or everything will go to sh*.
If you have two people, one who wants to build a great product and the other who wants to climb the corporate ladder, the one climbing the ladder will always end up managing the one building great products.
I'm so sick of search systems ignoring or changing my search string. LinkedIn is especially bad for this. If I search for "OpenGL", many of the results don't contain the one word I searched for. Many of the results are "promoted" jobs from Microsoft that have nothing to do with graphics.
On Apple’s job site, it will include OpenCL jobs in addition to OpenGL.
It is probably more efficient for my time and sanity to create a web scraper and run my own searches offline. At least for searching for job postings.
I agree. Fuzzy searches are a bane of my existence. Like trying to search amazon for any specific detail about a product. All you get are basically the same promoted crap from a non-specific search. I just want my results.
I switched to using DuckDuckGo primarily, and it's now fuzzy by default. It returns lots of results that doesn't contain more than the most generic word in my query, and I always get this one hit for a completely unrelated site just because it has the name of my town in the headline.
Sure you can force it by using "foobar" but yeah, searching the web isn't what it used to be.
I think this article would work better if it were written entirely like textbook traditional investigative journalism. And less like the modern TV opinion personality, or the random strong-opinion Web comments in which many of the rest of us (including myself) indulge.
Hyperbole that is quite obviously hyperbole is a well accepted literary device. It is a form of highlight via creative exaggeration of non-critical points, that is transparent, not deceptive, in service of making serious adjacent points. [0]
The point here is to highlight the actually cartoonish level of dysfunction and damage with an intentionally cartoonish flourish.
The "villian" in this case can be colorfully interpreted as the real world isomorphism of a mustache stroking, side sneering perpetrator, from any usually fictional world-stakes good vs. evil story.
Intentional exaggeration also communicates a bit of self-awareness, that gives heavy crisis alarms more credibility. The author's levity demonstrates a higher level awareness and humility, by making fun of his own extraordinarily serious thesis.
Finally: gallows humor. Add humor when talking about depressing things to relieve the anxiety that often inhibits discussion and contemplation of difficult topics.
Hyperbole is well and good in fiction and personal opinion pieces. I suppose my, and parent commenter's issue, is that we expected a certain type of writing, but got another. And that's fine. I don't have a dog in this fight, but to me it went beyond hyperbole and into personal attack territory. I called it juvenile because the descriptors lack nuance in the same way that "management bad, programmer good" arguments do. Having spent quite a bit of time on both sides, it's pretty clear that motivations, incentives, and constraints are not black and white, so I'm a bit more sensitive when I see people mocked without having full context.
This is a good point. This 3700 word article titled “The Man Who Killed Google Search” about Prabhakar Raghavan does not contain context for why the author would dislike Prabhakar Raghavan or speak ill of him professionally.
That makes sense. It is possible that Google search got better and not worse since it was taken over by the guy that used to run Yahoo search, in which case context would thoroughly vindicate the choice to promote SEO spam sites and make ads and search results nearly indistinguishable.
This is like that scene in the Simpsons where Lisa tries to teach Homer that correlation does not equal causation by telling him that a rock keeps bears away, and he responds by wanting to buy the rock.
Correlation isn't causation. Don't just buy that someone is fully to blame because someone told you they were fully to blame.
What part of the article would you refute aside from generally disagreeing with the idea that a manager can be considered responsible for what they’re in charge of? I’m not sure “management possesses an indelible philosophical unknowability” was Lisa’s point
Zitron spends paragraphs trying to convince the reader that Google Search sucks now mostly because of the efforts of one person.
I don't understand the correlation isn't causation argument in this context. If no one ever tried to convince others of their thesis, with numerous arguments, what's the point of writing?
Robert’s thesis is that there are smart people (like Lisa and himself) that agree that outcomes — no matter how specific or documented — should never be used to criticize managers, and hopelessly stupid people (like Homer) that do not take that position by default.
He could have said “perhaps there is a disconnection here” but rather opted to volunteer that he is in fact Very Smart and others are Very Dumb. With a position like that any writing that’s meant to convince the reader is pointless as there exists only ontological truths (things that he already agrees with) and pointless ramblings of cartoon buffoons (things that he does not already agree with)
> Robert’s thesis is that there are smart people (like Lisa and himself) that agree that outcomes — no matter how specific or documented — should never be used to criticize managers, and hopelessly stupid people (like Homer) that do not take that position by default.
None of the statements in this is the case, other than that there are smart people.
Obviously I don't have it. The author doesn't either and he is the one making the big claims. Regardless, I'm not arguing the extent to which Prabhakar Raghavan contributed to Google Search quality, I haven't even heard the name before this post. I'm not a fan of the writing style, that is all.
This makes sense. If you personally don’t like someone’s writing style it means that they do not have the factual basis to back up their claims even if they provide them. The exonerating context exists because the meanness online cannot be both correct and not to your stylistic preference
> it went beyond hyperbole and into personal attack territory.
> the descriptors lack nuance
> motivations, incentives, and constraints are not black and white
Hyperbole isn't a knife. Any more than a political cartoonist's brush. It is satire. Biting humor.
The more ridiculous the caricature, the less you are supposed to take the details literally.
The "culprit" is a lightening rod. Taking the heat for what is obviously the result of a lot of people's seemingly poor or unfortunate judgements. Google search was a thing of beauty. Now it is an ugly swamp I have personally stopped trying to wade through.
It's not at all obvious that the author intends to sound hyperbolic. At the risk of Poe's Law here, they come across as saying exactly what they intend to say, perhaps attempting to appeal to an audience looking for such portrayals.
Pinning everything on one manager, no matter how related and relevant, is obviously hyperbolic.
A lot of people, and whover they report to, right to the top, are responsible too.
But the fact remains, that this manager is (according to the essay) strongly associated with major product misfires. At best, they didn’t manage to influence decisions down better paths.
And the enshittification of Google is so obvious, so bad for customers and what has become a utility for the Internet in general, that identifying and shaming those responsible seems like useful customer-citizen feedback to me.
People need to push back as the quality of the online environment matters.
No respect for the value extractors who keep showing up to ride on the coattails of the value makers! (Even when they are the same people.)
The gentleman being called out, or another representative, is welcome to clarify why Google Search is really better than it presents. Or why they are not responsible for its precipitous quality drop - I.e. insurmountable constraints and challenges or whatever their view is. Although those kinds of excuses are not very credible when ad revenue over optimization is the obvious problem.
Thank you for this. I found this article compelling not only because of the subject matter but because of how it was written. It's possible for something to be informative and entertaining at the same time - I think this article is both. I enjoy the flourishes and creativity.
I thought it was a very good description. The person mentioned is responsible for turning one of the most important pieces of software used by billions, into user-hostile experiences that's better for only a few, including himself, just for profits.
As context, I offer the engineer oath used by some countries for certified engineers:
>> I am an Engineer. In my profession, I take deep pride. To it, I owe solemn obligations.
>> As an engineer, I pledge to practice integrity and fair dealing, tolerance and respect, and to uphold devotion to the standards and dignity of my profession. I will always be conscious that my skill carries with it the obligation to serve humanity by making the best use of the Earth's precious wealth.
>> As an engineer, I shall participate in none but honest enterprises. When needed, my skill and knowledge shall be given, without reservation, for the public good. In the performance of duty, and in fidelity to my profession, I shall give my utmost.
Because it's too vacuous and based on subjective morals to be realistically followed. I also think we need engineers who do jobs that are ugly to preserve our freedom.
I don't see why subjective morals cannot be realistically followed. Do you mean that it will mean sufficiently different things for different people that they any promise of this shape will not communicate much to strangers, or something else?
yes, it communicates nothing. As mentioned by another commenter, it's effectively aspirational ethics, and I do not work towards aspirations, I work towards reality.
Might be more realistic than imposed dogma, you never know.
>I also think we need engineers who do jobs that are ugly to preserve our freedom.
I think so too.
If you build something that can be used for evil purposes, some people along the line are going to have to judge how to build it, or whether or not to build it at all.
This seems like it would always require some moral judgment of some kind.
An engineer who plays an important technical role should not be removed from this type responsibility.
For instance, consider making weapons, some of which might be used offensively, others only defensively.
Some engineers would have no moral qualms against either type, others who are more selective, and others not willing at all. But regardless, coexistence is assured if it is accepted from the outset as an engineering goal.
These are really quite "different things for different people", triggering a different degree of uneasiness as different lines are crossed. All based on a moral foundation, incidentally whose goalposts can be moved whether anyone wants them to or not.
All could be valid depending on the situation, but a creed for the profession can help to better focus outcome, away from the direction of making things worse for humanity because of your efforts.
Experience has shown you really don't want people in key positions without a moral compass to guide their aspirations, and engineering can be important.
on example i see, "When needed, my skill and knowledge shall be given, without reservation, for the public good"
who decides they're needed? me, or some other form of authority? "shall be given"... as in no compensation just forced to work? "the public good", what does that even mean? like software for homeless shelters or national defense? Does designing AI for targeting enemies for bombing count as public good? In many eyes it does and in many eyes it does not.
I'm sure it does prevent some harm that would otherwise happen. There are certainly people in the world who would think twice about breaking an oath they've made, regardless of whether or not you think it's goofy.
And I think that is really part of the problem. The idea that something like this is "goofy" just makes me feel profoundly sad. Do people just not care about integrity anymore, to the point that asking someone to declare their intent to do their work with honesty is considered silly and pointless?
Perhaps the people who think it's goofy may have actually put some thought behind their statements and have good reasons? For example, I find the oath as written to be effectively impossible to implement- it's very lofty sounding, but depends greatly on the nature of "honesty":
"I shall participate in none but honest enterprises"
Who defines honesty in this context? What if two engineers disagree in their interpretation and come to different conclusions? The statements in this are so vague as to simply not be implementable in any sort of self-consistent way. Signing a vacuous unimplementable statement isn't integrity, it's mindless follower behavior.
Many of us act with integrity without signing oaths of loyalty.
"Honest enterprises" also falls into the trap of anthropomorphizing organizations. Companies are not people and cannot be honest/dishonest, moral/immoral, etc. Companies are made up of people who choose to take certain positions and actions. The oath sounds nice, but ultimately is empty.
Wait so because different people have different concepts of honesty you reject the concept of honesty wholesale?
Like surely you have some concept of honesty that you strive for... Unless you're like a sociopath?
I'm not saying it would be wrong to be a sociopath or to genuinely have no concept of an honest enterprise. I'm just trying to understand if you are truly amoral here, and that's why you can't formulate the statement in a way that makes sense to you, or if you're belaboring the point in protest because you need the statements to be more precise. I suspect it's the second one - you're just not aware of the common components of what an ethical enterprise is.
If you need a principal to be more precise, the usual way is to define sub principles that make up the principle. These principles in turn would tend to be defined in terms of other principles but let's assume that just one level of recursion gives us more meat to really judge the meaning of honest Enterprise. Then we might adopt principles like this:
Defining an "honest enterprise" in a way that is precise and actionable could incorporate several key principles. Here I have asked GPT4 to provide them, since it's excellent good at these kinds of ethical elaborations. I also happen to agree with the principles that it came up with.
Honest Enterprise is commonly taken to mean:
1. *Legal Compliance*: An honest enterprise complies with all applicable laws, regulations, and standards. This is a baseline requirement, reflecting a commitment to operate within the legal frameworks that govern its activities.
2. *Ethical Integrity*: Beyond legal compliance, an honest enterprise adheres to ethical standards. This includes transparency in operations, fairness in dealings with customers, suppliers, employees, and other stakeholders, and integrity in financial reporting and corporate governance.
3. *Social Responsibility*: The enterprise actively contributes to the welfare of the community and environment. This includes practicing sustainability, engaging in community development, and avoiding actions that harm the public or the environment, even if such actions are technically legal.
4. *Accountability*: An honest enterprise holds itself accountable to its stakeholders by being open to scrutiny and responsive to feedback. It should have mechanisms for addressing grievances and correcting misconduct.
5. *Commitment to Truth*: The enterprise should commit to honesty in its communications, advertising, and all forms of public interaction. This includes not engaging in deceptive practices or misrepresentations.
6. *Employee Respect*: Treating employees with respect, providing fair compensation, ensuring workplace safety, and supporting their professional development are signs of an honest enterprise.
7. *Innovation and Fair Competition*: The enterprise should engage in fair competition practices, respecting intellectual property rights, and avoiding practices that unfairly eliminate competition.
By strongmanning these principles into the definition of an honest enterprise we gain an ethical principle that is much harder to dispute or disagree with. Someone encompassing all these principles will tend to naturally have credibility and ethos.
It's not about the fact that the principles are arbitrary and vary from person to person. It's about the fact that you have taken great pains to collect a set of sub principles that are powerful and effective.
Oaths may come from a Time when such principles would have been more or less normalized through society. But we still have the power, by reflecting upon and studying the component principles of honest Enterprise, to adopt a strong and effective principle here. When you see a vague ethical principle, just take it to the strongest and the most effective version that you can reasonably compile. I think that's all that can really be expected of someone, ethically.
For your benefit the following text was handwritten:
All the words you saw previously were written with my permission and vetted by me. I took pains to make sure that every ethical concept was good. And I told you that I was using AI. I encourage you to read the principles and benefit from them.
But if that's not good enough for you, I invite you to go kick rocks. It's your choice and your life.
Personally I judge writing on its own merits, or I am making the genetic fallacy.
If I cannot critically analyze text regardless of source, I will lose opportunities to learn and benefit from knowledge. We are entering a time where both good and bad text will be written by AI. We will need to be able to know the difference.
I was part of one of these oaths, I have an iron ring (Canada). It's just, look around you. Every bridge collapse, every oil spill had some "certified oathkeeper" or a team of them behind it.
The presence of a ceremony - no matter how important it was in the past - just doesn't hold value anymore. I doubt that Professional Engineers(TM) that have signed the oath are among us operating on a higher plane of morality and gravitas. They're, most likely, by Occam's razor, just another person.
The idea that any amount of my peers (or myself) present at the same ceremony take this oath seriously is laughable. It's a wine and cheese event before you get your degree, nothing more.
well let's be honest, Google was never founded to dig wells or feed starving children. It was only ever for the profits.
Also, in their defense, afaik no one's paychecks have ever bounced. I bet many many people would become very interested in profit and its growth if their direct deposit all of a sudden stopped.
I'm talking about the difference between making money off a good product, and being on a quest to enrich yourself at all costs, even if it's detrimental to virtually everyone on the planet, and the company in the long term.
Hey since it's all for profits let's invent the version of Google where the computer has a robotic arm that puts a gun to your head and makes you watch ads for crypto currency arbitrage bot scams. If you don't click through it blows your brains out.
It's all for profit everything should be allowed for profit. Even really f*** awful products that hurt people and shouldn't exist... should be allowed for profit right? That's the line you're seemingly arguing.
You don’t find it to be succinct? It’s certainly pejorative, but in four words it explains quite nicely how the author feels about Raghaven in a way most engineers can probably relate to. If he’d said “engineer who no longer builds but leverages their past technical background to instead succeed in a management role, often to the detriment of their past engineering peers” it would roughly get the same idea across, it’s just a chore to read.
Personally I don’t mind that sort of colloquial flare, it reads like I’m talking with a real person rather than a design document.
Read some marx. There is a whole analysis and theory behind class traitorship, it's causes and effects. You can't be ignorant of something as fundamental as marxian theory in this context, and then act as if it's the author making the faux pas...
"Anyone who talks about class traitors, or almost any sort of traitor, outside of a real war, is deeply misguided on this point."
This is where you appear to imply you're ignorant of class traitorship. If you truly knew what it was - which you claim elsewhere to know - then you would know it doesn't require a war. Class traitors are non-capitalists who collaborate with capitalists against workers. They can do that during peace.
Now forgive me if the following explanation is unnecessary:
When someone uses a term in a misguided way we can say they made a faux pas. When you claim the author is misguided for talking about class traitors outside of war, you're implying they have made a faux pas.
But the author is making no mistake. Class traitors exist in peace time as well, as I mentioned.
So if you know what a class traitor is, then admit the author is not misguided. If you can't make that admission, you have misunderstood the nature of class traitorship.
I agree with the theory in the sense that I agree with the statement "Wouldn't it be nice if you had a genie that grants you wishes?"
