I don't know if Google needs a new CEO, but from everything I've heard about internal Google, they need to change up how they measure success and who they reward. So many awesome products launched with tremendous hype, left alone to stagnate, and then unceremoniously shut down. At this point, I can't get excited when Google announces something, no matter how amazing it seems.
At this point, they're doing a very poor job of maintaining their core, legacy products. Search, their bread and butter, has been going downhill for years -- and is practically unusable today.
I keep seeing this sentiment around here, which confuses me because I think gsearch is better than ever. I find what I need instantly in 90% of cases, and when I don't, other engines don't really do better. Granted, I use ublock, but even with that turned off I'm not bothered by the ads. Can you provide examples of a query which gives unusable results, but Bing (or whatever) works?
I think the comkon case is if you're looking for anything niche/technical, it'll often just reinterpret your query as if it were a typo even if you quote it. That and searching for product reviews usually just returns SEO'ed trash like 10 10 lists or best vacuum cleaner 2020 that's just a mishmash of press releases as opposed to actul experience or useful information.
How many people and organizations online actually provide real filtered hands-on reviews of things these days? There are exceptions like Wirecutter and sites like Amazon provide some insight assuming you're willing to wade through all the fake reviews, But generally speaking, consumers aren't willing to pay the cost for in-depth reviews.
ADDED: There are individuals in some domain niches but you pretty much need to know who they are.
Google was sitting on a massive cash cow, so they appointed someone who would just keep it ticking over.
In the face of an existential threat, like ChatGPT, they need someone who can actually drive innovation. Not innovate themselves, nobody expects a CEO to do that, just create a culture which has a hope in hell of rising to fend off challenges to the empire.
They don't have this.
That have a CEO who is only capable in "good times" ... along with most of the company.
Faced with sufficient adversity, they will need a CEO who can succeed in the face of adversity.
Reddit has lots of them. Not sure why google can’t pick them up. YouTube also has specific reviews on anything you might want. Considering google owns YouTube, it’s strange that these results don’t bubble to the top.
YouTube has ostensibly strong policies around disclosing commercial activity, but Reddit does not. This "you can trust Reddit for reviews" narrative is nonsense. It costs basically nothing to subtly shill a product on Reddit, and more sophisticated operations will manipulate upvotes as well. On most niche subreddits, you only need a dozen upvotes to bubble to the top. Impossible to track abuse on that scale.
Not to mention the transparency nightmare of subreddit moderation.
Now, you're talking about essentially manual curation of trusted reviewers though. At that point, you're getting close to essentially resurrecting a Yahoo-style directory of good content. I don't really use Reddit but I have sites and people I go to for reviews of certain types of gear. But I don't know how scalable that is.
A big part of Googs secret sauce is ranking relevancy in part by reputation. They totally could index text-to-speech of youtube videos and rank channels by popularity in their content niches, then supply those when searches overlap their the content terms. Clearly they do _something_ like this, and probably could do more. Wirecutter and reddit should show up higher than random SEO fake-review sites, not because of manual ranking, but because NYT and reddit get higher traffic, and have higher reputation from other sites. They should able to derive signals that them so.
For Google, given the amount of knowledge it has on people, it's possible to know if someone is reviewing a product just for the sake of it, or is it a job for him.
> it'll often just reinterpret your query as if it were a typo even if you quote it
This is exactly it for me, there's no way to tell the computer "this is what I want you to do." Maybe it's because product designers don't want to tell the user no. If something does fail to work, we couch it in language like "oops, something went wrong, we're very sorry" with no further hint of what to do next.
Sometimes I just want the big database in the sky to tell me what it knows about a specific string of characters; this seems like it should be straightforward but I suppose it isn't.
In general, it's probably true that the amount (and sophistication) of spam and spammish content has tended to overwhelm whatever technology improvements in search there have been.
It's just that to the HN audience, the spam sure seems unsophisticated. I can imagine being able to filter out most blogspam just by looking at the CSS. like, every blog spam review and restaurant site is so obviously bad it hurts.
also, "bestmitersaw.com" or other similar single product review/spam sites filled with affiliate links. Jeez. Kill them all.
Also feel like if there was more then one way to interpret a query, it used to try and give an example of each on the first page. Like it used to be if I searched "ford", I'd get both links relating to Ford Motors and President Ford. Trying today, the first link to Prez Ford is on the third page.
I don't think you will ever get a 1:1 answer of a query that "works" in DDG/Bing but not Google, search is too curated. From my experience, when I am searching for what seems like a rare - but not completely unheard of errors happening in my code, on my sprinkler system, anything, it seems like the Google results are just crap compared to what the same query 5 years ago would have yielded.
I don't know what it is, if their algorithm is getting worse, or there is just too much shit on the internet to accurately index. From my experience, Google Search hasn't even just stagnated, it has gotten consistently and steadily worse for at least the last half decade.
Same thing happened to my Google Home, literally got dumber as the days went on, queries that it could answer yesterday, would just stop working the next day. I threw that thing in the garbage.
However once you look for very specific narrow results it attempts to outsmart you can be a real annoyance. When it decides to ignore some rare term and correcting your query while that rare term actually is the thing of highest significance.
So yeah, for 95% of the searches it is great, but on the 5% it feels like modern advances are in the way.
If 95% of the Google searches I made were great, I wouldn't have stopped using Google. My experience is more like 10% of the Google searches result in something close to what I'm looking for before the third or fourth page.
Can’t say much about other search engines, but Google has definitely let it slip really bad. For example, organic results being pushed below the fold, with organic-looking paid results taking top spots instead. Another big issue they’ve had for about a year now is in my native language search, the organic results are completely been taken over by Google-translate generated content that actually redirects to random aliexpress items. Their language models seem to prefer Google-translated sites over human generated language for some reason.
I agree with you that saying it's unusable is ridiculous but I HAVE noticed a marked decline in results. I still get what I need 98% of the time, but now that 2% has gone from no results to having to figure out how to force Google to search for what I want. I'll search for a phrase and frequently it'll flat out ignore a word I entered, so I'll put it in quotes, and it STILL ignores it. Then I'll result to an entire phrase in quotes and I just get trash results. I feel like advanced search features have been nerfed for some reason.
I find that if I'm looking for a factual topic I just get heavily SEO'ed, heavily ad laden blogspam. The algorithm must be weighting dwell time because if you are looking for recipe for how to cook eggs you'll get articles with 7 pages of ads interspersed with fluff filler copy before any actual recipe. And they probably have no incentive to cut this down because much of those ads might go through google's own ad networks.
The recent yandex leak had dwell time in it, I think. It makes me sad that it means that recipes (a very competitive field) are going to be coming after novels on the top sites.
From personal experience, Google search on a desktop w/ Adblock is great. And especially when you know what you're searching for, the experience is usually great.
On mobile or without adblock though or when trying to do discovery of something new, you really have to sift through pretty much the first 5-7 results as they're all sponsored, ads, or terrible SEO spam.
But it is a hard problem to solve, and no other search engine is better in that regard imo.
It can filter out native search results as well, as long as you tell it what to filter out. It's of course a bit limited since you have to know beforehand what you don't want to see, but it works great if you're looking to, for example, filter out specific websites.
It can, but I don't know of any default filters that would do such a thing, and that is besides the point. It certainly doesn't have enough time to classify a particular entry as SEO spam without doing RPC to an external service, IMO.
My suspicion is that most of the people that feel it is getting worse either a) hate ads or b) don't realize they do harder searches than what they used to do.
I'm fully aligned on hating ads. It is silly how the top results are all sponsored. Curated, I would like. Sponsored? Not so much.
My searches aren’t harder than they used to be. If anything they’re easier because I often know precisely what I’m looking for.
I stopped using google because it ignores my search terms and I find that infuriating. I’ll use a lower quality search engine simply for the lack of annoyance. Whenever I open a new chrome profile I’m reminded that I objectively hate google search.
> they're doing a very poor job of maintaining their core, legacy products.
My guess is that great PMs and engineers are not into incremental changes or maintaining a mature system. As a result, the sharpest minds for building product would have left the search org over the years, therefore the quality of search deteriorates over time. I'm not saying search org does not have great talent, but I guess their talent is about rearchitecting search infra for the 101 times for no groundbreaking gain.
A lot of the allstar PMs and Engs who helped actually GTM a lot of great Google products like Maps, Docs, Ads, etc left in the 2010s to start their own startups (eg. Jens Rasmussen - founded Google Maps and then left to found Where2), become execs at other companies (eg. Niklesh Arora @ PANW, Lars Rasmussen @ FB, Bret Taylor @ FB+Salesforce), become VCs (eg. Bret Taylor, Niklesh Arora), or (re)enter Academia (eg. John DeNero @ Cal).
There also was a change in how PMs began getting hired at Google in the 2010s when they brought a senior ex-McK TMT consultant to lead and revamp the Product team after Marissa Mayer left to become CEO of Yahoo.
This is part of it. It's also well understood within Google that the way to get promo and move up (and secure your job...lack of 'upward momentum' means you'll be first on the chopping block) is to launch. Getting 'stuck' doing maintenance and incremental improvements is a death knell for your career. Thus the pattern of big flashy product launch, followed by stagnation and eventual cancellation.