I disagree with I think every implementation and its death toll, and with the general idea that we should be forming groups to violently gang up on other groups. Whether it's national socialism killing the citizens of other countries and taking their stuff to give to the government to apportion, or regular communism killing the citizens of other classes (classes defined by the communists) and taking their stuff to give to the government to apportion. Centralised economic control can easily get bad in small organisations, but at least the blast radius is limited. When it's in the hands of the government, who also have all the other powers, it never seems to work out well.
Your concern about the long form or simplistic style of AI text is valid, but I feel that it was warranted here. The conflation between marxian theory and failed communist states requires some subtlety to unpack, and without AI help, I would struggle to find the effort to do it justice. The text is intentionally a little simpler and expanded to make it easy to read.
As it stands, the text is comprehensive, truthful, informative, and attacks the issue at hand in a fair way.
I am happy with it.
I propose AI walls of text are bad form when they contain hallucinations and bad arguments, and are needlessly long and bungling. I hear your criticism that it was too verbose, but again, I feel that was necessary.
I propose that it's good enough.
Good day and good luck scaling artificial walls of text.
It's a ridiculous term that promotes polarization and dumbs down the level of discourse. I have the same reaction to it as when I see "bootlicker" as applied to anyone who takes the company's side (or is in management in general). There's too much adversarial name-calling these days, and not enough seeking understanding.
If you also take a wage, then you're also a class traitor by any reasonable definition, because denying the existence of class struggle only benefits capitalists - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_conflict
Thanks for helping me make my point. How's it up there in the socialist ivory tower? See, I grew up in Soviet Union and seen socialism's effects first-hand. It thoroughly disabused me of the notion of the holy class struggle and made me an unabashed capitalist (though I imagine our definitions of what this implies will differ).
Capital is Other People's Money (OPM) and capitalism is crafted so that's what rules.
Comparatively, socialism is other people's labor. That may be all you can do if there are not many other resources.
Free Enterprise is something completely different altogether.
For the Soviet natives I've known who have come to the US, it has often turned out to be the Free Enterprise which was the most promising thing they found which was not in their previous environment.
It seems like you might be abstracting and dumbing down the meaning of the term.
There was a sense in which the author uses that term as an abstract and meaningless insult. But there's also the sense in which the author uses the term as a reference to the class struggle, and the fact that scientists are generally in a lower class than capitalists, and so should, in theory, owe their allegiance to worker class rather than the capital class.
All of this nuance is implied in that statement. If you see class traitor and don't immediately think about arguments about the class struggle between capitalists and workers, then you are in effect infantilizing the term.
You can claim that a large part of the audience will naturally react that way to this term. However it may be the case that the author does not care if people who do not believe in the class struggle would tend to infantilize that term. Speaking to the audience that knows about the class struggle theory is sufficient and valid.
It only "promotes polarization" if you have already decided that anyone who uses it "dumbs down the level of discourse." If you instead give them the benefit of the doubt that they're trying to make an intelligent point about a situation or dynamic, and then try to understand that point, and then reason about that point's validity, then you will finally find yourself actually engaging in the "level of discourse" that you purport to (but are actually undermining with your kneejerk disdain).
Thanks for the link. I also took the term as clearly being used to describe the dynamic between managers and the engineers / coding "class" within a company. At Google, those lines are admittedly probably a lot blurrier, but I think the term gets the author's point across in this context.
Like, if we can't allow some level of incisive criticism of extremely well paid tech executives, who have a massive influence on technology, in an article/blog describing feasible harm by said people to said industry, on the "talk about technology news" website, I honestly don't know what the point of forums, blogging, or the internet even is.
I was strongly motivated to upvote and share this article. I probably upvote and share 1/500 articles I read on this website. So I disagree, I think his tone helps convey how the bulk of people feel about Google's search product and gives us a name to actually blame. Whereas every other blog writes about the decline of Google with a sad tone underwritten with nostalgia and always fails to provide any sort of root cause or solution, atleast this guy has given us good information and context to understand Googles decline. And of course, it's more entertaining when people are called out.
Understanding the dynamics is great, and we can learn from that, and apply it to other situations.
As for who to blame for something a company does, shouldn't outsiders blame the entire company? That's our interface, and also how we can hold the company accountable for its collective behavior.
It's also a defense against scapegoating: it wasn't just one person who made a unilateral decision, and everyone else -- up to and including the board, as well as down the tree, to those who knew and could walk and/or whistleblow -- was totally powerless. The company as an entity is responsible, and a lot of individuals were key or complicit.
I had the unfortunate experience of running a startup with a couple of guys from a name brand fintech. They absolutely demolished the company before we got our first sale.
I couldn’t quite work out if these guys learned their mendacious trade from $bigcorp or if $bigcorps simply attract these kind of people.
My sense is that it’s a bit from both columns - I think that huge, profit driven megacorps, in general, are bad for society, in part because corporate culture itself is rapacious, and in part because they deliver enormous power into the hands of incredibly selfish people.
It implies that getting rid of That Fucking Guy is a necessary but likely insufficient condition for improving things.
Orgs that have been dysfunctional for a long time tend to have very complex dysfunctions, but there are still ways to fix these orgs, and it often starts by removing poor leadership from their posts.
Does it immediately make everything sunshine and lollipops? Of course not, but removing leadership that's actively working to counter your goals is still a necessary step towards the greater goal.
I think there are often two camps when it comes to organizational dynamics: "Team Incentives" (everything is about org structure and incentives) vs. "Team Great Person" (everything is about a small set of specific high-level people)
The reality is often somewhere in between. IMO "Team Incentives" often errs too much in that belief - especially because dysfunctional incentives are often downstream from a surprisingly small number of people.
In terms of understanding the dynamic though, That Fucking Guy doesn't really help. At best it can be emblematic of the underlying dysfunction, but in reality, with complex organizational dynamics, it's the underlying forces that empower That Fucking Guy that are important to understand, because the whole problem is that their function in the organization are an inevitable consequence of the dysfunction, and with proper function the organization would be able to harness their skills productively.
Err, I'll walk it back a little. Corporate decisions are just people's decisions, and though it's probably not just Raghavan, it was _somebody_'s decision to have Google spam our homepages.
Maybe we just need to be better at navigating who _somebody_ is, organizations can only be so complex at the top.
It's nice to think that with the right leadership, companies will behave differently. "Organizations can only be so complex at the top" implies that only the dynamic at the top of the company drives its behaviour. It's simple, and it helps to justify tremendous compensation. It's just not true. PR came into Google with a relatively modest role. He only became elevated to a more significant role because of the dynamics of how the company functions, and you'd have to think him a fool for his decisions to not be informed by those dynamics. Sure, he came out on top and his choices were his own, but it's foolish to think that if someone else had come out on top, their choices would really be all that different. The organizational dysfunction ensured that whomever was in that role would make those choices.
Yes, 100 percent. These dipwads pay themselves 100x salaries. The only way to defend that is that they take 100x responsibility for screwing things up. I would say differently if it was just a rank-and-file IC but this individual has enriched himself greatly. He can endure a little bit of scrutiny for that.
Yeah I agree.
The personal tone makes it clear that this is the authors’ opinion and not unbiased fact.
I thoroughly enjoyed the article and the writing style.
Excellent job.
this is such a tiresome criticism. "this would be better if it were more boring" yeah okay and 4 people would read it and 2 of them would fall asleep during
And your criticism of him is what? Encourage more sensationalism? Because there's so much evidence of that being such good and healthy way for journalism/news to operate?
It may have been somewhat sensationalist and over the top. But it was also very authentic, and freaking hilarious. Much more entertaining to read than if it hadn't been snarky and catty.
So no don't go for pure sensationalism. Go for authentic voice and humor coupled with hard facts and sound arguments. That's what makes it powerful.
What is crappier: engaging text with colorful text that may offend people, or sterile text from an author afraid of offending a single person? I'm going with the latter.
Just to chime in, I started reading the article due to this comment, as I wanted to check the style of the writing, but the amount of in-your-face insistence to subscribe to yet another newsletter just put me off entirely.
There was a CTA right at the beginning (which appeared suddenly after 4-5 seconds of reading so I lost my place), then another one a few paragraphs later, then less than 3 seconds after that, a pop-up to subscribe!
At that point I was so annoyed I just scrolled to the end to see how many more of these distractions I would have to endure, and then I found _yet_ another one and ALSO a bottom bar?
What gives? Is this really useful anymore? do people that subscribe after being harassed like this actually care about your articles?
I try to ignore these as much as possible, but holy cow, I just want to read this one article and maybe later _if_ I find it interesting I might read a couple more and THEN actually subscribe.
I am really annoyed by the amount of distracting stuff these "blogs" put in front you as if they wanted you to avoid reading the material. What is wrong with these people?
Aside from the annoying pop-up, I didn't actually notice the other calls to subscribe.
It's a bit of an unfortunate situation for the author, if any reasonable number of people are like me. If I didn't notice the less-intrusive efforts to get me to subscribe, and when I see the intrusive one (the modal pop-up), it makes me less likely to want to subscribe... oof.
I think the theoretical ideal from the reader's standpoint is that there's just one call to subscribe, at the very end, the idea being that if you can't make it to the end of the article, you probably aren't going to subscribe anyway.
And yet so many sites still do the modal pop-up that interrupts you while you're reading. So clearly they must work, at least well enough to get people to sign up? Then again, I do wonder how many people are so turned off by those pop-ups, people who would have subscribed, but decide not to?
Not sure if it's my browser config, but I saw all these CTAs I mentioned, which I find absurd.
I really think the article was relatively interesting, enough for me to consider other articles if it weren't for the amount of annoying nudges I got, which is a shame because the author probably put some good effort into it.
I agree that the only CTA should be at the end, but more and more it looks like it actually works, otherwise I would imagine people would stop doing it so often.
I agree and it's especially frustrating because it's such a vital topic. Since at least ~2020 the utility of Google Search has declined dramatically and it appears much of the cause is actions intentionally taken by Google prioritizing short-term ad revenue over long-term user value.
There was likely a significant change in cultural priorities inside Google driving this. While one person can certainly contribute to such a cultural change, it would be a better article if it focused on the change in cultural values itself.
I thought it was written very well, and was engaging. I could easily imagine it being dry and boring, otherwise, something that wouldn't hold my attention long enough to read through it to the end.
That's the first question that came to mind while reading the article. Many of the possible answers that came to mind did nothing to improve my perception of the article.
Yes, I felt that the style of the writing lead me to doubt whether I was reading the full story (and indeed, the way Prabhakar's work at IBM is minimized reinforced that impression).
The thing I love about this story is that it demonstrates that even in a global mega-organization, a single person can make a huge difference, for better (Gomes) or for worse (Raghavan).
I'm not sure why people buy into the idea of this being down to an underling and not the CEO. Generally, the way this type of management structure works, it all heavily depends on the direction and incentives in place from the top down. And obviously it is not an underling that decides to replace someone with himself.
Now, let's look at how the corporate investors that hired that CEO operate.
Phenomenal article, very entertaining and aligns with my experience as a prominent search "outsider" (I founded the first search intelligence service back in 2004, which was later acquired by WPP. Do I have some stories).
The engineers at Google were wonderful to work with up to 2010. It was like a switch flipped mid-2011 and they became actively hostile to any third party efforts to monitor what they were doing. To put it another way, this would like NBC trying to sue Nielsen from gathering ratings data. Absurd.
Fortunately, the roadblocks thrown up against us were half-hearted ones and easily circumvented. Nevertheless, I had learned an important lesson about placing reliance for one's life work on a faceless mega tech corporation.
It was not soon after when Google eliminated "Don't Be Evil" from the mission statement. At least they were somewhat self aware, I suppose.
I don't know what caused it but I suspected at the time, and still do, that it was simply business people getting more involved in order to drive growth.
The hostility was simply this. One day we had a dedicated high level Google engineer helping us out and giving us guidance (and even special tags) to get the data we needed in a cost effective manner for both Google and us. The next day, he was gone and we received demands to know exactly what we were doing, why and even sensitive information about our business. After several months of such probing, we were summarily told that the access we had was revoked and that there was no recourse.
We circumvented by setting up thousands of unique IP addresses in 50+ countries throughout the world and pointing our spiders at Google through them (same as they do to everyone else). These were throttled to maintain very low usage rates and stay off the radar. We continually refilled our queues with untouched IPs in case any were ever blacklisted (which happened occasionally).
As for what we did, we sampled ads for every keyword under the sun, aggregated and analyzed them to find out what was working and what wasn't. This even led to methods for estimating advertiser budgets. At one point, we had virtually every Google advertiser and their ongoing monthly spend, keywords and ad copy in our database. Highly valuable to smart marketers who were looking for an edge.
I'm really glad the article came out though, it fills in some gaps that I was fairly confident about but didn't have anything other than my sense of the players and their actions to back up what I thought was going on.
I and a number of other people left in 2010. I went on to work at Blekko which was trying to 'fix' search using a mix of curation and ranking.
When I left, this problem of CPC's (the amount Google got per ad click in search) was going down (I believe mostly because of click fraud and advertisers losing faith in Google's metrics). While they were reporting it in their financial results, I had made a little spreadsheet[1] from their quarterly reports and you can see things tanking.
I've written here and elsewhere about it, and watched from the outside post 2010 and when people were saying "Google is going to steam roll everyone" I was saying, "I don't think so, I think unless they change they are dead already." There are lots of systemic reasons inside Google why it was hard for them to change and many of their processes reinforced the bad side of things rather than the good side. The question for me has always been "Will they pull their head out in time to recover?" recognizing that to do that they would have to be a lot more honest internally about their actions than they were when I was there. I was also way more pessimistic, figuring that they would be having company wide layoffs by 2015 to 2017 but they pushed that out by 5 years.
I remember pointing out to an engineering director in 2008 that Google was living in the dead husk of SGI[2] which caused them to laugh. They re-assured me that Google was here to stay. I pointed out that Wei Ting told me the same thing about SGI when they were building the campus. (SGI tried to recruit me from Sun which had a campus just down the road from where Google is currently.)
People would add sites for a particular topic (aka slashtag) to their list. That would build a virtual custom search engine within the search engine. And topic specific searches thrown at it would consistently out perform Bing and Google in terms of search quality. The meta "spam" slash tag (everyone got their own) would let you tell the engine sites you never wanted to see in your search results so if you were tired of your medical queries being spammed by quacks, add them to your spam list and they wouldn't be in your results.
Ultimately, lack of traffic. During Blekko's lifetime Google went from paying people less than $10M/quarter to send their search traffic to Google to over $4B/quarter to do that. If you are ad based you need traffic to serve ads to.
At some point a pay for search model might emerge that has a big enough audience to support a company but that time is not yet here.
1 . Does that mean blekko was something similar to millionshort ?
2. Was blekko capable of tackling seo sites or blogspam taht we have today or it had the advantage of low spam site count from the old web ?
3. Does it have a chance of coming back like how yahoo has been recently hinting a comeback ?
4. A stupid question : How much will it cost it build a blekko today ?
Not sure on #1, definitely mitigated SEO sites and blogspam (on an individual basis, if you added a spammy blog to your personal spam list it stopped showing up in results). As a result on slashtag searches there was very little spam.
Would it come back? As it was? no. The folks at Bing used some of the techniques to mitigate some spam in Bing results but didn’t implement slashtags.
It would cost between $3 - $6M to go from scratch to developing a 3 billion page index with a 10 billion page crawl ‘frontier’. You can seed the crawl with Common Crawl. If you can get $10 RPM’s ($10 per thousand queries) and roughly 10M queries/day (so $10k/day recurring revenue) you can run an operationally cash flow positive business. You would want to grow it organically to a 10 billion page index on a 100 billion page crawl which would cover 90+% of the english language queries. With clever optimizations (like a news sieve to only index pages about the news that made ‘sense’) you might improve efficiencies. You would also want to focus on reference applications (people who use search to get their job done) for paid subscriber growth, and simpler commercial partnerships for managing ad lead generation on commercial search (people looking for products or services).
Also you would need to be an advertising ‘primary’ (not taking feeds from networks on a revenue share model) So, for example, working directly with Amazon to both efficiently access their internal product index and to surface it on commercial queries. Note people like Amazon do their own advertising business on their own index so you compete with that to some extent and navigating that early is essential.
Certainly doable but not something that your typical venture fund would go for. It would have a longer payback time (lower internal rate of return) than VC’s look for.