Instead, my guess is that they are optimizing the system for maximum ad revenue--and that the products only have to be good enough so users won't switch to Bing, etc.
> Search, their bread and butter, has been going downhill for years
As a user, yes. But based on the extra ads and garbage I suspect that profitability of search is at an all time high. So as long as search keeps “growing” then there’s an opinion that it’s a success. I think that’s dangerous for long term thinking and will lead to Google’s demise (see IBM, AT&T, Comcast, etc) that were profitable with horrible UX, until they weren’t profitable.
AT&T didn't get outcompeted. They got broken up by the government and before that were forbidden from commercializing discoveries some of which weren't really commercializable (like the origins of the universe).
I have been using a different search engine for about a year now and almost never go back to Google anymore, and when I do go back to Google it's almost always to use it as a dictionary (search: define something).
Your describing the outcomes of the old "perf" performance review system. Cultural issues like that are hard, but not impossible, to change. GRAD changes things, but as long as promotions are tied to shipping new projects and not excellence in maintaining those launches we will continue to see this behavior.
GRAD in theory represents a huge improvement on Perf. Rather than having to please a faceless committee by stopping the whole company for several weeks per quarter to write performance data for the committee, you now have to please your manager and it's their job to gather that data.
The layer of indirection between you and the calibration committee in Perf meant that maintenance work, since it does not generate nearly so many “artifacts” (design docs, engaged user statistics, lines of code written, code review requests) it was nearly impossible to quantify and reward. Your best chance was to ask people on neighboring teams to give you Kudos or Peer Bonuses for it, so that the committee would say “well it must have been important they got all of these gold stars!”
This is how you get a dozen competing chat apps, “improved the last chat app” cannot appear easily on Perf, “wrote a new chat app and we already have 50 users!” can.
However, though it affords an opportunity for things to be better, the internal rollout of GRAD has also been botched this past year. In the absence of strong leadership, managers are assembling the same data as before “we just must not call them perf packets”, and potentially reinstituting the same biases as before. (I was actually told by my manager that I could not get a rating above a certain ratings ceiling even though he wanted to recommend me higher because his director phrased a general rule that would apply to me, “if X then they should not get a rating above Y,” but hi I am also X on something of a technicality—and my manager was not sure he would have the political capital to argue my case.)
The botched rollout means that these culture improvements from not having to prioritize only what can be easily quantified, are delayed. Like, seriously delayed. Imagine that with really strong solid leadership you could have changed the culture in one year, but now that people are reconstructing the broken familiar process inside of the new process, the culture is not going to change for the next 5 to maybe even 10 years as second order influences slowly nudge it into a better scenario.
Google leardship was primarily reacting to threats, such as Amazon S3 and the iPhone, rather than proactively innovating. Despite the fact that AI is widely regarded as the future, Google has not made a significant effort to dominate in this field.
I think Google needs a visionary leader who can anticipate the future and make strategic investments. I do not think internal structure will change without visionary leader.
> Despite the fact that AI is widely regarded as the future, Google has not made a significant effort to dominate in this field.
I think of “Google and AI”, and I remember hearing more about their work on “AI ethics” than work on actual “AI” itself. Of course, ethics is important, but if you are more focused on the ethics of doing something than actually doing it, that’s scarcely a recipe for leading the market-on the contrary, it sounds rather risk-averse-and, maybe that’s unfair, I don’t know, but that’s just the impression I get from my own limited perspective.
Google uses AI/ML all over the place to incrementally improve their products and always has but what people mean by "AI" in this context is the big LLMs or generative AI.
> Google looks like the IBM to their Microsoft right now.
I really dislike how Microsoft is being considered to "be better at AI" recently. No, they just integrated another AI solution in Bing. They haven't released any big AI product themselves for a long time.
> has not made a significant effort to dominate in this field
It's almost like Google is not immune to the fate of being a massive company.
And just like prior large, market dominating firms (IBM / Microsoft / Intel), managed to miss a new trend (commodity PC hardware / web/mobile / contract fabbing) due to wildly profitable legacy revenue streams whose sheer size masked competitor acceleration.
> Google has not made a significant effort to dominate in this field.
What? Tensorflow, one of the 2 main frameworks for doing AI work is a google project. Google has domain specific processors to accelerate AI workloads - tensor processor. Google Brain. Id argue they have been making the biggest effort out of all the large tech conglomerates. They just haven't made an effort to turn their developments into consumer facing products, instead of milking the ad-cow even more.
Google has shown they can build amazing AI that can play chess and go, nice … then what? They built borg and gave k8s to the world and then what? OpenAI took the stage on ChatGPT and AWS dominates the cloud.
This goes back to way promotions are handled: clearly people are incentivized to build stuff but no one cares if that would have any path to profitability.
Does the world really need fucsia? ChromeOS?
A business needs both and needs to incentivize innovation along with long term commitment.
kubernetes came after the rise of aws, likely to keep google in the game
> Does the world really need fucsia? ChromeOS?
ChromeOS is an extremely popular OS, especially in education markets and there is definitely a need for such an OS. The majority of computers in the world are overkill for what the average end-user is trying to achieve and chromeOS fills that space very neetly.
Otherwise I agree with you that technology needs more than just technical vision to succeed, but my opinion is that AI isn't ready for the mainstage and maybe some people within google thought the same and chose to not rush anything. Then google made a massive blunder by going on the defense with their bard unveiling.
I don't think it's the problem with lack of innovation. Google has innovated in a lot of areas - Transformers (the foundation for ChatGPT), Stadia, Project Starline, and some the public may not have heard of yet.
The problem lies with translating that innovation to long term product vision, and reimagining how these innovations could be made into a product.
I suspect that they announce it to fast too, too soon - before it's proven. Stadia and LaMDA is an example of this. They actually showcased LaMDA last year or the year before that in I/O. The other is that they give up on innovations too soon because they can't think of ways to monetize them.
Pichai needs to go, and I've been calling it here for over three years.
It's been so obvious Pichai isn't the one to lead Google. Here's a mountain of evidence where you can see him failing to adapt to a risky situation and changing market:
Pichai has a history of not being bold, not responding to threats, not innovating, not fixing broken culture, not seeing the 20 year view of the market. He's lost some of the biggest advantages Google once held. He needs to be done. And he needs to be done three years ago.
Now when he's tasked with reversing the sinking ship? Totally fumbling.
I agree, but not with the conclusion. I don't think a Nadella is what they need. He's far too much of a stabilizer, which makes sense for Microsoft given their incredibly rocky years. This archetype is also what Pichai is trying to fill and why Google isn't working out.
When you step back for a moment, it's utterly bizarre Tim Cook was able to pivot Apple towards being this privacy-focused company who is now able to eat Google's ad lunch from right under them. Tim Cook, the very same guy people called just a boring distributions-focused leader, yet he has a more forward-thinking vision than Pichai. Pichai, the man who once led a team to create Chrome.
It's outright absurd how much one has stalled in comparison.
What I like about Nadella is that he is very responsive to threats, and I think he fundamentally gets the business. Much of MS' product line is improving across the board and ramping up vs AWS.
Cook really understands the customer perspective around privacy, and I view him as part of the A bomb that will destroy the glacier of Surveillance Capitalism. FB is limping, and Google is bleeding. He'll likely be ramming it at Mach5 with the subscription icebreaker which feeds right into the Apple ecosystem. Now, I do think he needs to drop %s and bring them down to reality as part of a long play to make it the best platform and defeat monopoly arguments.
He was a PM but there's relatively little PMing to do on a browser. If you look at the features Chrome launched with it was all engineering focused stuff: speed, security, non-functionals like that. The project itself was really driven by Page and some hires from Mozilla/Safari teams.
As if Google has half the staying power of IBM. You have to eeek along for 50 years to be IBM. Google has 1 cash cow and if it does it will be more Nokia than IBM
Id be totally willing to see Jeff Dean promoted to CEO. Not that I think he'd do a great job, but it would be interesting to watch. He's been building a case for this for quite some time.
> Eric Schmidt is busy trying to fix Pentagon software development,
That could actually play to his advantage if he really wants to be CEO again, it is my belief that in the current geo-security climate all the big US tech companies will become more and more entangled with the MIC (transforming it into a MIC+tech thing, in a way).
But I suspect that at this point Schmidt is trying to play the big political cards. Maybe he wants to become the new government-appointed tech Tsar in case that job will be created at some point? (I personally think that it will be created).
Nadella has done a better job than Ballmer but don't overrate him too much! He has many major failures on his watch. Microsoft has been very effectively buying a warm reputational glow with developers by splashing money around, but that's all relative to their previous state. It's still a company with a lot of problems:
- With the exception of VS Code, the Microsoft things developers like are purchased or just catching up with where competitors were 20 years ago e.g. GitHub, Minecraft, OpenAI, Windows Terminal, WSL.
- There's a top thread today on HN all about how much people hate Teams. Teams is an abomination yet forms the central pillar of their collaboration strategy; how can they have executed so badly that people seriously say they'd rather quit their job if it's introduced than deal with its terrible design?
- Windows has totally rotted away on Nadella's watch. The execution failure here is total. Does Nadella even use Windows himself? It's still critical infrastructure for much of the world but the entire Windows platform has no vision, no ideas and has become (just like Teams) mind-blowingly buggy. Absolutely nothing they introduced in the last 15 years or so actually works properly. A good measure of the totality of Nadella's failure here is that Microsoft's new apps are all Electron based and Edge is a fork of Chrome i.e. they institutionally prefer to use Google's code to their own. Also they apparently hand out MacBooks to new employees!
- Visual Studio was once dominant in its space but is now apparently considered a writeoff, so VS Code is a totally different app written from scratch.
- .NET has experienced major product and branding churn that has left anyone not fully committed to the ecosystem confused about what it is and can do e.g. .NET Core vs Framework. .NET isn't a failure but it doesn't seem to be growing or exciting devs either, and in terms of core R&D they've been blown away by the work Oracle is doing with Graal.
- Azure is very successful but is showing worrying signs of the same bugs-and-tech-debt problems that plagues the rest of their products. When I had to use Azure, I was constantly amazed at how even basic things were flaky or did not work. Like even just holding open TCP connections between machines wouldn't work properly. This is despite the fact that Microsoft was able to built out Azure seemingly only by raiding the rest of the firm for talent, hence the Windows brain drain. Also cloud is becoming strongly associated with cost disease, which opens up a possible weakness in future (in fairness, a problem shared with AWS and GCP).
- HoloLens is cool but does anyone use it?
Nadella fixed the monolithic our-way-or-the-highway approach, which allowed them to import tech from elsewhere to fix their weaknesses. But compare that to Apple, which consistently doubles down on its own tech stack and has become even more successful with the monolithic integrated approach and it's hard not to see this as something Nadella was forced into rather than some great act of leadership.
I don't think this is the right way to look at it at all.
> With the exception of VS Code, the Microsoft things developers like are purchased or just catching up with where competitors were 20 years ago e.g. GitHub, Minecraft, OpenAI, Windows Terminal, WSL.
Yes, but now they're leaders in every one of these categories. And instead of holding back acquisitions, Microsoft has made each one demonstrably better.
> how much people hate Teams
Teams is a beachhead, and they're absolutely going to take it and win.
> Windows has totally rotted away on Nadella's watch. The execution failure here is total. Does Nadella even use Windows himself?
There's really not much need for Windows anymore. Putting a veneer on Linux would do just as well. That said, they're continuing to win gamers and over half of businesses. The future is thin clients, though, and that's where the battle is shaping up.
> Microsoft's new apps are all Electron based and Edge is a fork of Chrome i.e. they institutionally prefer to use Google's code to their own
The entire world chose Blink/Chrome/Chromium. Keeping their old browser around would have been a major mistake. And now they're set to take the the lead. Google will be too busy defending their own moat to keep up Chrome leadership, and Edge will push search margin to zero.
> Visual Studio was once dominant in its space but is now apparently considered a writeoff
The way people write software is changing. Cloud based thin clients are what businesses want. The entire development setup virtualized without DevOps. Fully secured. And beyond that, AI-assisted coding. Of course Visual Studio is a dinosaur.
> .NET has experienced major product and branding churn
Microsoft is busy winning Linux developers and the rest of the world.
> Azure is very successful but is showing worrying signs of the same bugs-and-tech-debt problems that plagues the rest of their products.
It's a top cloud contender and will gain even more market share.
> HoloLens is cool but does anyone use it?
A small, synergistic bet on spatial computing and XR that keeps them in the game should the field pop off.
Putting aside the product concerns, from my recent Xoogler perspective, they absolutely need a new CEO.
Start with a chaotic management style that is constantly reorg'ing and forcing manager changes. I had three managers and four reorgs during my under two years. (YMMV by team but I've heard of others even in product areas who've experienced similar.) You never know when you'll be pulled from a project, projects are developed and then handed-off vs. letting the builders continue to improve them, and promo becomes a political fantasy as you shift around.
Reorgs are a fact of enterprise life, but the frequency of them at Google is a huge sign of lack of strategic direction and bad planning. Absorbing HUGE numbers of new employees into this constantly shifting structure is a recipe for disaster. (OTOH, documentation tends to be very good.) And buying up tons of real estate when so many people either WFH full time or are hybrid? Crazy.
Then there's the way projects are managed. I never thought I'd miss JIRA so much. There are always too many cooks in the kitchen and everlasting approval processes.
To all the amazingly smart, dedicated, and user-focused people still there - you rock. To the board - time to shake things up.
This is it exactly. I'm a Xoogler also and you've nailed it on the head - honestly while there are many other narratives about Google they mostly feel like distractions to this core problem.
Google's management and leadership tenure is very short relative to other companies and the org structure is intensely unstable relative to peer companies. I lost count of how many "5 year plans" I went through that was summarily reset 1.5-2 years in because there was a leadership reorg.
Google has no product strategy for two reasons:
- leadership generally is much more interested in org-building than products. The nitty gritty of products is left to leaf node teams that have wide latitude to decide what gets built. This is great for individual autonomy and getting ICs promoted, but it's bad for products.
- any leader with an actual product strategy has no time to actually build it. It's practically guaranteed that the winds will shift and they'll be out, to be replaced by the next manager with their own vision and the need for a near-total reset.
I'm at a company now where leadership tenure is shockingly long (at least by Google standards) - and you see the payoff: multi-year strategies actually get built, actually pay off. Reorgs happen but is generally infrequent, and when they occur they are close to leaf node teams - rather than the wholesale "we're replacing all critical leaders" type that happens a lot at Google.
I've been reading this whole thread and playing my favorite game called "If I were CEO of Google this is what I would do differently"
It must be incredibly difficulty to evaluate how well people are doing, and how valuable peoples work is when only one or two departments make any money and everything else indirectly supports that work.
How do you reward people for doing boring maintenance work on existing products? How do you give people the time to build the products, but also keep them happy and well paid enough to prevent them being poached?
How to reward a talented engineer who's job it is to add some small feature to a massive product like Maps or Docs?
I can't help but think I would explode the company into thousands of tiny startups each managing themselves and their own budgets, staff, and salaries, and literately pay bounties for every little feature I wanted implemented. There is no ladder to climb, only bounties to claim.
This seems unlikely to work and in fact probably exacerbates a bunch of issues:
- it's impossible to collaborate across org boundaries. If each org has their own budget/staff/salaries and their sole source of income are claimed bounties, there is no incentive to contribute one iota of work that isn't related to a bounty they can claim. You can of course split bounties but a) then you have interminable fights about the exact way bounties should be split, and b) the meta-game likely still rewards only pursuing bounties that one's org can achieve by themselves, causing orgs to refuse to collaborate.
- orgs will become more and more short-term focused since claiming bounties is critical to survival. A smaller bounty that can be claimed in 4 months is better than a larger bounty that can be claimed with 2 years of work. This is extra true if the orgs compete with each other - your odds of being pre-empted is lower with a 4 month bounty than a 2 year bounty, where you can burn a ton of work only to get beat by another org. The meta-game will almost certainly heavily favor fast small features rather than long-term work, and will absolutely preclude self-disruption type projects that are both time-consuming and risky.
You can, of course, insert some layer of managerial judgment into this to offset the meta-incentive flaws in the system - so you can force investment in long-term projects and force inter-org collaboration, etc. But at that point you've replicated a traditional corporate structure, just with "bounties" in place of "promotions".
But most importantly a bounty-based system doesn't solve the core problem here: who makes decisions about the company's products?
In a bounty-based system like you describe, there would be some kind of central cabal that issues bounties - in essence determining what products and features should be built. But then you have some pretty obvious issues:
- does the central cabal know enough about the product domains to be the most qualified to make these determinations? Or will the products suffer because the cabal doesn't understand the product's domains deeply enough to make smart decisions about it? Does it not make intuitive sense that the people building the product knows more about it than a group of far-removed decision makers? How do you consider the views of those who are closest to the product and most keenly aware of its tactical needs, in balance with the views of those who are furthest, but have more inter-product and strategic knowledge?
- besides the problems of the cabal knowing what should be built, how does the cabal know what can be built? It is entirely possible for the cabal to issue bounties that are unimplementable (give me a system that can diagnose cancers with a 0% error rate!). Besides the challenges of a highly centralized product org knowing what the market wants, they would have little way of knowing what is expedient or efficient for the company to achieve.
Again, you can insert some layer of managerial judgment into this to offset the problems here, but again you'd end up replicating a traditional corporate structure.
I actually don't believe 5-year plan would work. Great products are built, not planned. A plan to keep management patient for 5 years, though, will work better. In AWS, a newly launched service will not seek profitability but user growth for at least the first two years, if not three. And then the GM of the service needs to pursue profitability and margin, while keeping user growth healthy. That said, product features are planned on a 6-month basis, and GMs have have moving target of profitability as market conditions often change.
Agreed, in part - and agreed with the other poster here that great products are both.
Google tends to suffer from the worst of both worlds: an over-abundance of 5-year plans that do not offer sufficient interim value to justify their continued work.