You know how a chess player will say something like "mate in 6" because their experience of all the options left to their opponent are both easily countered and will not prevent them from losing? Companies, and tech companies in my experience, get into death spirals due to a combination of people, culture, and organization. Pulling out of one of those is possible but requires a unique combination of factors and a strong leadership team to pull off. Something that is very hard to put into place when the existing leadership has overriding voting power. You can look at GE, IBM, and to some extent AT&T as companies that have "re-invented" themselves or at least avoided dissolution into an over marketed brand.
I have a strong memory of watching a Jacques Cousteau documentary on sharks and learning that Sharks could become mortally wounded but not realize it because of how their nervous system was structured. As a kid I thought that was funny, as an engineer watching companies in the Bay Area die it was more sobering.
If you have read the article, I think Gomes was right and saw search as a product, whereas Raghavan saw it as a tool for shoveling ads. A good friend of mine who worked there until 2020 wouldn't tell me why they left, but acknowledged that it was this that finally "ruined" Google.
Their cash cow is dying, I know from running a search engine what sort of revenue you can get from being "just one of the search engine choices" versus the 800lb gorilla. Advertisers are disillusioned, and structurally their company requires growth to support the stock price which supports their salary offerings. There is a nice supportable business for about 5,000 - 8,000 people there, but getting there from where they are?
My best guess at the moment is that when they die, "for reals" as they say, their other bets will either be spun off or folded, their search team will get bought by Apple with enough infrastructure to run it, Amazon or someone else buys a bunch of data centers, and one of the media companies buys the youtube assets.
> You know how a chess player will say something like "mate in 6" because their experience of all the options left to their opponent are both easily countered and will not prevent them from losing?
As a chess person, saying "Mate in _" means it's a calculated inevitability. There is no mathematical way out of it.
It is not nearly equivalent to the outside judgement of a company with so many factors — it's just incomparable.
Yes, but there are other positions that do fit the comparison, like a couple of advanced passed pawns that can still be defended against with surgical precision, but most times are lethal.
Again, I think there is a misunderstanding of what the saying is used for.
In chess, it's specifically used for saying "even with the best defense possible, you will be mated no mater what in a maximum of X moves." Computers use this definition as well. If Stockfish says # in 6, that means there is an indefensible path to mate available, and with the best play of the opponent will take 6 moves.
I don't disagree, chess is much more algorithmic and predictable. Maybe it is more like seeing your best mate of the last 20 years getting into their fourth or fifth relationship with the same kind of partner they failed with before and thinking, "Seen this movie before, it is not gonna work out." No algorithms, just you know how you're friend sabotages themselves and you also know they can't (or won't) look critically at that behavior, and so they are doomed to fail again.
But I can guarantee you that Google employees are reading these comments and saying "Wow, this guy is totally full of it, he doesn't know about anything!" and for some of them that thought will arise not from flaws in what I and others are saying, but in the uncomfortable space of "if this is accurate my future plans I'm invested in are not going to happen..., this must be wrong." I have lived in that space with an early startup I helped start, when I went back and worked on the trauma it had caused me it taught me a lot about my willingness to ignore the thinking part of my brain when it conflicted with the emotional part.
You have to do some of that to take risks, but you also have to recognize that they are risks. Painful lesson for me.
I don't think so. At one of the Sun Reunion events a bunch of us sat around and talked about it. I suggested someone should write a companion volume to "Sunrise: The first 10 years of Sun" called "Sunset: The last 10 years of Sun." But as far as I know nobody followed up (if they did they didn't reach out to me for my take)
With Google, I always feel like the side hustles (waymo, X, etc.) Really exist to be sold off in the future to prop up the add/search business and ensure future profitability. Everything not adds/search is on that list, and anything shut down despite being useful isn't seen as future-sellable.
Google today is starting to smell of future financial engineering games, like when a car maker earns more through financing than selling core product.
fwiw, there are approximately 25,000 FTEs reporting up to Thomas Kurian, and I'm not sure how many thousands of TVCs. That's just for Cloud, and doesn't include the massive numbers of additional, relevant employees directly support Cloud from within TI. Part of Google's problem is that it's so big and so broad, and has always insisted on a monorepo for internal source code, and it's outsourced to vendors as much as possible, that it's nearly impossible to disentangle any one business unit from the next. I predict that if the FTC or the EU seriously try to break up the company, this will be there argument against it.
Companies this size die several years before the body hits the floor.
They're dead when everyone starts to hate them and someone says "no, look how much money they're making, they're fine." That's the fatal blow, because they think they're fine, and keep doing the things that make everyone hate them.
At that point you're just waiting for someone else to offer an alternative. Then people prefer the alternative because the incumbent has been screwing them for so long, and even if they change at that point, it's too late because nobody likes or trusts them anymore, and ships that big can't turn on a dime anyway.
You have to address the rot when customers start complaining about it, not after they've already switched to a competitor.
While I totally agree that Atlassian products are terrible and steadily getting even worse, I'm not sure they are going anywhere anytime soon given their disconnect between users and customers. Most people who have to suffer their products have no say in the purchasing decision, and the company does a somewhat better job of appealing to the relative small group that does. Atlassian could very well have Oracle-like staying power.
I remember running into Kodak engineers, at an event in the 1990s, and they were all complaining about the same thing.
They were digital engineers, and they were complaining that film people kept sabotaging their projects.
Kodak invented the digital camera. They should have ruled the roost (at least, until the iPhone came out). Instead, they imploded, almost overnight. The film part was highly profitable.
Until it wasn't. By then, it was too late. They had cooked the goose.
If they owned the digital camera space like they should have, who’s to say they wouldn’t have eventually released a smartphone. It probably would have been an absolutely incredible camera first, and some mobile internet and phone features second.
One can really dream up a fascinating alternate timeline of iKodak if they didnt shoot themselves in the foot.
The just-so story about Kodak is one of those things that bugs me. Kodak did own the digital camera market, stem to stern, for years. They did not ignore it. They did, however, invent all that stuff a little early, before the semiconductor manufacturing technology had matured to the point where it could be a consumer good.
The company imploded because it spent all of its time, attention, and capital trying to become a pharmaceutical factory, starting in the mid-1980s.
Yeah, lots of things happened for a perfect storm of downfall…probably starting with the antitrust breakup of the film processing division.
They did indeed have a huge patent arsenal from all their research efforts that was very valuable. They were also really good at consumer tech - so it’s a shame it didn’t amount to more.
I'm not a Steve Jobs fan, but one business-quote I do like: "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will."
In other words, it could have been better for Kodak as a whole if they allowed their digital-arm to compete more with their film-arm, so that as the market shifted they'd at least be riding the wave rather than under it.
The mistake Adobe made was in canceling Flash instead of open sourcing it. Publish a spec and the let browsers implement the client side, then you can keep selling tools to make animations without everyone having to deal with the bug-riddled proprietary player Adobe clearly had no interest in properly maintaining to begin with.
It's kind of astonishing that all these years later we still don't have something equivalent in browsers. In theory they're Turing-complete and you can do whatever you want, but where's the thing that makes it that easy?
What makes you think people want easy? /s I mean, clearly that would be best for creativity, for cultural robustness, for accessibility. Unfortunately, there are a lot of incumbents in all the spaces Flash touched who were ecstatic (if in a schadenfreude-esque sense) to see the ladder pulled up after them. When you make it difficult or impossible for the peons to create, you make it difficult or impossible for them to bypass the professionals and the gatekeepers; when they can't tell their stories, their stories get told for them. Again, the professionals and the gatekeepers (and, now, the propagandists) find this ideal.
Suffice it to say, there are a lot of people who worked very hard to make sure that the 1998-2012ish period of openness and open-access and democratization was an anomaly. You got to see a mini-echo of this with the rollout and rollback of pandemic-era accessibility.
One of the problems was just how profitable film was. No amount of digital camera sales is going to be as profitable as being able to charge people $2 per photo (film+development).
Fujifilm survived by diversifying more into a chemical company than a consumer product company (whereas Kodak sold off those portions of the company as "not being core to consumer imaging" and focused on printers(??))
And yet even Fuji are now back to having traditional film photography being their single largest revenue generator (their instax instant film is now so popular it is chronically sold out and they are doubling factory capacity to keep up)
Any examples of this actually playing out with a company as established as Google? You can read comments like this on many companies... Microsoft (70B$ income), Meta (40B$), Oracle (8.5B$), IBM(7.5B$), SAP (6B$), yet none of them seem to ever actually enter the predicted death spiral.
And the internet isn't new anymore. There is no vast landscape of unexplored new technological possibilities, and no garage start up with an engineering mindset that will just offer a better solution.
AT&T, GE, AOL, Yahoo, Sony technology (they are a media company now, but they did used to make things that weren't a game console), Time Warner, SGI, Compaq, 3DFx, DEC...
Not only that, most of the other examples are just not at the end of their death spiral yet. Take a look at Windows market share, it's down 20% over the last 10 years:
And that's just desktop. Microsoft ceded the entire mobile market, which in turn now represents the majority of devices. The majority of the company's profits no longer come from selling Windows and Office. If they hadn't pivoted into a new line of business (Azure) they'd be on a trajectory to impact with the ground.
IBM has been bleeding customers -- and business units -- for decades. Their stock is flat, not even keeping up with inflation, compared to +300% over the last decade for the overall market. And they have no obvious path to redemption.
Oracle is kind of an outlier because of the nature of their business. Their product has an extraordinarily high transition cost, so once you're locked in, they can fleece you pretty hard and still not have it cost more than the cost of paying database admins high hourly rates for many hours to transition to a different database. Then they focus their efforts on getting naive MBAs to make a one-time mistake with a long-term cost. Or just literal bribery:
And even with that, their database market share has been declining and they're only making up the revenue in the same way as Microsoft through cloud services.
Meta isn't a great example because people just don't hate them that much. Facebook sucks but in mostly the same ways as their major competitors, they're still run by the founder and they do things people like, like releasing LLaMA for free.
Yeah, it's a pain in the butt. It often shows you the graph and then you try to show the link to someone else and it tries to get them to swipe their card as if anybody is going to do that. Meanwhile it ranks highly in Google search results instead of some other site that contains the same information without the bait and switch, because Google has completely lost the ability to produce quality search results.
All of the companies I cited are hugely profitable. They might not be as large as they once were, or as important, but a business that has non-declining net income in the billions is not in a death spiral. IBM has shrunk a lot, but except for the financial crisis in the 90s, they have been profitable every year, and profits are roughly flat since 2017.
This is certainly a completely different picture than Yahoo for example.
And your argument for Microsoft is that they are in a death spiral because they only have 70% of market share on the desktop, and are shrinking by 2% per year, so in, uh 15 Years they might only have 50% of the market share! Also, please ignore that they successfully diversified their revenue streams to other markets (Cloud).
And your evidence is that they failed to capture the mobile market. While you also argue that Google is in a death spiral when Google is actually the company that won the mobile market.
I think you might be using the term death spiral in an unconventional way here.
> All of the companies I cited are hugely profitable.
You cited them because they are hugely profitable, ignoring the ones that are already defunct. And the entire premise is that a company can simultaneously be posting profits while doing the thing that will ultimately destroy them.
> And your argument for Microsoft is that they are in a death spiral because they only have 70% of market share on the desktop, and are shrinking by 2% per year, so in, uh 15 Years they might only have 50% of the market share!
Platforms have a network effect. They're doing so poorly that the network effect from having 90% market share isn't enough to prevent them from losing market share. But now they only have the network effect from 70% market share, which makes it even easier for customers to switch. That's how you get a death spiral.
> Also, please ignore that they successfully diversified their revenue streams to other markets (Cloud).
Which are in turn dependent on customers using Windows so they need Active Directory etc. See also:
> And your evidence is that they failed to capture the mobile market. While you also argue that Google is in a death spiral when Google is actually the company that won the mobile market.
It is unquestionably the case that Microsoft lost the mobile market, which is the larger market. Android has the most worldwide market share, but Android is free to use and generates revenue for Google only to the extent that people want their services. If people stop wanting their services and switch to e.g. another search engine, how does it save Google from this even if they're using Android?
AT&T: 15B$ net income, world largest telecom company. #13.0n Fortune 500.
GE, while a reasonable example of a company that declined severely from its peak, was still generating 9B$ in income on 2023 before being split in better focused and profitable successors.
AOL/Yahoo were never dominant in a mature market. They were early to the Internet, but this was an uncharacteristically volatile time with an exponentially growing market.
Sony is also a leading manufacturer in several tech sectors (second largest camera, largest premium TVs). 6B$ net income and rising.
3DFx was never dominant in a mature field but, again, early in a nascent one. They collapsed quickly, not through some highly profitable extended death spiral.
Compaq was never dominant in a highly profitable field. Their market share peaked at 14%.
DEC might be a genuine example, they were never the top of the field, but they did not manage to adapt and turn things around when the world moved in a different direction. Compare to IBM who _were_ in a dominant position in the same field, and have leveraged that position into a sustainable and steady, if smaller and less groundbreaking, business.
Google might be in trouble (relatively speaking) if LLMs disrupt search, but they are not close to being in trouble from being outcompeted in search itself.
AT&T: today is not AT&T. The name was bought. It used to be Cingular.
GE: so your point is that it is a good example.
AOL/Yahoo: A 'mature market'? Are you making up rules so you can disqualify them?
Sony today only innovates in image sensors. They are a financial and entertainment company. Who cares if they sell the most 'premium TVs', this is the company created (off the top of my head) Betamax, CDs, DVDs, Minidiscs, Trinitrons, and made the best consumer tech in the world -- consistently.
3Dfx was the leader of an industry that is now lead by nVidia. That industry wasn't as big then, but everyone knew it would be and it was theirs to lose.
Compaq was the market leader in PC sales in the 90s.
I used the term "as established as google". In my mind this certainly meant the market has to be established. As long as an industry is brand new and rapidly developing, things are obviously different. Many early market leaders didn't make it in the internet. But in the last ten years, market leaders haven't been failing in the same way.
So no, not changing the rules, but maybe clarifying the point. Situations such as the rise of the internet in the late 90s and early 2000s are the anomaly, not the rule.
Operating Systems and Internet search are roughly the same they were ten years ago. 3d accelerator cards changed immensely in the years when 3dfx failed. Microsoft and Google are not in businesses where younger agile companies that read the changing tides better can quickly supplant them.
And that's why they get a thousand chances to turn things around while printing money with their "death spiralling" business.
Your question is effectively answerable as 'no' if you want to limit it to exactly google like market positions, because they haven't existed before. I was answering with examples of market leaders that fell due to bad top-down decisions.
Microsoft and Meta reinvented themselves a few times over. At this point Windows is just an legacy business unit for instance, and Meta literally changed name to mark the turn.
Oracle, IBM and SAP have the advantage(?) of being heavily business focused from the start, and I don't see them ever die a natural death in our lifetimes. As long as they have the money to outbribe the competition they'll be there, and it will require a small miracle to break that loop.
The one thing that has kept Microsoft afloat is their business oriented part. They are deeply entrenched in any company that needs to use Office and only ever hires Windows admins who won't even look beyond Windows. That is pretty much every non tech small to medium company. When things were shifting to the cloud they were smart enough to make sure it would be their cloud, locking customers even deeper into their own technology.
To add to this, Microsoft is really really good at understanding businesses, in a way Google will probably never be I think.
Having on premise hosting options for Exchange and all their core services is an example of that, even as they're also pushing for 365 in the cloud. I remember them being earlier than GCP to deal with GDPR and the in EU requirements as well but my memory might be failing.
People use Windows at home and at school and then employers use the same thing because they don't want to retrain people. But the home versions of Windows are becoming so malevolent that they're losing market share. Meanwhile all the things that used to require Windows are becoming web pages and phone apps. You go to a university and it's full of Macbooks and if you see a PC in the CS department there's a good chance it has Linux on it. These are the people who will be choosing what to buy in a few years.
But who cares about the clients anymore, right? They're making money from cloud services. Except their hook is getting people to use Active Directory and Microsoft accounts, which are the things for managing Windows client devices.
It's going to be a while before anybody convinces the accountants to stop using Excel, but for large swathes of employees Windows is no longer relevant, and if you don't need Windows then why do you need Azure instead of AWS or any of the others?
> if you don't need Windows then why do you need Azure instead of AWS or any of the others?
I don't have enough insight, but there's more to it than Windows/Microsoft services tie up. It's clearly not the ease of use for small customers, it could be the contract making, or something else that makes it better deal for businesses beyond just the cost bundling.
For instance I remember Apple hosting iCloud on Azure. And there's a few other big players going with Microsoft, especially retail chains who can't touch anything Amazon, and don't trust Google.