Part of this is bad projections - Google projects are often highly-ambitious multi-year affairs with some interim checkpoints like growth rate, but those numbers are usually poorly estimated, poorly sourced, wildly overly optimistic, and don't actually pan out. So when the team inevitably whiffs the checkpoints by a wide margin entire products get shut down. This is at least one of the larger causes of the leadership churn I described above.
But yes, if your idea is that you can have a 5-year budget to go do [insert big ambitious thing] and management won't cry about it, that's a fantasy.
That said, the opposite is also not a great way to pursue a product - which mostly rests on the theory that pursuing near-term improvements repeatedly naturally wins.
In reality you want a mixture of long-term strategy with short-term tactics. Product teams that are too heavily in one direction fail for it.
Google wa sitting on a massive cash cow, so they appointed someone who would just keep it ticking over.
In the face of an existential threat, like ChatGPT, they need someone who can actually drive innovation. Not innovate themselves, nobody expects a CEO to do that, just create a culture which has a hope in hell of rising to fend off challenges to the empire.
They don't have this.
That have a CEO who is only capable in "good times" ... along with most of the company.
Faced with sufficient adversity, they will need a CEO who can succeed in the face of adversity.
Ehh, I would not be hasty in blaming things on Sundar as a "caretaker CEO". My impression has been that this inability to ship started well before Sundar's reign, and goes into a core belief that the company has been built around since its early days.
The problem with Google is that far too much product authority is devolved into leaf node teams. But this isn't a quirk of Sundar's leadership, this is practically a shibboleth built into the DNA of Google itself. The idea is that autonomous teams of very smart people, given maximum freedom to pursue what they think is necessary, produces the best products.
This is one of the fundamental buildings blocks of Google and long pre-dates Sundar as CEO. And it is the thing that is failing.
What we're witnessing is IMO a repudiation of the idea that if you take smart people and "free range" them, they will spontaneously invent world-changing products. FWIW, I think the strategy has been clearly failing for a long time - the only product that came out of this system was Gmail. Quite literally everything else at Google that has survived the test of time was acquired (see: YouTube, Maps).
I think Sundar may end up taking the fall for being caught flat-footed, and surely as CEO he should rightly shoulder some of the blame, but Google's problems far pre-date him. It's also why I don't think the triumphant return of Larry and Sergey will necessarily fix things - they're the ones who instituted the system of autonomous teams.
Yeah, my statement went too far. I was just trying to emphasize that many aspects of a product will emerge from iterations, therefore 5-year plan sounds a gross waterfall model. That said, some planning is needed.
Sundar has Mckinsified and MBAfied Google.He faces intense spotlight because his background is McKinsey and Product Management . In core engineering and tech circles that’s the ultimate enemy and sell out. IMO Sundar hasn’t demonstrated the type of tech leadership like Satya or Zuck has. I am no fan of Zuck but he has a product he wants to pursue ( Metaverse) and is sticking to his guns to make it happen . Sundar just comes across as a pleasant McKinsey consultant who has seen ads and search as a cash cow and is focused on extracting as much cash from it to appeal to shareholders and others . There is no underlying tech vision or guts.
100% this. You do not want MBA types in your company, let alone running it! I couldn't think of a worse choice for leading Google, and it sounds like he is pulling that classic MBA trick where you are getting teams to work against each other instead of for a greater mission. No wonder nothing is shipping, projects are getting culled for no reason etc. I think google will be seeing a decline that may shock many if bing/chatGPT starts seeing wider adoption.
Apple and Microsoft both run by CEO’s with MBA’s, but you could argue that they are not “MBA types”, which is fair enough, but then we’re really talking about an straw man MBA.
> and buying up tons of real estate when so many people either WFH full time or are hybrid?
My pet conspiracy theory is that a significant motivating factor for why some of these big tech companies are so bullish on returning everyone to the office is that otherwise all of the real estate purchases and leases make the executives look like fools.
Why would investors want that? The building's already paid for. It doesn't seem like putting people into it or not would matter at that point, assuming RTO is employee performance neutral. And unlike executives, investors have no need to fool people into thinking they're making sensible decisions.
Those buildings will be worth much less if the culture of working from home becomes ingrained since the demand for this type of office space will permanently decline. Those who invested in office real estate may stand or fall with people returning to their offices.
Maybe they feel hurt every time they are reminded of the empty buildings because it's a waste of money and to get everyone back wouldn't hurt anybody in their assessment, it's actually how it was done before and it worked well, yadda yadda, so why not.
I do think the reasoning applies much better to executives, though.
Speaking of product, Ben Thompson mentioned in his podcast that Google planned to use their low-margin GDocs suite to undermine Microsoft Office's dominance. I wonder what happens to that strategy. If any company can pull off an office killer, I'd imagine it's Google. Yet somehow I'm still bitching that Quip is better than Google Docs.
On the other hand, Microsoft CEO is saying in unequivocal terms that Microsoft can use low-margin bing to undermine Google search. I'd not imagine such a day, but here it was.
I talked to a friend about what's she's seeing inside Google right now and the amount of corporate and cultural dysfunction is shocking. Politics, games, entitlement, and decreased productivity.
No. This is absolutely false. I don't think anyone who hasn't been inside of Google can possibly understand how "differently" (one might even say "Googley") dysfunctional it is.
Curious on what you [were] using? Something created in house? I am not a fan of Jira but not having it to track issues or create bug requests does indeed sound like a nightmare.
The bug tracker, deployment, and testing tools are very mature. It was the task tracking by spreadsheet on my teams that got to me, and lack of unified project management tooling across teams. This made tracking dependencies and planning more difficult (leading to more meetings). There are definitely in-house tools available. It's just another "YMMV considerably" element of things.
A lot of this reflects the "professional executive" MBA-ization others have mentioned. When folks who've never been engineers, or never worked on shipping products are the ones managing engineers, it creates dissonance (and BDUF[1]). I'm pretty biased, having entered the company after a decade on well-oiled scrum and XP teams - the predictability made it SO much easier to focus on the actual work. I've always believed that fewer things 100% complete are better than many things in partial states. That just isn't the case there and caused issues for me.
If the employees are happy and customers are happy, they don't need a new CEO. CEOs of companies at that scale are largely just PR puppets anyway, it's the ten thousand other engineers who do the real work. If you want to revolutionize the company, you need to swap out the army of ten thousand people, not the puppet.
They shouldn't give a damn about what some armchair critics say about an AI boo-boo. Ask those critics to code something better, if they can push some code commits, then they have a right to criticize, if not, shut up.
Yeah, we as a society need innovation, but it doesn't have to happen within Google, new companies can be established for that. We need a new Google, not a new Google CEO.
> If the… customers are happy, they don't need a new CEO.
Do you think their customers are happy?
Google’s thought leader customers are extremely unhappy with pretty much all of their products to the point that Google is ripe for disruption.
The main thing Google has going for them is their incredibly massive moat that limits viable competitors. IMHO, that moat will only protect them for so long if they don’t reorient themselves.
The only people I know who like Google products are relatively unsophisticated consumers. I realize that this is a large part of the market and is also a very lucrative segment of the market, but they will follow the thought leaders when the thought leaders move on to something else.
Sure, marketing for a great new search engine would be pretty easy.
But the demands of the regular user and the power user are very different. So before ChatGPT, I'm not sure that also catering to the power users would have helped Google with their regular users.
Since employees, (many) customers, and investors aren't happy, seems like time for a change. It's the layers between the puppet and army that cause the most issues IMO, but vision starts at the top. And it isn't there these days.
And I totally agree on the botched demo; it's just like the stock's unfair punishment after recent great quarters. Expecting that pandemic growth would continue forever just shows the irrationality of markets.
+1 to your comment that it's time for new Googles to rise up.
Other than the pay and the residual prestige from "this is the coolest place to work if you pretend it's still 2004" -- I'm not so sure I'd describe the average Google employee as "happy." "Begrudgingly willing to tolerate it" seems more common.
> it's the ten thousand other engineers who do the real work.
An army of ten thousand people marching in the wrong direction is what you get with bad leadership.
There is a lot of "real" work going on at a company like Google. Leadership really does matter, and there are a number of examples of bad CEOs running a company into the ground (e.g. HP) and good CEOs completely turning failing companies around (e.g. Steve Jobs coming back to Apple). None of those things would have happened if the CEO was just a figurehead.
Some engineers, notably junior ones without a lot of life experience, seem to believe that engineering teams could run the company by themselves and that leadership and other orgs don't provide any value. It's an immature world view that doesn't even work very well at startups, and certainly doesn't make any sense at large companies.
Employee and customer happiness has nothing to do with CEO performance.
A CEO's sole responsibility is to deliver value to the shareholders. It literally doesn't matter how that value is delivered, as long as it gets delivered.
this is kinda true, but only if you say, "In the short term". In the long term, things are recursive - poor employee morale loses productivity and product quality suffers and customers leave and shareholders lose. And that is only one of many loops.
A CEO may appear to be rewarded in the short term, and may make short term choices, but, rest assured that they must please all 3 constituencies or they will not have a long run timeframe to worry about. (of course, boards and ceos make mistakes and act poorly and suffer the consequences, too).
"Deliver value to the shareholders" is an outcome, not an action.
How a CEO delivers value is generally by running the company well, making the right decisions, hiring the right people, making sure the company has the right product vision, etc.
If the customers aren't happy, they will buy fewer products and revenue will decline. Since a large portion of a company's stock price is connected to expectations about future earnings, that will put downward pressure on the stock and hurt the shareholders.
This is an extremely flawed way to structure a society. In what messed up world does the CEO of a company have more responsibility to some armchair drugged suit-people eating Michelin food on high-rises in Manhattan than the actual billions of people who use the product on a day to day basis, and the tens of thousands of people who work half of their lives to deliver that?
> Employee and customer happiness has nothing to do with CEO performance.
Nonsense. Customer happiness, employee happiness and company performance are all related.
I used to be a Google shareholder. I got a good return for a while, but eventually I got annoyed enough as a Google customer that I decided that I didn't want to hold Google stock. This was partly emotional, and partly a prediction that their stock price was going to plateau or fall given that they were alienating their users. This seems to have been the correct decision.
> A CEO's sole responsibility is to deliver value to the shareholders. It literally doesn't matter how that value is delivered, as long as it gets delivered.
It literally does matter, because shareholders are not automatons. A lot of the economy runs on confidence. Investments aren't just made on short-term economic performance.
The Stadia closure sealed it for me. Such amazing tech for what it was, completely unable to see the long-term and stay dedicated to a tech that's obviously going to have increasing adoption into the future. Handed over that entire market to MS without a fight. It even had a perfect release window during COVID when everyone was home and wasn't able to find PS5 or Xbox to buy.
Everything around that product was a summary of how Google handles things now. I can't take any new product release seriously from them anymore.
I feel like Google used to be really big on the "release early, release often" mantra. At some point they turned more into Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. You can look in the windows and see them doing cool shit, but it never seems to make it to the general public.
Of course, most egregiously, they invented transformers like 6 years ago, and they've had LaMDA for over a year, and only let people see small glimpses of it. Also, Waymo has been around for almost 15 years, and seems to have some really neat tech, but people can't actually use it. Calico has apparently made some massive breakthroughs with ISRIB treatments, and bought up all the patents so they have exclusive access to it, but seem to be keeping everything to themselves.
I feel like Google Code could have easily dominated over GitHub, but then they just let Microsoft have it.
Google does so much cool stuff, and I'm grateful for the services that they offer, many of which I pay for. It just sucks that they've gotten so stingy lately about what they release. I hope that changes soon.
My understanding is that in the bay area, they do silly demos from time to time, and let people ride in them for free, but it's not an actual usable service anywhere. Like I said, basically Willy Wonka. If something has changed I'd be interested to know about it. This article is only a few months old though, and it seems to be saying the same thing.
Biggest thing that was wrong with Stadia - over promising. Like 4k@60Hz over internet is too bold and maybe doable from within Google Offices or Bay Area and that isn't a market enough.
Could go a guaranteed consistent and stable 720p@60Hz with a YouTube kind of Ad revenue model. You play, you watch the ads every X Minutes and revenue streams shared with developers.
Indie developer's heaven it could be.
You don't want ads? As subscription model could be the way. Best would have been to pick up tons of past titles BioShock, Mafia etc by being the goto place for recent retro games and gradually gaining traction in triple AAA segment.
Stadia launched without the full backing of google. Google could have easily foresee the public reaction, and mitigated it with a different pricing model or some guarantee that game purchases will be refunded if stadia closes down within 3 years of purchase.
Say what you want about Microsoft, but they executed with XBox and continued pouring money into it, because they knew its potential as a foothold in the living room was larger than its near-term revenue.
Windows Phone had a market share so low (~3%) it just didn't make sense to keep pouring money into it when cheap Chinese Android phones were coming in troves and Apple/Samsung dominated the high-end segments.
The Xbox only true competitor is the PlayStation which is much more manageable. Even the first Xbox had a market share of 33% in the US. It's important not to mix up killing a product before its prime and pouring money into an established market for dominance. Windows Phone was the latter.
Cloud gaming (if we believe it will eventually catch on) does not have an established "winner" yet. Nvidia/Xbox/Luna (Amazon) are still trying to make it work and Google had a better approach than all of them with lower controller latency.
What are you talking about lol. Windows mobile was before android and iOS. You’re seriously suffering from survivor bias. There’s was a very obvious path to success with Microsoft and mobile
They put a billion dollars into the refunds of xbox red circled units, nd then sfter that billions more into rnd to make it what it is today. they definitely had a long term vision for it
The Google engineering underlying Stadia is impressive and there's still so much possible value. But Google management launched Stadia in such a way to minimize all of the benefits of online play, and maximize all of its shortcomings. And then price it in such a way to provide value to the smallest possible number of customers.
No amount of engineering talent can overcome a management that's dedicated to self-sabotage.
The tech was the problem. I can spin up any cloud machine with moonlight and get better performance, play any game, and use any controller for the price of stadia and monthly fees.
A new CEO is needed for a culture shift if nothing else.
Google has long been cavalier about their automated systems banning, withholding payments, or otherwise harming users and customers with no recourse to challenge the false positive punishments.
They've made a laughing stock of themselves with product launches and sunsets in Chat (GChat, Talk, Hangouts, Hangouts Chat, Hangouts Meet, Allo, Duo, Meet, Meet Original, Spaces, etc). They're not really any better in payments (Google Wallet, Android Pay, Google Pay, Google Pay Send, Google Wallet but new this time).
Stadia was an amazing product, but I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole because looking at the killed-by-google graveyard made it obvious where it would end up. It's become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Google needs to show that it cares about its customers/users and that it cares about its own products. The willingness to abandon both so casually has hurt its reputation in a way that makes it difficult to trust.
Google Pay is huge in India but it is/was a completely different product that started in Google India as Tez but was taken over from the Indian team and ruined.
Google claims to operate Pay in dozens of countries with millions of transactions but almost all of them are from India where Google pay is merely a client for UPI
I said it before and I'll say it again, take away the search monopoly and Google is the slowest moving and most dysfunctional company in tech. Sundar is doing his best Ballmer impression and what it is truly embarrassing is given Google's supposed "talent" especially in the AI space they are really doing nothing for the billions they are throwing at the problem. I mean just look at the insane amount of articles about one of their top AI engineers, Geoffrey Hinton, so alot of press all fluff so to speak.
“Google is the slowest moving and most dysfunctional company in tech.”
That’s a little harsh. Google makes great products like the Google cloud and Gmail. To say they are the most dysfunctional and slow moving company in tech is outlandish.
If the shoe fits.... Gmail was launched in 2004(almost 20 years ago), and google cloud, well its hemorrhaging money - it lost $3.1B in 2021[1], that's not a successful business in anyone's opinion.
Yes, badly. Nothing about Google stands out anymore and they've been rotting from multiple ends for a long time.
Search rarely returns credible results and I find myself adding 'site:reddit.com' frequently to at least get some organic discussions about things rather than articles which look like they were sponsored and artificially inflated to the top. They've turned into a joke about releasing something and killing it off a few years later. Android is a nightmare for developers (and users) with how they handle API changes and the Google Play store as a whole. Any kind of customer support is non-existent in basically any of their products. Their hardware is good but software gets worse over time and stagnates (their smart home ecosystem). I still don't trust them for a second with my data.
Gmail is fine, Maps are fine, YouTube is... well, we don't really have a competitor and nobody wants to switch because they wouldn't have access to a large audience. Whatever they release I have no faith in it, not with it keeping my data, not with its longevity, not in its reliability.
Maps are not fine at all, not anymore. They have started showing "sponsored locations" on the maps very prominently. For eg, some outlets (restaurants, electronics, apparel etc.) will be shown very large and prominently, even at very zoomed out levels. It is highlighted very disproportionately, obscures the nearby area and has bigger in size that public attractions like parks, local monuments etc. This is happening in my area for some time atleast. Really cheapens the experience.
I think that is perfectly acceptable for a product that is otherwise very good and completely free. You don't even need a Google account to use it (at least in the browser, not sure about on phones).
You 100% need a google account on Android. Recently, for a month or so, Maps had been malfunctioning for me -- it wouldn't show any maps. It would still do turn-by-turn directions, but not maps.
It turns out that I had logged out of my google account and forgot to log back in. Once I did that, I could see the maps again. Not that I really want to -- those sponsored locations are much too annoying to tolerate. So I've switched away from Google Maps and logged back out of my account.
Agree. Google maps are definitely getting less reliable. I see weird ui bugs often. Sometimes it also forgets the search history somehow. I’ve never seen that happen before a year or two ago
When I use the quotation marks "xyz" to ensure that the result contains the string "xyz", goog no longer gives me results that have "xyz" in them.
It's not for all cases, but is most noticeable when trying to debug a program. I'll get an error, then search for that error online, putting the outputted error in quotation marks. Granted, these tend to be obscure errors and I'm not exactly expecting to find an answer.
But goog will return a bunch of SEO spam, ads, and then ~2/3rds of the way down the page, finally some real answers. But! These 'real' pages/answers don't contain the string that I made sure to specify to return. Often, it's very badly related to what I'm searching for to begin with.