It's the ease of use for medium customers. Large customers have Linux servers with full-time staff to write custom code and do whatever they want because they have their own resources; Facebook doesn't use Azure. Small customers buy a Macbook or Chromebook or tablet and have a gmail address and host their website on WordPress or one of those awful (but easy to use) web host proprietary site builders.
Medium businesses are big enough to want to have their own email domain but not big enough to want to implement their own spam filter, so they turn to the likes of Amazon and Google and Microsoft. Then Microsoft's advantage is they can manage and integrate with your Windows devices. Otherwise they're just doing price competition with every other hosting company. People who aren't even using Active Directory start to wonder why they should pay extra for SQL Server instead of using Mariadb on Linux, and in turn why they shouldn't put that VM on AWS unless Microsoft cuts them a better deal. (Which is presumably what happened with Apple, but offering long-term discounts is not how you make a lot of money.)
Moreover, it's increasingly easy each year for companies to support BYOD and let employees procure whatever they want that meets IT requirements. My current employer gave all non-tech staff $2000 to buy themselves a laptop, which was then enrolled in some fleet management systems with almost a single click.
Frankly, I see very few people choosing Windows anymore.
Also, another point to add: Microsoft's Intune fleet management system is perfectly capable of managing Macs, and you can use AD as your IDM source of truth for just about anything, including SSO for Google Workspace & ChromeOS devices.
To your last point, Windows Server is a hard requirement in many enterprises because of legacy or procured software that requires it. That is entirely separate from end user computing.
(I used to run end user computing for an F500, and I also ran the Enterprise Apps org at the same time. This was from about 2008-2015, and initiatives including mass migrations aware from MS Office to Workspace, and replacing thousands of Windows laptops with Chromebooks.)
Reinventing yourself because you imploded your primary market is still an own-goal. If you can capture a new market then you could have had both. And what if the primary market collapses first?
I think many of us are underestimating Microsoft because of how crappy Windows is and keeps being.
But as a business entity they've been ferocious from the start, and succeeded through sheer perseverance where Google gave up after some tepid tries.
Xbox would have been killed by Google in the first year. Exchange would have stayed in beta for a decade, and Office365 would have had no support if it was in GSuite.
If Google were to find a way, I think they'd need a radically different approach, as I don't see them ever fixing their focus problem.
I think that's a valid point. Maybe Google culturally will not be able to turn around. Not because crappy product, but because of lack of focus.
That said, Google is still printing money and increasing profits and revenues. Nothing like falling profits (or even losses) to create some pressure to focus. DEC would be the example of a company that failed to do so.
IBM used to be bigger than MS, it's a 10th of it today.
But most importantly all the above listed companies with the exception of Meta are those that are heavily ingrained in large companies operations. IBM still provides mainframes, MS has Exchange and Windows domains and is successfully transitioning a lot of customers to Azure, Oracle has their databases and other products, SAP their ERP systems.
Once a non-IT company has their internal IT systems and some legacy working they're going to be very very slow in changing them out if it works, companies that provide those and get a critical are going to have very very long runways compared to regular b2c companies if a significant portion of their revenue comes from this.
Google has Chromebooks that are used in schools and some GCP usage but could that save Google long enough if search revenue was cut into a fraction? And GCP is kinda of an also-ran today, people looking at larger options usually look at AWS(nr 1) or Azure (Windows legacy).
In 2023 the revenues of Google Cloud, Youtube Ads and "Google Other" and Google Network Members Ads were 130B combined.
If they could reduce headcount and operating expenditures to 2019 levels without losing that, they would be roughly breaking even without any search. They also have 280B$ in equity to tide them over.
When Google actually sees its business failing, it will have many many many chances to turn things around.
The majority of that revenue comes from violating data protection law and regulators and litigants are slowly racking up a series of wins which will gut ads margins.
There is no Plan B, they are just going to break the law until they can’t and there’s zero clue what happens after that.
They sat back and let OpenAI kick their ass precisely because ghouls like Prabakar call the shots and LLM are not a good display ads fit.
A) I think it’s important to acknowledge that in many ways Google is actively trying to keep CPC low - what they care most about is total spend. A low CPC means an effective advertising network where interested consumers are efficiently targeted. Their position is complex thanks to their monopoly status over online advertising.
B) I don’t think it’s fair to characterize recent layoffs as some put-off collapse… criticize Google all you want for running a bad search engine, but right now they’re still dominant and search is the most effective advertising known to man. They’re raking in buckets of money: they had 54K employees on 01/01/2015, and 182K on 01/01/2024. Similarly, they made 66B in 2014, and 305B in 2023. The latest layoffs are them cleaning house and scaring their workers into compliance, not the death throes of a company in trouble — they’re barely a dent in the exponential graphs: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb...
A) This is short-sighted. What you're suggesting is in fact a way to optimize short-term gain over long-term viability. It's pure MBA tactics.
Additionally, it's complete and total oversimplification. If you look at Google's earnings it's pretty damn clear that at least until 2020 they were not just going for maximum total spend, but for a steady, gradual raise in total spend. Not too slow, not too fast. They were NOT taking every opportunity they had, in fact they're famous for systematically refusing many opportunities (see the original founders' letter, but even after that). They were farming the ad market, the ad spend, growing it, nurturing it. Then COVID blew up the farm.
Maybe you're right now, but I do hope they're recovering their old tactics. Because if they maximize it you'd see nothing but scams ... wait a second.
B) Google was built by providing a vision, and getting out of the way of ground-up engineer efforts. "Scaring workers into compliance" IS killing the golden goose.
You can see this in AI. Every story from an AI engineer that ran away from Google is the same. They didn't run away for the money, they ran away because they were getting scared into compliance.
Now AI may make it, or not. I don't know. But this is happening EVERYWHERE in Google. Every effort. Every good idea, and every bad idea runs away, usually inside the mind of "a worker". Not to make them personally maximum money, but it's natural selection: if the idea doesn't run away, the engineer it's in is "scared into compliance", into killing the idea.
Whatever the next big thing turns out to be, it simply cannot come out of Google. And it will hit suddenly, just like it did for Yahoo.
> You can see this in AI. Every story from an AI engineer that ran away from Google is the same. They didn't run away for the money, they ran away because they were getting scared into compliance.
Totally agree on the overall prognosis of Google - I am (also?) one of said engineers! Here’s a recent update from a tiny corner of the company: the rank and file is still incredibly smart and generally well-intentioned, but are following hollow simulacrums of the original culture - all-hands, dogfooding, internal feedback, and ground-up engineering priorities are all maintained in form, but they are now rendered completely functionless. I am personally convinced that the company is — or was, before ChatGPT really took off - focused on immediate short term stock value above all else. After all, if you were looking down the barrel of multiple federal and EU antritrust suits and dwindling public support for the utility you own and operate, you might do the same…
I guess I’m standing up for the simple idea that terribly inefficient organizations can prevail when they’re the incumbents, at least for significant periods if not forever. We can’t be complacent and assume they’ll fall on their own, esp when AGI threatens social calcification on an unheard of scale.
Why would Google's collapse be for the good of humanity? When was a power vacuum ever beneficial?
"Build a better search engine for the good of humanity", I can understand. "Kill a search engine for the good of humanity" is a reductive, childish take.
They've already killed it in essence, so that they are hurting billions of humans with it daily. But they can still run it because it creates more revenue in this harmful form than it did in its helpful form. Therefore sabotage against that revenue is justified.
Sabotaging the revenue of Google search will weaken them against honest incumbents. They are currently well funded enough to kill incumbents. That will start to change as they decline, aided by our boycotts and other forms of sabotage. The decline and sabotage of Google is necessary for a better search engine to have the space to succeed.
A power vacuum is often good.
Linux and open source exists in a personal and collective power vacuum that was created by proprietary knowledge and software.
Sometimes power vacuums are colonized by people with good intentions. And it's neither reductive nor immature to help create those opportunities.
I never said that someone shouldn't sabotage Google as well as create a better search engine. I myself am working on llm-driven knowledge retrieval systems, at the same time as advocating for the destruction of Google.
Good luck and do anything in your power that you think will help humanity have good search again.
Very much appreciate the sentiment and kind words! Reminds me of Yudkowsky’s line[1] about AI: “we should be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.” This kind of talk sounds insane in the Silicon Valley language game, but we’re talking about real people’s lives here and sometimes implied violence needs to be made explicit. And that’s what I see your suggestion as, ultimately —- but that’s probably because I got an American HS education, so the Malcom X vs. MLK Jr. debate was driven into my mind quite thoroughly.
Luckily/unluckily I left already due to factors out of my control. Regardless, for all of Google’s faults I will say that they were incredibly serious about data security and respecting consumer data protection laws with strict oversight, so I think “sabotage” in a direct sense would be incredibly hard + risky. The only solution I see is continuing to organize for government regulation. I would include worker organization within Google, but I recently learned they represent less than half a percent of the company…
Did I mention I was more pessimistic? :-) I expect that today they could layoff 150k, keep the 30K that are involved with search and enough ads that are making business and that husk would do okay for a long time. I don't suppose you watched SGI die, that happened to them, kind of spiraled into a core that has some money making business and then lived on that.
One of my observations between "early" Google and "late" Google (and like the grandparent post I see 2010 as a pretty key point in their evolution) was employee "efficiency." I don't know if you've ever been in that situation where someone leaves a company and the company ends up hiring two or three people to replace them because of all the things they were doing. Not 10x engineers but certainly 3 - 5x engineers. Google starting losing lots of those in that decade. They had gone through the "Great Repricing" in 2008 when Google lowered the strike price on thousands of share options. And having been there 5 to 10 years had enough wealth built up in Google stock that for a modest level of "this isn't fun any more" could just do that.
But aside from your observation that "they have plenty of people" it is similar to observing that a plane that has lost its engine at 36,000' has "plenty of altitude" both true and less helpful than "and here is the process we're going to use as we fall out of the sky to get the engines back on."
Google has lots of resources. If you have ever read about IBM reinventing itself in the 90's its quite interesting to note that had IBM not owned a ton of real estate it likely would not have had the resources to restructure itself. I worked with an executive at IBM who was part of that restructuring and it really impressed on me how important "facing reality" was at a corporation, and looking at the situation more realistically. I had started trying to get Google to do that but gave up when Alan Eustace explained that he understood my argument but they weren't going to do any of the things I had recommended. At that point its like "Okay then, have fun." Still, at some point, they could. They could figure out exactly what their "value add" is and the big E economics of their business and realign to focus on that. Their 'mission oriented' statement suggests that they are paying some attention to that idea now. But to really pull it off a lot of smart, self-interested, and low-EQ people are going to have to come to terms with being wrong about a lot of stuff. That is what I don't see happening and so I'm not really expecting them to transform. Both not enough star bits and the luma are just not hungry enough.
Are you suggesting that Google fire all the engineers who work on Cloud? That would... be a very interesting business decision, likely closing any door for them working with enterprise in the future.
Here's a few more realistic changes that Alphabet could make:
- shut down X
- shut down Verily
- sell calico or shut it down if no buyers
- sell Fiber or shut it down if no buyers
- shut down Intrinsic, Wing, and all the other X spinoffs
- make Cloud be its own Alphabet company with Kurian as an actual CEO
That would show Wall Street that GOogle is really serious about not wasting money on crazy ideas. That would boost the price (along with reducing costs) giving them some runway. I think it would be a shame if Waymo was shut down but it has a long, long way to being highly profitable.
It looks like Alphabet wants to sell Verily or spin it out of the Alphabet family entirely (after decoupling Verily's infrastructure from Google's) but nobody wants to buy it.
I was suggesting that they fire all the engineers that work on things that don't make money. It was only last quarter that Cloud actually made a profit. That said, I think you make a reasonable restructuring case; Now you just have to figure out how to get leadership to buy in and execute on that plan. In my experience two things work against that.
1) If it isn't their idea that don't believe it will do any good and could not possibly be the "right" thing to do.
2) If they don't have a job after it happens, they will work behind the scenes to sabotage attempts to make it happen.
You can work around those, but you need "existential risk" level energy to create that sort of change in a company.
That it is, but a more apt comparison would be Duck Duck Go which was a contemporary of Blekko and definitely out performed relative to Blekko's success. DDG still going strong and even buying TV ads, so yeah.
That said, how Blekko and Watson ended up squandering good technology in search of something else is also an interesting learning experience/tale.
I agree with everything you are saying, but the stock price is up 6x over the last 10 years and revenue is still growing 13% a year so nobody at google is going to listen to any of this.
Basically ad dollars have continued to transition from old media to digital media over the last decade+ and that mass migration has created enough revenue to cover up all of Google's core problems.
The reality is that this firehose of money is what allowed those core problems to grow & fester. That and the practice of using TVCs for as much as possible, to the point where nearly every process that's documented is outsourced, and often no one inside really understands how things work anymore.
Here here! Google needs to trim the fat, desperately! They need to eliminate all of their non revenue generating departments, ban all internal discussion forums and such that aren't laser focused on the job at hand. Cut 30-40% of all engineers, and get rid of the free food and other benefits. Install vending machines and charge for meals at their cafeterias, run them like any other business and make a profit. Get rid of free employee health benefits, make the employees pay for them. And for god sake get rid of that ridiculous swimming pool! Anything that isn't directly in the service of delivering value for shareholders needs to be done away with, starting with those hair-brained cash burning crazy X projects.
Looking at financials, all metrics are improving. They haven’t even started to lose altitude - they’re still gaining.
We might not like what they’ve become, but the comparison to a plane that’s lost its engine seems rather odd. Why couldn’t they keep going indefinitely, without making the changes that some would like?
Is IBM a good example? Like GE, their saving-grace restructuring was basically turning into a giant corporate leach (one through financialization, one through consulting).
ChuckMcM, I just wanted to say, I really appreciate the long view you bring to HN discussions. When you've been in tech for a few decades you start to see predictable patterns. History may not repeat, but it often rhymes.
Piggybacking on this to also express my appreciation. If/when you write a memoir someday, it would be a valuable historical record. If not, your hn comments are a wonderful corpus too :)
How many companies have management consultants taken down? It's quite amazing how bad they are at anything. Peter Thiel's hatred for consultants is really legit.
I enjoy reading this chap's stuff. It's not the way that I would write, but he's got a much broader audience than I do, so he obviously is meeting the needs of the reading population.
I do feel that I can't argue with his stuff, although it is very dark and cynical (and, truth be told, I have a lot of dark and cynical, in me, as well, but I try not to let it come out to play, too often).
The 2010-2013 timeline was also when the problem of ad fraud exploded. Google even acquired a company (or multiple, if I recon correctly: https://www.ft.com/content/352c7d8e-9acc-11e3-946b-00144feab... ). You had these companies popping up left and right that were snooping on Google and the emerging programmatic advertising environment to see if the websites and the traffic delivered were legit, and there were some scary numbers flying around.
The whole problem kind of got swept under the rug with most advertising ecosystems implementing a checkbox solution for clean traffic, and the web turned mobile user first.
My impression is that ad fraud never disappeared - it just got sanitized and rolled in with the other parts of the ad stack.
How much of (online) advertising is legit? Does any one know?
What would a "healthy" ad ecosystem look like? What should the the FTC (and advertisers) be working towards?
Eliminate any potential conflicts of interest? Bust up vertical integration (eg search & ads must remain separate companies)? Independent verification, as best able (eg like Nielsen does for ratings)?
Or maybe we determine (digital) ads based biz models are irredeemable, and we figure something else out.
Boeing was put on the path to failure by James McNerney. He was their first non-engineer MBA CEO. A literal Jack Welch apprentice. He divested Spirit and chose to build the MAX instead of the 797.
Dennis Muilenburg was an engineer and handled the MAX crisis poorly but wasn’t responsible for the decision to divest key capabilities from Boeing or to optimize short-term sales over long-term survival by building the MAX instead of a new airliner.
Good point. But really it was Phil Condit who’s often regarded as kicking off the long slide to mediocrity with the McDonnell merger and move of Boeing HQ to Chicago. And he’s an engineer.
Well, no, it isn’t. Nobody wanted a plane that suddenly turns into a lawn dart or falls apart in the air.