Like, I'm okay with goog not returning anything. That helps me know that the thing I'm trying to do is headed in the wrong direction.
But goog is very much not okay with not returning anything.
I imagine that some KPI was set by some manager at google that they have to decrease the number of pages that don't return anything. So to do that, some check was implemented to strip the quotation marks away if a query doesn't have a result. And I just so happen to get caught in this a lot. I understand, google get more money when that happens, as it makes sure to show a lot more ads to me when it does this (pretty certain of this, but not 100%).
Still, yeesh!, it's so frustrating when I try to use the tool and it just ignores me!
Maps is not fine. There are random gaps in Streetview data all over the place for places that previously had coverage or where the data was obviously collected. I've tried reporting the bugs through multiple routes, but it never gets completely fixed. There's nothing more infuriating as a software developer than being unable to open a ticket for a software bug.
The 3D rendering is falling behind what competitors are offering. I also find the UI very convoluted, they are trying to do too much.
And OH MY GOD DO NOT CHANGE MY ZOOM LEVEL!! I spend so much time trying to find the area I want to search, enter Chinese restaurant and it expands to the entire freaking region. PLEASE STOP DOING THAT!!
OH MY GOD I thought I was the only one who noticed that! I still prefer gmaps for most things, but the zoom out after I narrowed into exactly where I wanted is just infuriating UX. If I wanted that broad of a search I’d just… I dunno… go read a food blog.
What's the competition out there? It seems like every year I scope out Apple Maps and Bing Maps and get disappointed and come back to Google Maps. Is there stuff out there that I'm just not aware of?
And as you reach the highest zoom level on mobile apps, increase the font size of the street names etcetera.
Keeping font sizes tiny at high zoom levels is a real anti-pattern against usability for older people.
I wonder if they test maps being used by anyone over the age of 60? Testing a UI on older people (or any group out on the edges) really shows up usability and accessibility flaws.
Maps has become buggier and buggier over time. These days I can't figure out how to use the UI and my navigation to work has become completely wrong (it used to be correct for years) out of nowhere.
To what site were you expecting to see a link? Isn't the better complaint here that there simply isn't any good public content on this subject and that all the official docs are behind paywalls or NDAs?
FWIW: I just tried "mazda 5 wiring diagram", and indeed there's nothing good there. But... I think that's because there's nothing good there. I suspect if I really want that document I'm going to have to buy it.
I mean, everyone in a technical field deals with this. There's stuff out there, but it's going to be on some rando adware site with questionable licenses. Datasheets for old ICs. Repair documentation for consumer electronic devices. Even regulatorily required stuff like MSDS sheets for older products tends to not be available in public places.
But the search engine can't fix that for you.
[1] With the notable exception of software development, where open source has freed us from those walls. But also instilled in us the attitude
The info is there and has always been there: in traditional, non-SEO optimized forums. But they have been flushed off the search results pages by irrelevant SEO optimized GitHub copycats and mediocre fluff text recipes.
When I test your hypothesis by searching for "2019 honda cbr1000rr wiring diagram" [1] the first results are images of the wiring diagrams and then links to the exact non-SEO optimized forums you're talking about with a post that contains a PDF file available to download for the exact motorcycle I'm interested in.
Its not the exact term I used over the weekend in my original post, but this is a basic enough one. Since it's more basic, it actually has a good result or two first. Then falls into spam upon spam. My original search over the weekend has only spam.
I eventually found results by adding forum to the search.
But even if there weren't any good results, which I know there are because someone somewhere has asked for a wiring diagram of the tail lights many times, and someone out there has access to a diagram (usually a mechanic).
But regardless of results or not, Google serving 20+ pure spam and malware results less technical users might fall for is insane IMO.
> I think that's because there's nothing good there
One problem is that Google can't bear to serve you up no results, because potential delicious advertising revenue.
Rather than say there aren't any results, they'll serve up fifteen ads (barely recognisable as such) that match something vaguely similar, ignore a few words in your search term that would have excluded some profitable results, rewrite your search term into something that it feels like you should be searching for, drop the quotes around your phrases to find more pages, or some other infuriating reinterpretation.
So even if there isn't anything good there, it's hard to get a feel for whether the data are sparse or you're just being funnelled to stuff that's more profitable.
>YouTube is... well, we don't really have a competitor and nobody wants to switch
A lot of youtubers (more than I expected, anyway) I see now promoting Rumble and Odysee, and they aren't even the cancellable types who'd have reason to move. Maybe they're being paid better or maybe they're just seeing the writing on the wall with youtube striking tech videos and tutorials, or everyone flocking to mastodon over twitter stuff and I guess it's opened their minds to new platforms.
I got scared from the Rumble front page with borderline scams, conspiracies, and click-bait. But then I realized it's the same with YouTube if you don't log in.
When I search for a keyword, I see an ad for the same product as the first item in search results.
For eg. If I search for "rav4", I see "2023 Toyota® RAV4 - Toyota® USA" pointing to toyota.com.
I often wonder why show an ad, why can't you show non-ad version of the same? Is it to get commission from Toyota for the click OR Toyota listing an ad for keyword "rav4"?
They get paid for during the ad, but my understanding is that it's more insidious than that.
I searched "buy rav4" and the first ad I got was Toyota, but the second I got was VW, "Compare the VW Tiguan."
My understanding is that if Toyota doesn't cough up the money to buy a high placement ad for "Rav4," the VW ad might actually be at the top of the list.
By making the "promoted" search results barely distinguishable from the organic ones (they used to be so distinct, now it's just a little tag that says "Ad" or "Sponsored") Google gets to reap the benefits of a bidding war for direct searches for a product.
Your Google Keyword Account Specialist also recommends you buy your own brand keywords.... and those of your competitors. Just to make sure that people spend the 10-15% percent of their budget on this
Right, but I think that buying an ad for a competitor's product would generally be a fairly low-value opportunity (if you're searching "Rav4" you'd most likely be looking to click on a site related to a Rav4), particularly if ads are clearly demarcated.
But, because ads now look organic, there's an increased chance that someone will click on it, so because of that UI change on Google's part, people now have to spend more on ads.
I'm not sure about the low value. If I'm searching for a Rav4, it probably behooves other makers of small SUV models--or even substitutes like a Suburu Outback--to help plant a seed about the other options out there just in case you're not thinking that way.
Companies pay top dollar to show an ad when someone searches their name, otherwise a competitor could make a paid ad slamming the product. We dealt with this first hand a year ago in my company.
Yep. Which is kinda insane when you think about it from a user perspective. You search for Rev4, as a user, and unless the company you’re searching for has paid Google not to basically fuck up the top result, you don’t actually get back what you wanted.
It’s almost like when you’re searching for a movie on Netflix and it only shows you similar titles because the movie is not in the catalog. Super annoying.
Sure, Netflix and Google have very different reasons to do that. Bus as a user: you search for A, but get B.
Not even taking into account how annoying it is from a company perspective.
The big problem is context. If someone is looking for a new car showing competitors offerings is really just classic advertising. If they're not they're probably looking for info about the car they own and it's mostly dead ad spend other than generic brand awareness.
> For eg. If I search for "rav4", I see "2023 Toyota® RAV4 - Toyota® USA" pointing to toyota.com.
You searched for a product and got... the manufacturer's web site as the top link. And you think that's... wrong? I mean, even if it's a paid ad, it's still a paid ad for the most relevant link to the content you searched for, right?
Are you just complaining that you saw an ad at all? But... surely if there's going to be a good market to advertise RAV4's to, it's to people searching for "rav4", no?
FWIW: I just tried this in an incognito window (to try to suppress ads). The top hit is indeed a tree of links to toyota.com, but they aren't marked as ads. The second hit is wikipedia. The third is a Car and Driver review page. The most SEOish link on the page is a still-legitimate-seeming link to "buyatoyota.com".
Is Reddit the least open platform on the internet? It's the only place I can think of where accounts are easily permabanned. Even Twitter gives a multitude of options and now practically allows everyone back on after a 6 month timeout. Aside from this place of course. But this place is a bit of an outlier.
I'll give you a reason why it's not just trouble makers getting banned. Let's say you allegedly break a rule of a sub. You feel this is unjust so you complain on one of the other friendly subreddits. This will be considered brigading and harassment. Immediate ban.
Is Reddit really good anymore? It's hardcore enforced group think.
Accounts on reddit aren't really attached to an identity like they are on other social media platforms though, so getting an account perma-banned doesn't have all that much impact.
When I (the consumer) think of successful Google products, I think of search, email, maps, productivity (docs, sheets, drive), Android, and Chromecast. Which of those launched under the current CEO?
I'm sure I'm missing another success story, but really, when was the last time Google hit a home run?
It's probably not helping that most of their newer products get relaunched/branded and splintered so frequently leading to consumer confusion; for example, Android Pay -> Google Wallet -> Google Pay -> Google Pay and Wallet.
Or the evergreen GoogleTV -> AndroidTV -> GoogleTV.
Or Hangouts (the massively online public video space) -> Hangouts (the chat app inside GMail) -> Hangouts (the private videoconfering app) -> Google Meet.
With Apple, definitely Apple Watch, they also leaned into Apple specific services with lots of success. Apple TV+ started a little shaky but its growing at a good clip. The new Apple TV's have been pretty successful.
Apple also shipped the M series chips, revitalized the Mac line as a result, and been giving proper attention to the iPad, finally.
Amazon has been innovating in logistics and Alexa is (was?) a genuine innovation when it came out. I think, ironically, AWS lacks a lot of innovation to pivot to more user friendliness and understand-ability, but its its still growing strong.
Google has been more flatfooted by comparison, with more product closures than successful projects, period, let alone hits.
Amazon ads - from 0 to a multi tens of billion $ business at probably a 80% margin. The reason your Amazon results are probably awful today is precisely this.
Amazon also has a more decent content strategy (eg why they bid on the NFL rights) than both Apple and Google.
Moving to a completely different architecture is a big deal, launching their own architecture is an even bigger one. I am astonished at how readily it was accepted, how well it seems to have delivered (I don't own any of their newer products yet), and how smooth the transition seems to have been for OS users and software vendors.
It's a huge deal, far more interesting than individual products like the watch or earbuds (successful though those are, they're not paradigm shifts).
AWS has added hundreds of products - they even arguably have a better hosted Kubernetes than Google Cloud does. I suspect AWS Aurora alone makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year as well.
Chromecast came from Pichai's era - Maybe before he became CEO, but he had had broad authority even then. Not claiming he's a hit maker, just dropping a trivia.
Calling Android an "acquisition" is really overblown. What Google bought was a handful of employees and a 3000 line JavaScript demo. There was no "Android" OS when Google bought them.
source: Androids: The Team that Built the Android Operating System
A new CEO would be good, as long as that person has a sense of leadership and can set long-term strategic goals by clamping down on promotion-case projects that get abandoned on short notice.
Google strikes me as a place with too much money and no focus on how to productively use it, and now there are viable competitors popping up to challenge them.
Their idea was to be a giant "start-up factory", create tons of interesting ideas and see what sticks: the shotgun approach. But so far not enough are sticking, and their reputation for pulling the plug early makes people not want to risk depending on their platforms and products because they fear being left high and dry. Microsoft has been generally reasonable in that area, and thus seen as a safer bet. (I know, MS is annoying in many ways, but so are their competitors.)
I'd like to see Google give MS a run for their money. For one, create a state-ful GUI markup standard that's business-oriented, not crap like Bootstrap. Second, open source key products so users don't fear getting the plug pulled. (The GUI browser/pluggin could be based on the Tk or Qt kits to avoid reinventing the GUI wheel.)
Sundar has Mckinsified and MBAfied Google.He faces intense spotlight because his background is McKinsey and Product Management . In core engineering and tech circles that’s the ultimate enemy and sell out. IMO Sundar hasn’t demonstrated the type of tech leadership like Satya or Zuck has. I am no fan of Zuck but he has a product he wants to pursue ( Metaverse) and is sticking to his guns to make it happen . Sundar just comes across as a pleasant McKinsey consultant who has seen ads and search as a cash cow and is focused on extracting as much cash from it to appeal to shareholders and others . There is no underlying tech vision or guts.
And at that time they were also operating with enthusiastic Engineers who can’t write bubble sort on their first try but then started hiring using the methods that led to “Cracking the coding interview” and terrible products
We're in the middle of the hype phase for LLMs; it'll die down when hallucinations are widely understood and the investment community + public realize that none of these organizations have built something that replaces Search (YET).
Calling for Sundar's head during the hype phase is premature.
You're right, calling for his departure for this is premature.
But calling for his departure for an abject lack of corporate strategy (unless you consider "partially bankroll moonshots across Google etc. with ad revenue" a strategy, which it isn't) is fairly overdue.
What's Google's north star, their vision for 2035? Have you heard it?
I haven't, not from Google. But given Microsoft's trajectory with cloud and AI investments, I know theirs well.
Plus, what kind of strategy is it to antagonise every single large player in the industry.
Apple and Amazon are friendly to each other. Microsoft and Facebook have been longtime partners despite Microsoft owning Linkedin. but Google manages to enter everybody’s industry and fail.
I haven't fully replaced search, but I have replaced a good part of my usage (disclaimer: I'm a chatgpt plus subscriber). Search isn't dead but it sure is bleeding, and hard.
Doesn't it get annoying to have to fact check everything that ChatGPT spews? It's very useful for code generation, but other than that, the frequency of hallucinations makes it a lot less useful.
After some time you just get used to it and its limitations, so you know what it's reasonable to ask for. In general I use it as a tool for creative writing, code formatting and easy snippets, writing emails and summarizing texts.I lazily copy-pasted my linkedin profile page to it and it wrote a nice bio, which I corrected a bit, but it was time saved nevertheless.
I don't ask many specific questions because then I'd have to fact check a lot, like you said.
It's amazing (literally, I can't fully grasp it) that MS got the state of the art LLM into search and decided to use it to answer questions. It looks like the hype is so strong that even the people that created it don't know its strengths and weaknesses.
But the hype will eventually calm down, and people will eventually discover what LLMs are good for. They will be out of the news, but they will still be essential for search. I don't know what Google has on that subject, but if they don't have any good answer by then, they will be done.
Every tech company needs to flush their highest level of managers because this cohort was promoted to their positions at a time when tech company stocks saw 20% CAGR growth just for existing.
Reminds me of the line from The Godfather 2: "You're not a wartime consigliere, Tom."
Times have changed. It’s funny that literally every tech company’s response has been to lay off low level workers who could be re-deployed in different projects but to keep their leadership the same.
Now they’re all making the same mistake which is gonna bite them hard a couple of quarters down the road when product development grinds to a halt due to overtaxed and burned out engineers.
Their predecessor tech companies all did the same in the 90s and 00s, then cried through the 10s that they couldn’t find the right talent mix to compete against new tech.
Part of the issue here is that Google is a large, mature, Corporation.
People expect it to act like a (or rather 50) small, nimble, innovative start ups. But it isn't that. It's a large mature corporation in a stable market (search/advertising).
This is why there were layoffs recently: Google's future is not growing (where people are an asset) it is Efficiency (where people are a cost centre).
This is also why Google struggles so much with innovation, new product lines etc. The same things that stopped GE or AT&T becoming big players online will stop Google from being a big player in <Insert New Thing> (remember before ChatGPT when it was Crypto and Google didn't have a coin? Or before that when it was Quantum computing and Google were totally definitely building one, it just still doesn't exist?).
And all of this is A-Ok. This is just the corporate lifecycle. There are very good, economically sensible, pragmatic reasons why big companies do not innovate and why efficiency is more important there.
Whether Google needs a new CEO or not depends entirely on whether it's current one can deliver that. But Layoffs are a sign the current guy is doing his job, people just don't understand (or don't want to understand) what his job is...
I think you nailed it! I think there is a bit of cognitive dissonance here because a lot of the workforce at Google (and indeed at other FAANGs) are people who have worked their entire careers at Google or similar companies and now their endless summer is coming to an end. Kids that went from college to free food, latte bars, arcade rooms, 20% own projects and such are now waking up to a new reality of their first real down cycle. Profits are down or at least not growing, and they have become sacrificial lambs at the altar of capitalism, where you are measured against the value you produce, not the coolness of your projects. So it goes.
I am sort of sympathetic. The same thing has been happening at my company over the last year. We are a startup but we're up to 180 people now and when you're looking to raise and starting to think about a buyer/IPO etc then things get more and more efficient. That's just life.
I think Google (and other FAANGs) did really well to remain innovative and start-up-y for so long. But "gravity always wins in the end"
It must be a bit bitter for people who recently started at these companies. I think a lot of people worked very hard for a long time to "get in". They expected guaranteed employment for life, perks galore, etc. They had "arrived". And now its all evaporating. That's not fair really. But I don't think anyone did it on purpose. I think people just forgot that middle age comes to all companies eventually...
This piece has a click bait title and focuses exclusively on the last week of tech-news.
IMO the answer to the clickbait title is still yes, but the reasons lie in the last 5 years of stagnation and extend far beyond the use of AI in search/information retrieval. Google is a massive company that does a lot more than Search. The simple problem is that Google as a company is languishing without purpose. The incentives do not line up for attention to detail, product excellence or ground breaking tech. Instead they now have a massive sprawling enterprise that is dominated by politics over products.
Google used to be the company that delivered us a fast browser, free online video streaming and was going to give absurdly cheaper fiber and wireless internet and affordable yet awesome smartphones.
In 2007 when I graduated, I thought Google hired the best of the best.
Recently they hired an exgf of mine with a degree from a school that accepts anyone, who gets confused watching TV shows, and has trouble doing basic math.
Is it possible I've dated several better women and am content with all that, but as a hackernews/YC content consumer, I genuinely do think Google has started hiring the dumbest of my exgfs while the best of my exgfs work at companies doing real things in the world? Or is anyone that ever has something negative to relate about an exgf jealous and bitter?
What company today is the Google of 2007 that only accepts the best of the best?
I can't think of any one. Perhaps the increase in the size of the industry from 2007 to 2023 might just come with a lowering of hiring standards so positions can be filled.