The MAX was short term thinking on Boeing’s part. A foolish mistake in the aerospace industry. Boeing was a few years behind Airbus. Now they are a decade behind and tarnished their reputation.
wasn't max a record selling plane? nothing wrong with modernising a 737 variant. plenty wrong with putting MCAS in it which goes haywire when its sole sensor fails
What’s wrong with modernizing a 737 is exactly what happened. The design has already been modified to the limit. There is nowhere to go from here. Boeing spent the money to develop the MAX but they still have to develop a new plane to replace it. In the long term it will cost more than just building the plane they actually needed.
Will be interesting to see how this article is ranked on Google in a month or so ;). There might be a good reason why there aren't many search results about this guy, let alone anything negative.
I try. I swear to god I try. Then the DDG search results come up, and they're just dumb. It's like they trained some dog to bring the search results. If it were a dog coming up with them, you would be amazed and rightly so. The dog reads, it vaguely understands the topic you're looking for. It can sort of find something related to it, but not really relevant. But look, it's actually a god doing it. Woohoo.
Of course, there is no dog, sadly. It's just some half-assed algorithm and a company too poor to spider the entire internet often or consistently. And when it fails, as it does more often than not, I search again on Google. This is the part where I'm dumb though. I know Google won't find what I want. This is 2024's Google, not 2015's Google. It has been nearly a decade now since it returned good results, useful results. Maybe I am performing a ritual, praying that the original Google returns. Maybe I have defective cognition and an addictive personality.
I no longer even know for certain whether Google was ever as good as I remember it to be. Maybe I have imagined it.
No, it was definitely that good. I remember finding a web page as a child (I think it was some weird webpage about medieval siege weaponry). Several years later, as a teenager, I wanted to find it again. With the right tweaking of search terms, I was able to find the same dang site. This actually happened more than once with multiple topics. If the site was still around, it was findable.
Now? Google search shows you what it wants you to, and damn anything else.
It's not entirely Google's fault - the web has gotten worse. But they take a large share of the blame, and I believe that their failures have played a role in making the web worse.
939 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 411 ms ] threadWell if that ain't the purdiest turn of phrase
> a management consultant wearing an engineer costume
> his expertise lies primarily in “failing up,” ascending through the ranks of technology on the momentum from the explosions he caused
It seems no-one, not even Google, can escape Outlook-style email concatenation.
If you follow them you'll get copies of email threads related to a suit against Google where the non-public information was revealed.
* https://www.justice.gov/usdoj-media/atr/media/1322631/dl?inl...
* https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417557.pdf
* https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417581.pdf
Barry Schwartz regularly posts Google updates on his site[1], for over a decade no less. Since August 2023, those updates have been reaching the 500 mean comment range with many updates reaching 700-900 comment range. And this has been happening for 8 straight months!
People have been robbed of their livelihoods and many have caught strays, with the culprit being that Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn have tripled/doubled their traffic.
I just don’t understand why Google can’t create a Discussions panel and let people decide what they want to view as opposed to flat out cutting creators off at the knees.
No content creator thinks to themselves, “let me go write my next article on Reddit”.
Now they are throwing AI in the mix also which is probably the dumbest thing they could have done, but I get why they are doing it.
I hope it clicks for Google soon that they are “fucked” and will never recover users they lost to OpenAI, etc.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067605
[1]: https://www.seroundtable.com/category/google-updates
That's absurd. People gambled with their livelihood, some got rich, and most lost.
And so far, for the last 8 months, not a single person has had their site reinstated after this penalty.
That is the very definition of being robbed.
Google wouldn’t exist without websites to index.
> gambled with their livelihood
Google owns ~90% of search. Its basically a public utility at this point. On which every small business owner has to rely. There is no saying "Go use a competitor" when using a competitor means you will lose access to ~90% of world search traffic. Imagine your salary being cut down to 10% of what it was last month - that's what using an 'alternative' to google for your business means.
These tech giants have been holding literal unregulated power over the livelihoods of people for decades now. And as we have recently come to see in many examples, they use that power to screw over everyone for shareholders.
The situation we have today is a situation that is as crazy as privatizing the entire road network and allowing an unregulated company to do whatever with the traffic that runs on it.
LinkedIn is now one of the top results for topics like metaphysics, quantum physics, etc.
It’s a clown show.
It happens to pretty much all companies. A paradigm shift pulling the rag from underneath the big company, and the big company just can't turn itself to ride the new paradigm. Like say Sun Micosrosystems not able to switch from their super-expensive Big Iron to horizontally [super-]scaled cheap x86. And usually it doesn't "click" - the management just rides the gravy train until it lasts.
I've been for years wondering what will displace Google - I was sure that such paradigm shift would happen as always, I just couldn't say what it will be (my imagination was just failing at how one can displace a trillion dollar gorilla), and now we get to observe that process - the tech like snake dropping old skin and emerging in a beatifull new one - in all its glory again.
Funny you mention 'No content creator thinks to themselves, “let me go write my next article on Reddit”'. Schwartz and many other SERP/SEO experts talked about writing for medium, circa ~2013, to raise their Google rankings, back when everyone jumped on the medium bandwagon.
Google is bleeding ends users and content creators alike. If search results are getting worse for end users, many AI price points (free or $20/month) or ad-free paid search (Kagi) are eating away at Google's market share. At the other end, content producers which had a symbiotic revenue sharing relationship are also jumping ship.
As you point out, Google will likely never recover, they dropped the ball at both ends: worse end user experience and worse ad revenue sharing, both of which were their lifeblood. I think Google in a few years will be like Yahoo search or AOL email before it, they will still have users, but most likely not by free will, but rather users landed through OEM/marketing deals.
In ~2016 Google started shifting towards optimizing for financial objectives more aggressively than user experience. Timing updates to coincide with beginning/end of fiscal quarters, blending ads, features solely created to drive incremental searches (People Also Ask/Related Searches), various misaligned defaults within GAds interface, branded search extortion, stance against header bidding, etc.. Essentially when they stopped promoting the "Don't be evil." slogan, they had legitimate reason to do so.
If I could give anyone advice with regards to establishing a website that is reliant on Google for traffic-- it would be to be extremely careful. I have one site now that is super high utility for end users, great UX, super fast, high repeat user rate, no ads/tracking/popup spam, great feedback from users and it is -60% in Google traffic from the March 2024 core update. There is 0 support from anyone at Google to identify why a site suddenly loses traffic. There are search liaisons who give snarky replies, but good luck getting any constructive feedback.
Even relying on paid traffic is just as dangerous-- given the black box that is Quality Score (it ties mostly to Click Through Rate, but has adjustable floor to increase effective costs) and Google's consistent drive away from measurable performance that helped them destroy traditional marketing channels so successfully.
All that I can think is that there is absolute panic at Google right now. When >50% of product searches start directly on Amazon (https://searchengineland.com/50-of-product-searches-start-on...), Google can't siphon anything off. With Meta adding things like Llama 3 to FB Messenger, there is going to be another huge hit to Google query volume-- albeit most likely low commercial intent queries (see: not as monetizable by Google), at least initially, but it will help increase user familiarity with chatbots and observed data will probably help improve Meta ad targeting ability in ways that may rival search query intent.
High value categories like home services, banking and finance are among Google's last relatively safe bastions of profit-- but eventually advertisers in these spaces have to reach a level of sophistication to realize they're giving too much of their margin to Google, leading to push-back. Highly fragmented, lower margin spaces like restaurants (or other "near me" driven niches) that have success on GMaps seem relatively safe for Google at this point. If Meta handles the chatbot transition (if it actually happens) well, they stand to gain a lot of ground there, too, given that they do already have a decent amount of small businesses who use FB pages as their sole internet presence, along with associated meta-data like hours/location/menus/reviews.
the web could be fast!
The thing I'd like to draw your attention as a Xoogler, 2016 to 2023, is this bit:
> Gomes, who was a critical part of the original team that make Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world’s largest and most important search engine, was chased out by a growth-hungry managerial types led by Prabhakar Raghavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume.
This is the dynamic you can hang your hat on as being how Google changed post-Sundar, definitely post 2020. A la Sculley era at Apple.
It's a huge company, there's pockets of good and bad.
But by far and large, unless you're happily settled into a corner of a corner of an org humming along coding on some infra that is both crucial and yet not politically important, 'standard business' decision-making has infected every corner. Scaling meant importing a lot of management from other companies, and not great ones. And the self-induced "crisis" of not growing revenue 20% every year has left them empowered relative to those old dunderheads babbling their opinions about users.
There's all sorts of knock on effects: cliques became much more important, especially as a lot of managers promoted a new layer and withdrew from day-to-day once WFH started. It was shocking to see people unleashed: rampant power abuses, hiring of friends. I was shocked how quickly it turned into not just a regular company, but a bad company. Partially because it had no immune system / practice dealing with bad behavior. Everyone is just trying to get to tomorrow now, instead of doing the right thing, even if it is hard.
EDIT: One more thought: It's a lot harder to fight these effects with the overly-polite-to-point-of-vacuousness I saw the higher up I got. You end up with all these biases that are grounded and kind but get you to the point where you're enabling bad stuff. Ex. "no one person is responsible for failure/success of their product" enables "for some reason Yahoo's ex-search-head is high up at Google, and saying the right vacuous things that rhyme with The New Order: stonk must go up. So now we get more evil."
I'm still sad about the launches I participated in that were straight up lies when demo'd and advertised. Rot went all the way up from what I saw, VPs were more than happy to throw their name on outright lies if it was the hot thing that year at IO. Then when it isn't, they disappear and leave vague instructions, and the real shitty stuff starts, because now middle managers just want the old cool thing as 1 of 6 things in their portfolio.
I did peer counselling for a year or two, before leaving, and still follow along on Blind, and it was utterly depressing to hear from someone who joined the last couple years/post-COVID. 100% just another job now, besides the comp., and given the 1.5 years of constant firings and attendant self-interested behavior, you're forced to recognize this very quickly.
Why did I read this in Connie Sacks' voice talking to George Smiley (The Alec Guinness one)?
I'm sure they'll get Karla (Raghavan), in the end. It's his fanaticism that will do him in.
(Yes, I know, some people actually need to use Chrome for whatever reason, but the vast majority of people who use it, do not actually need it, and would be fine using Firefox.)
this sea change is related to the AI rush -- very disappointing and at the same time alarming, due to the previous universal reliability of google search
https://bsky.app/profile/dahosek.bsky.social/post/3kqm25jwsf...
Maybe that page is AI generated but Google is displaying a relevant although incorrect result
People failing with golden parachutes, and others failing upwards into even more lucrative roles. I think that's the thing that is eating away at the core of our society: basic contracts like "fail and you won't get rewarded" or "succeed and you'll get rewarded" are just not there. You see people fail upwards constantly, and it eats away at your incentive to do any sort of good work, because it just doesn't fucking matter.
Edit: WIRED is the worst about these useless tech fluff pieces. It's like they make insane money from just fauning all over whatever tech CEO is the hottest right.
At certain company sizes, the direct output of entire divisions ceases to be visible to leadership.
What they receive instead are reports that filter up through management.
Consequently, when they promote people, they're doing so on the basis of what they've seen.
Invariably, this selects for shitty business types who can spend the majority of their time ensuring their name is first on successful initiatives and scrubbed off failed ones.
You know what it would take for a technologist to match that?
200% time: 100% to get the job done + 100% to match corporate politicking
Yeah but it doesn't have to be this way. I put in these details that are summarized in 1 or 2 easy to read bullet points, but asked to remove them because 'leaders are thinking about things on a strategic level'.
And don't get me started on promotion. If I find/do something that improves the teams performance by 10x, "that is just doing my job, please don't bring up stuff like that to management." "you need to have impact across teams". So every team is trying to make every other team take on their 'product' and no one wants to take on other teams product because even if it improves their quality / productivity, they don't get anything for it.
https://prospect.org/article/press-release-journamalism/
And it's not just "people" in general. It's certain people: It's people beyond a certain tipping point in their careers.
If I, as a low level worker bee fail in my job, to the point where I need to leave, I just leave and jump back into Resume Thunderdome to fight for the privilege of doing another 11 round interview nightmare full of code challenges and take home tests.
If my first level manager fails and leaves, he might have a bit of a tough time too, maybe a little easier since he has that all-important "manager experience" that unlocks many doors in silicon valley that are shut to me.
On the opposite side, if anyone in my company who is SVP and up fails spectacularly, they are 100% leaving with an exit bonus of $millions and are probably getting a title bump in their next job: a job that is literally sitting there waiting for them to take, no job application needed.
I visualize it as a hill. At my level, when you leave the company and let go of the rock, it rolls down and to the left, back into Thunderdome. Past a certain crest in the hill, which we'll call "Director," the rock rolls down and to the right when you fail, and you get better and better positions.
People easily see this exclusive club and yea it's demotivating as hell, and eats away at the idea that the world is just, fair, egalitarian. It's certainly corrosive to society.
I read stuff like this all the time, but this take is actually extremely reductive. (Otherwise, every moron out there would be making 7 figures, but they don't.) It's not as if these folks are utterly incompetent in their roles, but in fact they optimize for things you think don't matter (but actually do.) For example, if you can get a promotion just by knowing people, why would you optimize for building a better product, when you could optimize for getting a box and inviting C-execs at a football game?
To wit, sitting on a board is often "free money" and those positions are purely obtained by networking. Life is much more of a popularity contest than people (especially engineers) want to believe and EQ pays off much more than IQ does. We are, at the end of the day, social creatures.
Your parenthesized logic is fallacious. No one is saying there's no filter of who gets to make 7 figures. What people are saying is that merit isn't the filter.
> It's not as if these folks are utterly incompetent in their roles, but in fact they optimize for things you think don't matter (but actually do.) For example, if you can get a promotion just by knowing people, why would you optimize for building a better product, when you could optimize for getting a box and inviting C-execs at a football game?
> To wit, sitting on a board is often "free money" and those positions are purely obtained by networking. Life is much more of a popularity contest than people (especially engineers) want to believe and EQ pays off much more than IQ does. We are, at the end of the day, social creatures.
You seem to be presenting nepotism as if it's a feature when it's obviously a bug.
I mean, do you not see how building worse products because you can get away with knowing people is worse for society?
If you cause your company to fail but you keep getting promoted because you are good at managing upward, you are incompetent in your role.
Your role is supposed to be making your company successful. Your role IS NOT supposed to be networking yourself into free money.
I guess that's where we disagree: in my view, it's definitely a feature. When I have kids, I will 100% be willing to give them opportunities over other (more qualified) people. It's not even really a question in my mind. I am much more likely to invest in a friend's company ("friends and family" rounds are a thing, you know); I am much more likely to get into business with close associates, and so on.
Applied systemically, your behavior is one of the most harmful forces in our society.
And by the way, at a personal level, I get it. You like your friends and family--everyone does. But if we're going to have any pretense that capitalism works, we need to have a system where good work is rewarded. What you're arguing for isn't a free market, it's an oligarchy.
I'll note that there's a significant shifting of the goalposts between your previous post and this one, too. Before, you were saying that networking is a valuable skill, and that's somewhat true, but now you're admitting that competence never had anything to do with it. If someone happens to be your child, you're happy to give them positions they don't deserve even if they're completely incompetent.
Yeah, I'm being a bit contrarian & spicy for the sake of argument (don't hold it against me, my actual position is way more nuanced), but even so: I don't really see how nepotism forges a path to oligarchy. If they are completely incompetent, they'll run the company into the ground and the free market still wins.
I've watched wildly incapable people bluff their way up a corporate ladder, fail over the course of two years in an elevated role, and then use that previous title to bluff their way into better positions elsewhere (and then leave those positions before they're totally found out to move on to somewhere else with a yet better title). I've watched people come out of McKinsey into the startup world, talk a major game -- they are the best conjurors of business fantasy at strat plannings and my god, those decks -- but then utterly fail to deliver for years only to end up with SVP roles at major companies on the "strength" of their backgrounds.
I get it: play the man, not the puck or whatever...but eventually somebody has to make sure the puck ends up in the fucking net and not sold off to buttress quarterly earnings.
In that movie, Willis plays a hard worker that is unpolished, while his slick, suited co-worker just sails on through life.
The people I know who've successfully demonstrated their ability to operate at the C level are addicted to the role and have more money than time. I wonder if we can come up with some kind of prestige leveling system and just not pay them after a while.
A physical $100 million CEO coin with embedded connection to a purpose-built government blockchain. The coins are non-transferable.
https://es.finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/?guccounter=1&guce_r...
Larry & Sergey are only humans. They can get bamboozled by people just like anyone. And they are in a situation where the very best bamboozlers are trying to bamboozle them, all the time. The people "failing up" are, in some cases, the Lebron James's of bamboozlement.
It's quite strange to see very capable people fall for such types, but it happens, I've seen it - and everyone around saw it except the very capable person.
There was a TGIF where prominent Search leaders (highest level of engineer, not management) openly asked Larry why we were being asked to compromise the quality of Google search to grow Google+ when GOogle+ was such a crappy and unpopular product. Larry just sort of lamely asked "can't you all get along" and then shortly afterwards, abdicated to Pichai (whose main skill was mainly to get all the SVPs to stop shivving each other in the quest to grow revenue). It was pretty clear that Vic had somehow convinced Larry through grima-style wormtonguing that social feed was the future for google, and Larry had fallen for it.
The difference being, there was no gandalf to come along and reinvigorate Larry.
So you can see why Eric, Larry and Sergey were afraid. They were worried that Facebook might ultimately do a search engine that somehow integrated social recommendations, and that'd be the end of Google. That fear was shared by other top execs like Hoelzle and Alan Eustace iirc. No wormtonguing was required. They convinced themselves of that thesis all by themselves.
In that environment lots of teams were trying to sprinkle social magic onto their product, often in hamfisted ways. The GMail team launched an ill-fated social network called Buzz that immediately upset lots of users who clicked through the consent popup without reading it and discovered that their address books were suddenly public. Maps was adding their own social features. Orkut was an actual social network popular in Brazil. But, none of these products integrated with each other in any way. They mostly even had their own separate user profiles! Like, there wasn't even one place to set a profile picture for your Google account. It was pretty disastrous.
Given that, some attempt at a unifying social layer was inevitable. Gundotra gets unfairly demonized in my view. Google+ was probably the best that Google could have done to compete with Facebook. It wasn't enough because it was a me-too product driven by corporate fear, and such products are rarely compelling. But it also wasn't terrible. Some users really liked it.
Having once been on an engineering team where we all wound up shivving each other's ideas in a quest to, idk, do good work? be alpha? its been a while - when the company hired a manager who was able to stop the shivving, it was like night and day. I can deeply respect that skill!
(And created a product and company that is basically universally loathed)
The cynical assumption would be that they're just sitting on the extremely vast hoards of money and greedy for more. The (slightly) less cynical assumption is that their interest in Search nowadays is as a piggy bank for projects they consider more important.
Worth noting though the latter has long been the going assumption internally at Google: Search was the cash cow that funded Google's expeditions in finding the Next Big Thing. This plan has been complicated by the appearance that Google seems to not be terribly good at the kind of product execution that would lead them to the Next Big Thing.
The technology that one would get in an open source situation isn't very usable outside of Google's ecosystem because Google builds software on top of Google's stack. Like, without the monitoring infrastructure they've built or the Borg scaling infrastructure, their software is actually kind of fragile because the ethos is " If it starts to malfunction break it quickly so it can cause a monitoring event and to get replaced by auto restart."
The Google way of doing things is actually not a great way to architect most software that isn't running on a giant data center structure.
It's probably worth mentioning that hypothetically, One could take the source code and port it to third party libraries and kubernetes. But I can't help but think that that would be about as much work as clean rooming it from scratch based on a feature description.
My two cents is that Google has been consumed by its performance review process; the amount of money made by advancing dwarfed the amount of money made by making advancements, and as always the metric was the outcome.
Advancement and fulfilling of personal ambitions is a common thing in basically every sufficiently large company. Google isn't unique in having that problem - nor is their promotion process markedly different than everyone else's!
What is different is that Google is extremely metrics and OKR driven, combined with a near-total absence of product leadership. There is often no broader product strategy besides "grow X by Y".
This results in a critical weakness where you can get promoted for shipping Obviously Dumb Shit, because it hits some ill-defined OKR. It's practically an annual tradition within Google's management: creatively interpret pointless and vague OKRs so that you can make a (contorted) argument that Projects X and Y contribute to it, so you can ship it and get everyone involved their promos.
People in other companies are ambitious and want to get promoted too! The difference is that in many other companies there are other sanity checks in place that you don't get promo'ed for shipping Obviously Dumb Shit.
Google's root problem IMO is that there is an extreme lack of product leadership and product vision at the very top levels of the company. This results in a near-total inability to mitigate meta-hacks of internal promotion systems.
At companies with more product strategy at some point someone at a high level goes "Projects X makes no damned sense!" and puts the kibosh on it. At Google Project X will ship, and then after its badness becomes inescapable, get shut down.
Forget about a "Jobs returning to Apple" miracle. As they say, "you can't get there from here". There's no easy path for Google back from the short term profit-driven corner they've painted all of us into.
But there are plenty of other incentives that AI hasn't touched at all.
That was a couple of years before the rest of us started smelling smoke coming out.
Their passion and energy now goes into designing the most comfortable super jet for their free time.
[is OP's implication, i have no idea if it's true]
“we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-advertising-and-search-e...
They have enormous power, but they are now also up against vast armies of lawyers and executives and lobbyists who will whisper and whine in their ears all day
Do I, Larry Page, really want to deal with all of that with my failing health and depleting energy?
Even if Alphabet lost all its market value tomorrow, they've already cashed out enough of their stock to have thousands of lifetimes of money.
PR needs short-sellers too.
On Apple’s job site, it will include OpenCL jobs in addition to OpenGL.
It is probably more efficient for my time and sanity to create a web scraper and run my own searches offline. At least for searching for job postings.
e.g. something like "exact match for this string" and ~(similar or fuzzy match for this string)
Sure you can force it by using "foobar" but yeah, searching the web isn't what it used to be.
The point here is to highlight the actually cartoonish level of dysfunction and damage with an intentionally cartoonish flourish.
The "villian" in this case can be colorfully interpreted as the real world isomorphism of a mustache stroking, side sneering perpetrator, from any usually fictional world-stakes good vs. evil story.
Intentional exaggeration also communicates a bit of self-awareness, that gives heavy crisis alarms more credibility. The author's levity demonstrates a higher level awareness and humility, by making fun of his own extraordinarily serious thesis.
Finally: gallows humor. Add humor when talking about depressing things to relieve the anxiety that often inhibits discussion and contemplation of difficult topics.
[0] See famous "juvenile" writer Mark Twain.
This is a good point. This 3700 word article titled “The Man Who Killed Google Search” about Prabhakar Raghavan does not contain context for why the author would dislike Prabhakar Raghavan or speak ill of him professionally.
Correlation isn't causation. Don't just buy that someone is fully to blame because someone told you they were fully to blame.
I don't understand the correlation isn't causation argument in this context. If no one ever tried to convince others of their thesis, with numerous arguments, what's the point of writing?
He could have said “perhaps there is a disconnection here” but rather opted to volunteer that he is in fact Very Smart and others are Very Dumb. With a position like that any writing that’s meant to convince the reader is pointless as there exists only ontological truths (things that he already agrees with) and pointless ramblings of cartoon buffoons (things that he does not already agree with)
None of the statements in this is the case, other than that there are smart people.
> the descriptors lack nuance
> motivations, incentives, and constraints are not black and white
Hyperbole isn't a knife. Any more than a political cartoonist's brush. It is satire. Biting humor.
The more ridiculous the caricature, the less you are supposed to take the details literally.
The "culprit" is a lightening rod. Taking the heat for what is obviously the result of a lot of people's seemingly poor or unfortunate judgements. Google search was a thing of beauty. Now it is an ugly swamp I have personally stopped trying to wade through.
It's not at all obvious that the author intends to sound hyperbolic. At the risk of Poe's Law here, they come across as saying exactly what they intend to say, perhaps attempting to appeal to an audience looking for such portrayals.
A lot of people, and whover they report to, right to the top, are responsible too.
But the fact remains, that this manager is (according to the essay) strongly associated with major product misfires. At best, they didn’t manage to influence decisions down better paths.
And the enshittification of Google is so obvious, so bad for customers and what has become a utility for the Internet in general, that identifying and shaming those responsible seems like useful customer-citizen feedback to me.
People need to push back as the quality of the online environment matters.
No respect for the value extractors who keep showing up to ride on the coattails of the value makers! (Even when they are the same people.)
The gentleman being called out, or another representative, is welcome to clarify why Google Search is really better than it presents. Or why they are not responsible for its precipitous quality drop - I.e. insurmountable constraints and challenges or whatever their view is. Although those kinds of excuses are not very credible when ad revenue over optimization is the obvious problem.
They are even more welcome to reverse the rot.
>> I am an Engineer. In my profession, I take deep pride. To it, I owe solemn obligations.
>> As an engineer, I pledge to practice integrity and fair dealing, tolerance and respect, and to uphold devotion to the standards and dignity of my profession. I will always be conscious that my skill carries with it the obligation to serve humanity by making the best use of the Earth's precious wealth.
>> As an engineer, I shall participate in none but honest enterprises. When needed, my skill and knowledge shall be given, without reservation, for the public good. In the performance of duty, and in fidelity to my profession, I shall give my utmost.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Engineer#Oath
Might be more realistic than imposed dogma, you never know.
>I also think we need engineers who do jobs that are ugly to preserve our freedom.
I think so too.
If you build something that can be used for evil purposes, some people along the line are going to have to judge how to build it, or whether or not to build it at all.
This seems like it would always require some moral judgment of some kind.
An engineer who plays an important technical role should not be removed from this type responsibility.
For instance, consider making weapons, some of which might be used offensively, others only defensively.
Some engineers would have no moral qualms against either type, others who are more selective, and others not willing at all. But regardless, coexistence is assured if it is accepted from the outset as an engineering goal.
These are really quite "different things for different people", triggering a different degree of uneasiness as different lines are crossed. All based on a moral foundation, incidentally whose goalposts can be moved whether anyone wants them to or not.
All could be valid depending on the situation, but a creed for the profession can help to better focus outcome, away from the direction of making things worse for humanity because of your efforts.
Experience has shown you really don't want people in key positions without a moral compass to guide their aspirations, and engineering can be important.
who decides they're needed? me, or some other form of authority? "shall be given"... as in no compensation just forced to work? "the public good", what does that even mean? like software for homeless shelters or national defense? Does designing AI for targeting enemies for bombing count as public good? In many eyes it does and in many eyes it does not.
And I think that is really part of the problem. The idea that something like this is "goofy" just makes me feel profoundly sad. Do people just not care about integrity anymore, to the point that asking someone to declare their intent to do their work with honesty is considered silly and pointless?
We truly live in a cynical world.
"I shall participate in none but honest enterprises"
Who defines honesty in this context? What if two engineers disagree in their interpretation and come to different conclusions? The statements in this are so vague as to simply not be implementable in any sort of self-consistent way. Signing a vacuous unimplementable statement isn't integrity, it's mindless follower behavior.
Many of us act with integrity without signing oaths of loyalty.
Aspirational ethics exist outside of verifiable scenarios.
Like surely you have some concept of honesty that you strive for... Unless you're like a sociopath?
I'm not saying it would be wrong to be a sociopath or to genuinely have no concept of an honest enterprise. I'm just trying to understand if you are truly amoral here, and that's why you can't formulate the statement in a way that makes sense to you, or if you're belaboring the point in protest because you need the statements to be more precise. I suspect it's the second one - you're just not aware of the common components of what an ethical enterprise is.
If you need a principal to be more precise, the usual way is to define sub principles that make up the principle. These principles in turn would tend to be defined in terms of other principles but let's assume that just one level of recursion gives us more meat to really judge the meaning of honest Enterprise. Then we might adopt principles like this:
Defining an "honest enterprise" in a way that is precise and actionable could incorporate several key principles. Here I have asked GPT4 to provide them, since it's excellent good at these kinds of ethical elaborations. I also happen to agree with the principles that it came up with.
Honest Enterprise is commonly taken to mean:
1. *Legal Compliance*: An honest enterprise complies with all applicable laws, regulations, and standards. This is a baseline requirement, reflecting a commitment to operate within the legal frameworks that govern its activities.
2. *Ethical Integrity*: Beyond legal compliance, an honest enterprise adheres to ethical standards. This includes transparency in operations, fairness in dealings with customers, suppliers, employees, and other stakeholders, and integrity in financial reporting and corporate governance.
3. *Social Responsibility*: The enterprise actively contributes to the welfare of the community and environment. This includes practicing sustainability, engaging in community development, and avoiding actions that harm the public or the environment, even if such actions are technically legal.
4. *Accountability*: An honest enterprise holds itself accountable to its stakeholders by being open to scrutiny and responsive to feedback. It should have mechanisms for addressing grievances and correcting misconduct.
5. *Commitment to Truth*: The enterprise should commit to honesty in its communications, advertising, and all forms of public interaction. This includes not engaging in deceptive practices or misrepresentations.
6. *Employee Respect*: Treating employees with respect, providing fair compensation, ensuring workplace safety, and supporting their professional development are signs of an honest enterprise.
7. *Innovation and Fair Competition*: The enterprise should engage in fair competition practices, respecting intellectual property rights, and avoiding practices that unfairly eliminate competition.
By strongmanning these principles into the definition of an honest enterprise we gain an ethical principle that is much harder to dispute or disagree with. Someone encompassing all these principles will tend to naturally have credibility and ethos.
It's not about the fact that the principles are arbitrary and vary from person to person. It's about the fact that you have taken great pains to collect a set of sub principles that are powerful and effective.
Oaths may come from a Time when such principles would have been more or less normalized through society. But we still have the power, by reflecting upon and studying the component principles of honest Enterprise, to adopt a strong and effective principle here. When you see a vague ethical principle, just take it to the strongest and the most effective version that you can reasonably compile. I think that's all that can really be expected of someone, ethically.
All the words you saw previously were written with my permission and vetted by me. I took pains to make sure that every ethical concept was good. And I told you that I was using AI. I encourage you to read the principles and benefit from them.
But if that's not good enough for you, I invite you to go kick rocks. It's your choice and your life.
Personally I judge writing on its own merits, or I am making the genetic fallacy.
If I cannot critically analyze text regardless of source, I will lose opportunities to learn and benefit from knowledge. We are entering a time where both good and bad text will be written by AI. We will need to be able to know the difference.
Good luck and have a good day.
The presence of a ceremony - no matter how important it was in the past - just doesn't hold value anymore. I doubt that Professional Engineers(TM) that have signed the oath are among us operating on a higher plane of morality and gravitas. They're, most likely, by Occam's razor, just another person.
The idea that any amount of my peers (or myself) present at the same ceremony take this oath seriously is laughable. It's a wine and cheese event before you get your degree, nothing more.
well let's be honest, Google was never founded to dig wells or feed starving children. It was only ever for the profits.
Also, in their defense, afaik no one's paychecks have ever bounced. I bet many many people would become very interested in profit and its growth if their direct deposit all of a sudden stopped.
It's all for profit everything should be allowed for profit. Even really f*** awful products that hurt people and shouldn't exist... should be allowed for profit right? That's the line you're seemingly arguing.
>It was only ever for the profits.
Why not? But remember how they had a proven bonanza without having to be the least bit evil?
I know that's not enough for some people, so too bad.
>no one's paychecks have ever bounced.
I guess you could say that. Technically correct.
>their direct deposit all of a sudden stopped.
This appears to be what has actually happened to thousands, and may continue for some time.
Personally I don’t mind that sort of colloquial flare, it reads like I’m talking with a real person rather than a design document.
"Anyone who talks about class traitors, or almost any sort of traitor, outside of a real war, is deeply misguided on this point."
This is where you appear to imply you're ignorant of class traitorship. If you truly knew what it was - which you claim elsewhere to know - then you would know it doesn't require a war. Class traitors are non-capitalists who collaborate with capitalists against workers. They can do that during peace.
Now forgive me if the following explanation is unnecessary:
When someone uses a term in a misguided way we can say they made a faux pas. When you claim the author is misguided for talking about class traitors outside of war, you're implying they have made a faux pas.
But the author is making no mistake. Class traitors exist in peace time as well, as I mentioned.
So if you know what a class traitor is, then admit the author is not misguided. If you can't make that admission, you have misunderstood the nature of class traitorship.
I think this is deeply misguided.
Do you disagree with communist theory in general?
I disagree with I think every implementation and its death toll, and with the general idea that we should be forming groups to violently gang up on other groups. Whether it's national socialism killing the citizens of other countries and taking their stuff to give to the government to apportion, or regular communism killing the citizens of other classes (classes defined by the communists) and taking their stuff to give to the government to apportion. Centralised economic control can easily get bad in small organisations, but at least the blast radius is limited. When it's in the hands of the government, who also have all the other powers, it never seems to work out well.
As it stands, the text is comprehensive, truthful, informative, and attacks the issue at hand in a fair way.
I am happy with it.
I propose AI walls of text are bad form when they contain hallucinations and bad arguments, and are needlessly long and bungling. I hear your criticism that it was too verbose, but again, I feel that was necessary.
I propose that it's good enough.
Good day and good luck scaling artificial walls of text.
Are you saying that it's an incorrect description, or are you just generally against accusing people of things?
Comparatively, socialism is other people's labor. That may be all you can do if there are not many other resources.
Free Enterprise is something completely different altogether.
For the Soviet natives I've known who have come to the US, it has often turned out to be the Free Enterprise which was the most promising thing they found which was not in their previous environment.
There was a sense in which the author uses that term as an abstract and meaningless insult. But there's also the sense in which the author uses the term as a reference to the class struggle, and the fact that scientists are generally in a lower class than capitalists, and so should, in theory, owe their allegiance to worker class rather than the capital class.
All of this nuance is implied in that statement. If you see class traitor and don't immediately think about arguments about the class struggle between capitalists and workers, then you are in effect infantilizing the term.
You can claim that a large part of the audience will naturally react that way to this term. However it may be the case that the author does not care if people who do not believe in the class struggle would tend to infantilize that term. Speaking to the audience that knows about the class struggle theory is sufficient and valid.
Like, if we can't allow some level of incisive criticism of extremely well paid tech executives, who have a massive influence on technology, in an article/blog describing feasible harm by said people to said industry, on the "talk about technology news" website, I honestly don't know what the point of forums, blogging, or the internet even is.
Understanding the dynamics is great, and we can learn from that, and apply it to other situations.
As for who to blame for something a company does, shouldn't outsiders blame the entire company? That's our interface, and also how we can hold the company accountable for its collective behavior.
It's also a defense against scapegoating: it wasn't just one person who made a unilateral decision, and everyone else -- up to and including the board, as well as down the tree, to those who knew and could walk and/or whistleblow -- was totally powerless. The company as an entity is responsible, and a lot of individuals were key or complicit.
No, I firmly believe that this level of indirection over-diffuses responsibility in a way that enables the malfeseance we're observing.
It's a social dark pattern that I'm keen to identify and disrupt.
I had the unfortunate experience of running a startup with a couple of guys from a name brand fintech. They absolutely demolished the company before we got our first sale.
I couldn’t quite work out if these guys learned their mendacious trade from $bigcorp or if $bigcorps simply attract these kind of people.
My sense is that it’s a bit from both columns - I think that huge, profit driven megacorps, in general, are bad for society, in part because corporate culture itself is rapacious, and in part because they deliver enormous power into the hands of incredibly selfish people.
The company should be held responsible for bad actions AND so should the individuals.
Which... is not a claim I'd agree with without extremely convincing evidence.
It implies that getting rid of That Fucking Guy is a necessary but likely insufficient condition for improving things.
Orgs that have been dysfunctional for a long time tend to have very complex dysfunctions, but there are still ways to fix these orgs, and it often starts by removing poor leadership from their posts.
Does it immediately make everything sunshine and lollipops? Of course not, but removing leadership that's actively working to counter your goals is still a necessary step towards the greater goal.
I think there are often two camps when it comes to organizational dynamics: "Team Incentives" (everything is about org structure and incentives) vs. "Team Great Person" (everything is about a small set of specific high-level people)
The reality is often somewhere in between. IMO "Team Incentives" often errs too much in that belief - especially because dysfunctional incentives are often downstream from a surprisingly small number of people.
Maybe we just need to be better at navigating who _somebody_ is, organizations can only be so complex at the top.
I'm not sure that scapegoating makes the characterization of the article any better.
> atleast this guy has given us good information and context to understand Googles decline.
The style of the article gives good reason to think that the context & information is selectively provided.
> And of course, it's more entertaining when people are called out.
Yup.
So no don't go for pure sensationalism. Go for authentic voice and humor coupled with hard facts and sound arguments. That's what makes it powerful.
There was a CTA right at the beginning (which appeared suddenly after 4-5 seconds of reading so I lost my place), then another one a few paragraphs later, then less than 3 seconds after that, a pop-up to subscribe!
At that point I was so annoyed I just scrolled to the end to see how many more of these distractions I would have to endure, and then I found _yet_ another one and ALSO a bottom bar?
What gives? Is this really useful anymore? do people that subscribe after being harassed like this actually care about your articles?
I try to ignore these as much as possible, but holy cow, I just want to read this one article and maybe later _if_ I find it interesting I might read a couple more and THEN actually subscribe.
I am really annoyed by the amount of distracting stuff these "blogs" put in front you as if they wanted you to avoid reading the material. What is wrong with these people?
It's a bit of an unfortunate situation for the author, if any reasonable number of people are like me. If I didn't notice the less-intrusive efforts to get me to subscribe, and when I see the intrusive one (the modal pop-up), it makes me less likely to want to subscribe... oof.
I think the theoretical ideal from the reader's standpoint is that there's just one call to subscribe, at the very end, the idea being that if you can't make it to the end of the article, you probably aren't going to subscribe anyway.
And yet so many sites still do the modal pop-up that interrupts you while you're reading. So clearly they must work, at least well enough to get people to sign up? Then again, I do wonder how many people are so turned off by those pop-ups, people who would have subscribed, but decide not to?
I really think the article was relatively interesting, enough for me to consider other articles if it weren't for the amount of annoying nudges I got, which is a shame because the author probably put some good effort into it.
I agree that the only CTA should be at the end, but more and more it looks like it actually works, otherwise I would imagine people would stop doing it so often.
There was likely a significant change in cultural priorities inside Google driving this. While one person can certainly contribute to such a cultural change, it would be a better article if it focused on the change in cultural values itself.
This is probably the most true thing. It might depend on the person and the environment, but there are certainly people you cannot discount.
Now, let's look at how the corporate investors that hired that CEO operate.
Shareholders probably want it - up to the point where the whole thing goes "poof" - then of course they don't want it.
The engineers at Google were wonderful to work with up to 2010. It was like a switch flipped mid-2011 and they became actively hostile to any third party efforts to monitor what they were doing. To put it another way, this would like NBC trying to sue Nielsen from gathering ratings data. Absurd.
Fortunately, the roadblocks thrown up against us were half-hearted ones and easily circumvented. Nevertheless, I had learned an important lesson about placing reliance for one's life work on a faceless mega tech corporation.
It was not soon after when Google eliminated "Don't Be Evil" from the mission statement. At least they were somewhat self aware, I suppose.
The hostility was simply this. One day we had a dedicated high level Google engineer helping us out and giving us guidance (and even special tags) to get the data we needed in a cost effective manner for both Google and us. The next day, he was gone and we received demands to know exactly what we were doing, why and even sensitive information about our business. After several months of such probing, we were summarily told that the access we had was revoked and that there was no recourse.
We circumvented by setting up thousands of unique IP addresses in 50+ countries throughout the world and pointing our spiders at Google through them (same as they do to everyone else). These were throttled to maintain very low usage rates and stay off the radar. We continually refilled our queues with untouched IPs in case any were ever blacklisted (which happened occasionally).
As for what we did, we sampled ads for every keyword under the sun, aggregated and analyzed them to find out what was working and what wasn't. This even led to methods for estimating advertiser budgets. At one point, we had virtually every Google advertiser and their ongoing monthly spend, keywords and ad copy in our database. Highly valuable to smart marketers who were looking for an edge.
I and a number of other people left in 2010. I went on to work at Blekko which was trying to 'fix' search using a mix of curation and ranking.
When I left, this problem of CPC's (the amount Google got per ad click in search) was going down (I believe mostly because of click fraud and advertisers losing faith in Google's metrics). While they were reporting it in their financial results, I had made a little spreadsheet[1] from their quarterly reports and you can see things tanking.
I've written here and elsewhere about it, and watched from the outside post 2010 and when people were saying "Google is going to steam roll everyone" I was saying, "I don't think so, I think unless they change they are dead already." There are lots of systemic reasons inside Google why it was hard for them to change and many of their processes reinforced the bad side of things rather than the good side. The question for me has always been "Will they pull their head out in time to recover?" recognizing that to do that they would have to be a lot more honest internally about their actions than they were when I was there. I was also way more pessimistic, figuring that they would be having company wide layoffs by 2015 to 2017 but they pushed that out by 5 years.
I remember pointing out to an engineering director in 2008 that Google was living in the dead husk of SGI[2] which caused them to laugh. They re-assured me that Google was here to stay. I pointed out that Wei Ting told me the same thing about SGI when they were building the campus. (SGI tried to recruit me from Sun which had a campus just down the road from where Google is currently.)
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18_y-Zyhx-5a1_kcW-x7p...
[2] Silicon Graphics -- https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/peninsula-high-tech...
At some point a pay for search model might emerge that has a big enough audience to support a company but that time is not yet here.
Would it come back? As it was? no. The folks at Bing used some of the techniques to mitigate some spam in Bing results but didn’t implement slashtags.
It would cost between $3 - $6M to go from scratch to developing a 3 billion page index with a 10 billion page crawl ‘frontier’. You can seed the crawl with Common Crawl. If you can get $10 RPM’s ($10 per thousand queries) and roughly 10M queries/day (so $10k/day recurring revenue) you can run an operationally cash flow positive business. You would want to grow it organically to a 10 billion page index on a 100 billion page crawl which would cover 90+% of the english language queries. With clever optimizations (like a news sieve to only index pages about the news that made ‘sense’) you might improve efficiencies. You would also want to focus on reference applications (people who use search to get their job done) for paid subscriber growth, and simpler commercial partnerships for managing ad lead generation on commercial search (people looking for products or services).
Also you would need to be an advertising ‘primary’ (not taking feeds from networks on a revenue share model) So, for example, working directly with Amazon to both efficiently access their internal product index and to surface it on commercial queries. Note people like Amazon do their own advertising business on their own index so you compete with that to some extent and navigating that early is essential.
Certainly doable but not something that your typical venture fund would go for. It would have a longer payback time (lower internal rate of return) than VC’s look for.
I have a strong memory of watching a Jacques Cousteau documentary on sharks and learning that Sharks could become mortally wounded but not realize it because of how their nervous system was structured. As a kid I thought that was funny, as an engineer watching companies in the Bay Area die it was more sobering.
If you have read the article, I think Gomes was right and saw search as a product, whereas Raghavan saw it as a tool for shoveling ads. A good friend of mine who worked there until 2020 wouldn't tell me why they left, but acknowledged that it was this that finally "ruined" Google.
Their cash cow is dying, I know from running a search engine what sort of revenue you can get from being "just one of the search engine choices" versus the 800lb gorilla. Advertisers are disillusioned, and structurally their company requires growth to support the stock price which supports their salary offerings. There is a nice supportable business for about 5,000 - 8,000 people there, but getting there from where they are?
My best guess at the moment is that when they die, "for reals" as they say, their other bets will either be spun off or folded, their search team will get bought by Apple with enough infrastructure to run it, Amazon or someone else buys a bunch of data centers, and one of the media companies buys the youtube assets.
As a chess person, saying "Mate in _" means it's a calculated inevitability. There is no mathematical way out of it.
It is not nearly equivalent to the outside judgement of a company with so many factors — it's just incomparable.
In chess, it's specifically used for saying "even with the best defense possible, you will be mated no mater what in a maximum of X moves." Computers use this definition as well. If Stockfish says # in 6, that means there is an indefensible path to mate available, and with the best play of the opponent will take 6 moves.
It's not a "Mate in X, probably."
But I can guarantee you that Google employees are reading these comments and saying "Wow, this guy is totally full of it, he doesn't know about anything!" and for some of them that thought will arise not from flaws in what I and others are saying, but in the uncomfortable space of "if this is accurate my future plans I'm invested in are not going to happen..., this must be wrong." I have lived in that space with an early startup I helped start, when I went back and worked on the trauma it had caused me it taught me a lot about my willingness to ignore the thinking part of my brain when it conflicted with the emotional part.
You have to do some of that to take risks, but you also have to recognize that they are risks. Painful lesson for me.
:-)
Google today is starting to smell of future financial engineering games, like when a car maker earns more through financing than selling core product.
They're dead when everyone starts to hate them and someone says "no, look how much money they're making, they're fine." That's the fatal blow, because they think they're fine, and keep doing the things that make everyone hate them.
At that point you're just waiting for someone else to offer an alternative. Then people prefer the alternative because the incumbent has been screwing them for so long, and even if they change at that point, it's too late because nobody likes or trusts them anymore, and ships that big can't turn on a dime anyway.
You have to address the rot when customers start complaining about it, not after they've already switched to a competitor.
I remember running into Kodak engineers, at an event in the 1990s, and they were all complaining about the same thing.
They were digital engineers, and they were complaining that film people kept sabotaging their projects.
Kodak invented the digital camera. They should have ruled the roost (at least, until the iPhone came out). Instead, they imploded, almost overnight. The film part was highly profitable.
Until it wasn't. By then, it was too late. They had cooked the goose.
One can really dream up a fascinating alternate timeline of iKodak if they didnt shoot themselves in the foot.
It had a magnetic mount, where you could snap on external lenses.
I'm pretty sure they still have some variant of the concept, except that it's an external camera that uses your phone as a viewfinder.
The company imploded because it spent all of its time, attention, and capital trying to become a pharmaceutical factory, starting in the mid-1980s.
They did indeed have a huge patent arsenal from all their research efforts that was very valuable. They were also really good at consumer tech - so it’s a shame it didn’t amount to more.
In other words, it could have been better for Kodak as a whole if they allowed their digital-arm to compete more with their film-arm, so that as the market shifted they'd at least be riding the wave rather than under it.
The Flash Renaissance was the counter-era to the search despair era we currently find ourselves in.
In the same vein as Kodak, I wonder what the alternate timeline would look like where Adobe cannibalized native apps.
[1] https://youtu.be/65crLKNQR0E?si=mXPgXxlMRxU-xjcu&t=2472
It's kind of astonishing that all these years later we still don't have something equivalent in browsers. In theory they're Turing-complete and you can do whatever you want, but where's the thing that makes it that easy?
Suffice it to say, there are a lot of people who worked very hard to make sure that the 1998-2012ish period of openness and open-access and democratization was an anomaly. You got to see a mini-echo of this with the rollout and rollback of pandemic-era accessibility.
Fujifilm survived by diversifying more into a chemical company than a consumer product company (whereas Kodak sold off those portions of the company as "not being core to consumer imaging" and focused on printers(??))
And yet even Fuji are now back to having traditional film photography being their single largest revenue generator (their instax instant film is now so popular it is chronically sold out and they are doubling factory capacity to keep up)
And the internet isn't new anymore. There is no vast landscape of unexplored new technological possibilities, and no garage start up with an engineering mindset that will just offer a better solution.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...
And that's just desktop. Microsoft ceded the entire mobile market, which in turn now represents the majority of devices. The majority of the company's profits no longer come from selling Windows and Office. If they hadn't pivoted into a new line of business (Azure) they'd be on a trajectory to impact with the ground.
IBM has been bleeding customers -- and business units -- for decades. Their stock is flat, not even keeping up with inflation, compared to +300% over the last decade for the overall market. And they have no obvious path to redemption.
Oracle is kind of an outlier because of the nature of their business. Their product has an extraordinarily high transition cost, so once you're locked in, they can fleece you pretty hard and still not have it cost more than the cost of paying database admins high hourly rates for many hours to transition to a different database. Then they focus their efforts on getting naive MBAs to make a one-time mistake with a long-term cost. Or just literal bribery:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/27/sec-fines-oracle-23-million-...
And even with that, their database market share has been declining and they're only making up the revenue in the same way as Microsoft through cloud services.
Meta isn't a great example because people just don't hate them that much. Facebook sucks but in mostly the same ways as their major competitors, they're still run by the founder and they do things people like, like releasing LLaMA for free.
Maybe it's time to switch to a competitor.
This is certainly a completely different picture than Yahoo for example.
And your argument for Microsoft is that they are in a death spiral because they only have 70% of market share on the desktop, and are shrinking by 2% per year, so in, uh 15 Years they might only have 50% of the market share! Also, please ignore that they successfully diversified their revenue streams to other markets (Cloud).
And your evidence is that they failed to capture the mobile market. While you also argue that Google is in a death spiral when Google is actually the company that won the mobile market.
I think you might be using the term death spiral in an unconventional way here.
You cited them because they are hugely profitable, ignoring the ones that are already defunct. And the entire premise is that a company can simultaneously be posting profits while doing the thing that will ultimately destroy them.
> And your argument for Microsoft is that they are in a death spiral because they only have 70% of market share on the desktop, and are shrinking by 2% per year, so in, uh 15 Years they might only have 50% of the market share!
Platforms have a network effect. They're doing so poorly that the network effect from having 90% market share isn't enough to prevent them from losing market share. But now they only have the network effect from 70% market share, which makes it even easier for customers to switch. That's how you get a death spiral.
> Also, please ignore that they successfully diversified their revenue streams to other markets (Cloud).
Which are in turn dependent on customers using Windows so they need Active Directory etc. See also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40142351
> And your evidence is that they failed to capture the mobile market. While you also argue that Google is in a death spiral when Google is actually the company that won the mobile market.
It is unquestionably the case that Microsoft lost the mobile market, which is the larger market. Android has the most worldwide market share, but Android is free to use and generates revenue for Google only to the extent that people want their services. If people stop wanting their services and switch to e.g. another search engine, how does it save Google from this even if they're using Android?
GE, while a reasonable example of a company that declined severely from its peak, was still generating 9B$ in income on 2023 before being split in better focused and profitable successors.
AOL/Yahoo were never dominant in a mature market. They were early to the Internet, but this was an uncharacteristically volatile time with an exponentially growing market.
Sony is also a leading manufacturer in several tech sectors (second largest camera, largest premium TVs). 6B$ net income and rising.
3DFx was never dominant in a mature field but, again, early in a nascent one. They collapsed quickly, not through some highly profitable extended death spiral.
Compaq was never dominant in a highly profitable field. Their market share peaked at 14%.
DEC might be a genuine example, they were never the top of the field, but they did not manage to adapt and turn things around when the world moved in a different direction. Compare to IBM who _were_ in a dominant position in the same field, and have leveraged that position into a sustainable and steady, if smaller and less groundbreaking, business.
Google might be in trouble (relatively speaking) if LLMs disrupt search, but they are not close to being in trouble from being outcompeted in search itself.
AT&T: today is not AT&T. The name was bought. It used to be Cingular.
GE: so your point is that it is a good example.
AOL/Yahoo: A 'mature market'? Are you making up rules so you can disqualify them?
Sony today only innovates in image sensors. They are a financial and entertainment company. Who cares if they sell the most 'premium TVs', this is the company created (off the top of my head) Betamax, CDs, DVDs, Minidiscs, Trinitrons, and made the best consumer tech in the world -- consistently.
3Dfx was the leader of an industry that is now lead by nVidia. That industry wasn't as big then, but everyone knew it would be and it was theirs to lose.
Compaq was the market leader in PC sales in the 90s.
DEC: so, it is a good example.
So no, not changing the rules, but maybe clarifying the point. Situations such as the rise of the internet in the late 90s and early 2000s are the anomaly, not the rule.
Operating Systems and Internet search are roughly the same they were ten years ago. 3d accelerator cards changed immensely in the years when 3dfx failed. Microsoft and Google are not in businesses where younger agile companies that read the changing tides better can quickly supplant them.
And that's why they get a thousand chances to turn things around while printing money with their "death spiralling" business.
Oracle, IBM and SAP have the advantage(?) of being heavily business focused from the start, and I don't see them ever die a natural death in our lifetimes. As long as they have the money to outbribe the competition they'll be there, and it will require a small miracle to break that loop.
Anything else they do is a bonus.
Having on premise hosting options for Exchange and all their core services is an example of that, even as they're also pushing for 365 in the cloud. I remember them being earlier than GCP to deal with GDPR and the in EU requirements as well but my memory might be failing.
People use Windows at home and at school and then employers use the same thing because they don't want to retrain people. But the home versions of Windows are becoming so malevolent that they're losing market share. Meanwhile all the things that used to require Windows are becoming web pages and phone apps. You go to a university and it's full of Macbooks and if you see a PC in the CS department there's a good chance it has Linux on it. These are the people who will be choosing what to buy in a few years.
But who cares about the clients anymore, right? They're making money from cloud services. Except their hook is getting people to use Active Directory and Microsoft accounts, which are the things for managing Windows client devices.
It's going to be a while before anybody convinces the accountants to stop using Excel, but for large swathes of employees Windows is no longer relevant, and if you don't need Windows then why do you need Azure instead of AWS or any of the others?
I don't have enough insight, but there's more to it than Windows/Microsoft services tie up. It's clearly not the ease of use for small customers, it could be the contract making, or something else that makes it better deal for businesses beyond just the cost bundling.
For instance I remember Apple hosting iCloud on Azure. And there's a few other big players going with Microsoft, especially retail chains who can't touch anything Amazon, and don't trust Google.
Medium businesses are big enough to want to have their own email domain but not big enough to want to implement their own spam filter, so they turn to the likes of Amazon and Google and Microsoft. Then Microsoft's advantage is they can manage and integrate with your Windows devices. Otherwise they're just doing price competition with every other hosting company. People who aren't even using Active Directory start to wonder why they should pay extra for SQL Server instead of using Mariadb on Linux, and in turn why they shouldn't put that VM on AWS unless Microsoft cuts them a better deal. (Which is presumably what happened with Apple, but offering long-term discounts is not how you make a lot of money.)
Frankly, I see very few people choosing Windows anymore.
Also, another point to add: Microsoft's Intune fleet management system is perfectly capable of managing Macs, and you can use AD as your IDM source of truth for just about anything, including SSO for Google Workspace & ChromeOS devices.
To your last point, Windows Server is a hard requirement in many enterprises because of legacy or procured software that requires it. That is entirely separate from end user computing.
(I used to run end user computing for an F500, and I also ran the Enterprise Apps org at the same time. This was from about 2008-2015, and initiatives including mass migrations aware from MS Office to Workspace, and replacing thousands of Windows laptops with Chromebooks.)
But as a business entity they've been ferocious from the start, and succeeded through sheer perseverance where Google gave up after some tepid tries.
Xbox would have been killed by Google in the first year. Exchange would have stayed in beta for a decade, and Office365 would have had no support if it was in GSuite.
If Google were to find a way, I think they'd need a radically different approach, as I don't see them ever fixing their focus problem.
That said, Google is still printing money and increasing profits and revenues. Nothing like falling profits (or even losses) to create some pressure to focus. DEC would be the example of a company that failed to do so.
But most importantly all the above listed companies with the exception of Meta are those that are heavily ingrained in large companies operations. IBM still provides mainframes, MS has Exchange and Windows domains and is successfully transitioning a lot of customers to Azure, Oracle has their databases and other products, SAP their ERP systems.
Once a non-IT company has their internal IT systems and some legacy working they're going to be very very slow in changing them out if it works, companies that provide those and get a critical are going to have very very long runways compared to regular b2c companies if a significant portion of their revenue comes from this.
Google has Chromebooks that are used in schools and some GCP usage but could that save Google long enough if search revenue was cut into a fraction? And GCP is kinda of an also-ran today, people looking at larger options usually look at AWS(nr 1) or Azure (Windows legacy).
If they could reduce headcount and operating expenditures to 2019 levels without losing that, they would be roughly breaking even without any search. They also have 280B$ in equity to tide them over.
When Google actually sees its business failing, it will have many many many chances to turn things around.
Google continues generating profits out of inertia and a lack of a better alternative.
It went for “don’t be evil” to “a necessary evil” (just until something a little better appears).
There is no Plan B, they are just going to break the law until they can’t and there’s zero clue what happens after that.
They sat back and let OpenAI kick their ass precisely because ghouls like Prabakar call the shots and LLM are not a good display ads fit.
The best parallel for Google is Kodak.
B) I don’t think it’s fair to characterize recent layoffs as some put-off collapse… criticize Google all you want for running a bad search engine, but right now they’re still dominant and search is the most effective advertising known to man. They’re raking in buckets of money: they had 54K employees on 01/01/2015, and 182K on 01/01/2024. Similarly, they made 66B in 2014, and 305B in 2023. The latest layoffs are them cleaning house and scaring their workers into compliance, not the death throes of a company in trouble — they’re barely a dent in the exponential graphs: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb...
Additionally, it's complete and total oversimplification. If you look at Google's earnings it's pretty damn clear that at least until 2020 they were not just going for maximum total spend, but for a steady, gradual raise in total spend. Not too slow, not too fast. They were NOT taking every opportunity they had, in fact they're famous for systematically refusing many opportunities (see the original founders' letter, but even after that). They were farming the ad market, the ad spend, growing it, nurturing it. Then COVID blew up the farm.
Maybe you're right now, but I do hope they're recovering their old tactics. Because if they maximize it you'd see nothing but scams ... wait a second.
B) Google was built by providing a vision, and getting out of the way of ground-up engineer efforts. "Scaring workers into compliance" IS killing the golden goose.
You can see this in AI. Every story from an AI engineer that ran away from Google is the same. They didn't run away for the money, they ran away because they were getting scared into compliance.
Now AI may make it, or not. I don't know. But this is happening EVERYWHERE in Google. Every effort. Every good idea, and every bad idea runs away, usually inside the mind of "a worker". Not to make them personally maximum money, but it's natural selection: if the idea doesn't run away, the engineer it's in is "scared into compliance", into killing the idea.
Whatever the next big thing turns out to be, it simply cannot come out of Google. And it will hit suddenly, just like it did for Yahoo.
Can you elaborate?
https://sifted.eu/articles/deepmind-talent
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-researcher-quit-google-op...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/features/2023-07-13/ex-goo...
https://mdwdotla.medium.com/why-im-leaving-google-for-a-star...
I guess I’m standing up for the simple idea that terribly inefficient organizations can prevail when they’re the incumbents, at least for significant periods if not forever. We can’t be complacent and assume they’ll fall on their own, esp when AGI threatens social calcification on an unheard of scale.
Work to sabotage and collapse the organization - do that for the good of humanity.
Thank you for your work, and good luck getting out without harm or reprisal <3
Hit em hard.
"Build a better search engine for the good of humanity", I can understand. "Kill a search engine for the good of humanity" is a reductive, childish take.
Sabotaging the revenue of Google search will weaken them against honest incumbents. They are currently well funded enough to kill incumbents. That will start to change as they decline, aided by our boycotts and other forms of sabotage. The decline and sabotage of Google is necessary for a better search engine to have the space to succeed.
A power vacuum is often good.
Linux and open source exists in a personal and collective power vacuum that was created by proprietary knowledge and software.
Sometimes power vacuums are colonized by people with good intentions. And it's neither reductive nor immature to help create those opportunities.
I never said that someone shouldn't sabotage Google as well as create a better search engine. I myself am working on llm-driven knowledge retrieval systems, at the same time as advocating for the destruction of Google.
Good luck and do anything in your power that you think will help humanity have good search again.
[1] https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-no...
Luckily/unluckily I left already due to factors out of my control. Regardless, for all of Google’s faults I will say that they were incredibly serious about data security and respecting consumer data protection laws with strict oversight, so I think “sabotage” in a direct sense would be incredibly hard + risky. The only solution I see is continuing to organize for government regulation. I would include worker organization within Google, but I recently learned they represent less than half a percent of the company…
That op-ed reminds me of some short fiction you might like:
https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/
Really? I have the impression Google’s other tools (I have lots of uses of Docs and Meet ) are degrading in quality quite quickly
That is a subjective judgement, but it seems Google no longer cares
Well in 2011 Google had just over 30k employees, and now they're doing "layoffs" with 180k+ in 2024. I don't think the layoffs mean much.
One of my observations between "early" Google and "late" Google (and like the grandparent post I see 2010 as a pretty key point in their evolution) was employee "efficiency." I don't know if you've ever been in that situation where someone leaves a company and the company ends up hiring two or three people to replace them because of all the things they were doing. Not 10x engineers but certainly 3 - 5x engineers. Google starting losing lots of those in that decade. They had gone through the "Great Repricing" in 2008 when Google lowered the strike price on thousands of share options. And having been there 5 to 10 years had enough wealth built up in Google stock that for a modest level of "this isn't fun any more" could just do that.
But aside from your observation that "they have plenty of people" it is similar to observing that a plane that has lost its engine at 36,000' has "plenty of altitude" both true and less helpful than "and here is the process we're going to use as we fall out of the sky to get the engines back on."
Google has lots of resources. If you have ever read about IBM reinventing itself in the 90's its quite interesting to note that had IBM not owned a ton of real estate it likely would not have had the resources to restructure itself. I worked with an executive at IBM who was part of that restructuring and it really impressed on me how important "facing reality" was at a corporation, and looking at the situation more realistically. I had started trying to get Google to do that but gave up when Alan Eustace explained that he understood my argument but they weren't going to do any of the things I had recommended. At that point its like "Okay then, have fun." Still, at some point, they could. They could figure out exactly what their "value add" is and the big E economics of their business and realign to focus on that. Their 'mission oriented' statement suggests that they are paying some attention to that idea now. But to really pull it off a lot of smart, self-interested, and low-EQ people are going to have to come to terms with being wrong about a lot of stuff. That is what I don't see happening and so I'm not really expecting them to transform. Both not enough star bits and the luma are just not hungry enough.
Here's a few more realistic changes that Alphabet could make: - shut down X - shut down Verily - sell calico or shut it down if no buyers - sell Fiber or shut it down if no buyers - shut down Intrinsic, Wing, and all the other X spinoffs - make Cloud be its own Alphabet company with Kurian as an actual CEO
That would show Wall Street that GOogle is really serious about not wasting money on crazy ideas. That would boost the price (along with reducing costs) giving them some runway. I think it would be a shame if Waymo was shut down but it has a long, long way to being highly profitable.
It looks like Alphabet wants to sell Verily or spin it out of the Alphabet family entirely (after decoupling Verily's infrastructure from Google's) but nobody wants to buy it.
1) If it isn't their idea that don't believe it will do any good and could not possibly be the "right" thing to do.
2) If they don't have a job after it happens, they will work behind the scenes to sabotage attempts to make it happen.
You can work around those, but you need "existential risk" level energy to create that sort of change in a company.
That said, how Blekko and Watson ended up squandering good technology in search of something else is also an interesting learning experience/tale.
Basically ad dollars have continued to transition from old media to digital media over the last decade+ and that mass migration has created enough revenue to cover up all of Google's core problems.
We might not like what they’ve become, but the comparison to a plane that’s lost its engine seems rather odd. Why couldn’t they keep going indefinitely, without making the changes that some would like?
Thank you for sharing your experiences, Chuck!
I do feel that I can't argue with his stuff, although it is very dark and cynical (and, truth be told, I have a lot of dark and cynical, in me, as well, but I try not to let it come out to play, too often).
The whole problem kind of got swept under the rug with most advertising ecosystems implementing a checkbox solution for clean traffic, and the web turned mobile user first.
My impression is that ad fraud never disappeared - it just got sanitized and rolled in with the other parts of the ad stack.
How much of (online) advertising is legit? Does any one know?
What would a "healthy" ad ecosystem look like? What should the the FTC (and advertisers) be working towards?
Eliminate any potential conflicts of interest? Bust up vertical integration (eg search & ads must remain separate companies)? Independent verification, as best able (eg like Nielsen does for ratings)?
Or maybe we determine (digital) ads based biz models are irredeemable, and we figure something else out.
Dennis Muilenburg was an engineer and handled the MAX crisis poorly but wasn’t responsible for the decision to divest key capabilities from Boeing or to optimize short-term sales over long-term survival by building the MAX instead of a new airliner.
The MAX was short term thinking on Boeing’s part. A foolish mistake in the aerospace industry. Boeing was a few years behind Airbus. Now they are a decade behind and tarnished their reputation.
Of course, there is no dog, sadly. It's just some half-assed algorithm and a company too poor to spider the entire internet often or consistently. And when it fails, as it does more often than not, I search again on Google. This is the part where I'm dumb though. I know Google won't find what I want. This is 2024's Google, not 2015's Google. It has been nearly a decade now since it returned good results, useful results. Maybe I am performing a ritual, praying that the original Google returns. Maybe I have defective cognition and an addictive personality.
I no longer even know for certain whether Google was ever as good as I remember it to be. Maybe I have imagined it.
Now? Google search shows you what it wants you to, and damn anything else.
It's not entirely Google's fault - the web has gotten worse. But they take a large share of the blame, and I believe that their failures have played a role in making the web worse.