The things I wrote are facts. She really did get confused watching average TV shows, and couldn't calculate basically anything. And she does work at Google now as some kind of project manager. I am not whining about her. I am whining about the poor hires google makes these days, which might explain the downward trajectory of their products we all see.
She was a 2014 grad. But why would it be relevant? Because she wasn't that great of a student and unless something changed since 2018, she wasn't that bright either (hence the confusion following story lines and inability to calculate anything more than simple addition).
If colleges don't matter, I'm not sure why so many successful companies paid attention during their starts. Its a pretty good metric to estimate intelligence, not knowledge IMO.
I'm sure she's a great project manager though!
She was a scrum master for 3 years at another company. One day I asked her what the term scrum stood for? I wasn't in the field at all so I had no idea. But it was an obvious question IMO. She didn't know. Next day I looked it up and learned it's just a rugby term. It came up a month later, and she still didn't know. I cared enough to look it up. She didn't. And it's her job. Now she's at Google. If you think that's not a bad sign, you might work at Google too.
College decade ago, your perception of her 5 years ago.
Dont get me wrong, you may be right, but those above are not reliable
like... you can change your whole life within 5 years, wow.
>If colleges don't matter, I'm not sure why so many successful companies paid attention during their starts. Its a pretty good metric to estimate intelligence, not knowledge IMO.
my personal opinion is that anything below top e.g top3 is more or less similar mess. I know grads across various topX levels and it never felt like a school was important factor. Top people are top
>She was a scrum master for 3 years at another company. One day I asked her what the term scrum stood for? I wasn't in the field at all so I had no idea. But it was an obvious question IMO. She didn't know. Next day I looked it up and learned it's just a rugby term. It came up a month later, and she still didn't know. I cared enough to look it up. She didn't. And it's her job. Now she's at Google. If you think that's not a bad sign, you might work at Google too.
Haha, actually not getting familiar with scrum seems like a good choice :) devs hate it with passion
She was very familiar with it, and it was her job. My point was, she only cared about the time wasting parts you hate. In general, she had little actual depth of knowledge or curiosity.
Exactly. Google has no future. but for the moment it generates loads of cash to shareholders. Sundar's only task is to keep it as long as possible. And shareholders on their own will allocate this cash to next Google.
Did Pichai make his name first in Google by being an excellent PM of Chrome? I wonder why he stopped being a product guy after becoming a CEO. It looks to me that the CEOs of mega successful tech companies are mostly "super PMs". Larry Page, Bezos, Jobs, Nadella (arguably, but his strategy has been cloud and super bundling, which has been very successful), and Musk. I can hardly see what Google's product strategy is. AI for everything certainly is not a product statement.
Whether or not they change CEOs, they need a new business model. They have needed this for decades now, and it shows.
Their entire existence relies on GoogleAds. That's it. Nothing else comes even remotely close to GoogleAds revenue to their bottom line. This is why they can be so cavalier discontinuing products, as they don't make money so get cut without a second thought.
Search has been so co-opted by this model and dependency on revenue that they are literally killing the one product that makes them money.
My take from the outside at least is that GoogleAds revenue is no longer carrying the business (maybe less business, maybe the company grew too fast, maybe market pressure), and now they are forced to make some tough decisions.
Although I'd love his paycheck, I am glad I am not Google's CEO. That is a really awful position to be in, IMHO.
I think so. Sundar has been pitching "AI" for who knows how long. All the "A.I." stuff dumped on me has annoyed me more than anything. No, I don't want to talk to my phone.
And the times I might want to (driving a car)... I used to be able to simply ask maps what my "E.T.A." was and, shock!, it would answer... that's been broken for years now and I'm fairly sure that will never be fixed.
Google's CEO claimed that he's taking "full responsibility" for the massive layoffs they went through.
I have no idea what the fuck that actually means, but I would think resignation and being replaced would probably be a reasonable way to take responsibility for his reckless gambling with peoples' lives.
Just realized I don't even know who the CEO is rn. I remember when Google came out and seemed like this amazing thing invented by two nerds. Now it's just like a utility, useful and mildly annoying. Maybe time to break it up and have three or four new CEOs.
If he's an operator then explain stadia launch/strategy/positioning, over hiring, deprecations, botched layoffs, botched grad/perf, and everything else.
Sundar is a politician. He's a fixer and back room power broker. He doesn't give a shit about tech or product.
How is Nadella an innovator? He's just been leveraging corporate dependencies on MS into cloud-world. MS's newer products suck. People only use them because they are bundled with Windows/Azure deals, and thus relatively cheap. MS-Teams is a lesson in How Not To Make A UI.
I don't think he is an innovator, but he definitely has a better vision than Sundar. All of Microsoft's acquisitions (LinkedIn, GitHub, Mojang) so far were well executed and leveraged properly to help tie together the company's offering.
On top of that you have the Microsoft Loves Linux initiative which saw them finally stop pushing their shitty OS everywhere and embrace being a cloud provider which was a smart move.
All of that not to say that he's some. kind of god-tier CEO, but he definitely is above-average and above Sundar Pichai who got the CEO role at about the same time (2015) but saw no such "good business move" in the same timespan. He's been mostly content milking the ads revenue.
Google Search has become aggressively bad after their last few updates. The top pages are literally just filler BS written by someone with no subject matter expertise or first hand experience. I have no idea how it went so far off the rails so fast.
This is weird, I just had this conversation the other day and wrote a comment in another google story on HN that sundar is not doing a good job and will be replaced soon.
They need someone that can turn around GCP and productize their self driving platform. I believe the privacy regulations about their search business are now unstoppable and so they should let it happen and adapt
For a company that really depends on user click signals, removing the dislike count from Youtube (and making the button pointless) is a amateurish mistake indicating a very broken internal structure.
the search UX, especially the top bar where you switch between search types is broken for nearly a decade and they are not able to fix that.
I truly wonder what fool decided that it would be a good idea to change the UI depending on what the results were. It's hard to recall a company making such a big bet on dumbing its own products for long.
Whilst the article itself has some ok arguments for the hypothesis it puts forward, I can't help but point out that it's completely overshadowed by the dumpster fire of a presentation, with scroll event interception until I click on the cookie nagger, and a full screen low-resolution photo blocking the whole viewport that has to be scrolled out of the way to get to the actual article. Maybe om.co should get a new web designer? No, scratch that. I'm willing to bet that these particular design choices were not made by anyone with practical knowledge and experience of web design.
Everyone is of course entitled their opinion, but lately I've noticed people more boldly and frequently thinking they're better than the incumbents, which is interesting.
I’ve been pulling away from Google products more and more over the last few years. Their quality is in steady decline. It’s very frustrating and I’m hesitant to use them for something new. I’ve even noticed non-tech folks are noticing the decline as well.
When you combine the declining quality with a lack of innovative new products, the public’s privacy concerns, and potentially the awakening of advertisers to poor ROI, there’s a clear picture of trouble ahead for Google.
Maybe. Or, perhaps, was told an overly-optimistic story that changed as it floated up the hierarchy:
engineer: well, yeah, we've got something. It's OK. But it has limitations and needs to be used very carefully.
engineer's boss: we've got something. It's OK.
AVP: we've got something.
VP: We've got something!
SVP: We've got something. It's great!
CTO: We've got something. It's great! It's just what we need to counter the press noise!
CEO: Phew. Great. Get it out there.
None of which exonerates Pichai. Given the significance of the threat to the firm, the "code red", the knowledge that he's personally going to take heat, he should've been all over this. Imagine Steve Jobs in a similar situation. He'd have been over it like a rash.
So no: Pichai doesn't get away with blaming someone else. His job.
This article is unreadable on mobile because of a huge subscribe modal that appears and whose controls are pushed off screen where I can't even scroll to them.
If they delay doing this, there's going to be irreversible damage. OTOH, it seems unlikely because they just renewed his contract and incentives in November
Sundar is a great peace-time leader. He can milk and feed the cash cow Ok-ish. Sundar has never made an actual decision. He waits till a consensus forms and then takes that side. That isn’t the kind of leader you need at times of war. ChatGPT declared a war. Sundar is unfit for this duty.
Of course they do!?! How is this even a question? Unless you’re a run of the mill mba grifter desperately trying to push short-term “shareholder value”..
Giving detail that you probably already know in case it's useful for others.
When you have "showdead" enabled in the settings you can see all the "dead" posts.
A dead post is one that has been marked such that it only appears if you have the above setting enabled and prohibits replies to it. This is usually because it's deemed too off topic or otherwise obnoxious to have value.
The post in question was probably marked dead and because it wasn't particularly offtopic or obnoxious then a shadowban is a reasonable assumption. This could be further verified by noticing that that person's comments are almost all dead. This suggests either they're shadowbanned or are remarkably consistent at producing offtopic/obnoxious posts without getting shadowbanned.
These nonsense generalizations have no place on HN. Similar cultural norms exist in many European countries, but they are never brought up. Such thinly veiled racism against Asians is nauseating.
That stuff is all driven from the top down. Who do you think let Google become a “DEI before tech” company in the first place? They need to change management before any of that other stuff has any chance of real change.
