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Longtime Google Engineer Quits; Says Company Can No Longer Innovate, Is Mired in Politics, and Has Become Absolutely Competitor-Focused (medium.com)
Steve Yegge, a longtime Google engineer who gained popularity after his rant on Google+ went viral, wrote another rant on Wednesday, in which he announced he has left Google. His rationale behind leaving Google, in his own words: The main reason I left Google is that they can no longer innovate. They've pretty much lost that ability. I believe there are several contributing factors, of which I'll list four here. First, they're conservative: They are so focused on protecting what they've got, that they fear risk-taking and real innovation. Gatekeeping and risk aversion at Google are the norm rather the exception. Second, they are mired in politics, which is sort of inevitable with a large enough organization; the only real alternative is a dictatorship, which has its own downsides. Third, Google is arrogant. It has taken me years to understand that a company full of humble individuals can still be an arrogant company. Google has the arrogance of the "we", not the "I". Fourth, last, and probably worst of all, Google has become 100% competitor-focused rather than customer focused. They've made a weak attempt to pivot from this, with their new internal slogan "Focus on the user and all else will follow." But unfortunately it's just lip service.
You can look at Google's entire portfolio of launches over the past decade, and trace nearly all of them to copying a competitor: Google+ (Facebook), Google Cloud (AWS), Google Home (Amazon Echo), Allo (WhatsApp), Android Instant Apps (Facebook, WeChat), Google Assistant (Apple/Siri), and on and on and on. They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. They simply don't have innovation in their DNA any more. And it's because their eyes are fixed on their competitors, not their customers.
You can look at Google's entire portfolio of launches over the past decade, and trace nearly all of them to copying a competitor: Google+ (Facebook), Google Cloud (AWS), Google Home (Amazon Echo), Allo (WhatsApp), Android Instant Apps (Facebook, WeChat), Google Assistant (Apple/Siri), and on and on and on. They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. They simply don't have innovation in their DNA any more. And it's because their eyes are fixed on their competitors, not their customers.
Stagnation and decay.
but the user is not the customer - the advertiser is. All of those MeToo things he complains about are more ad real estate - that's what google is, an ad company, period.
These are symptoms of becoming a large company. Size makes it difficult to change. Size must be paid for. It is easier to rely on cash cows than it is to take a risk to that may pay off later. People who manage the routine start to rise to the top. Many companies have survived the change and thrived, others run into a brick wall and it's over.
I heard Google HR invented thirteen new genders, five new categories of sexual assault, and TWENTY THREE ways of shaming white men in a fiel invented by white men.
That's innovation!
Apple lost St. Jobs some years ago and has been doing minor "courageous" upgrades for the past few years.
Microsoft had an initial flair for innovation back when Bill Gates was at the helm, then they too started down the path of "Me Too". Just look at Windows Phone.
Facebook is starting down that road with their intent to compete with Twitch.tv
Now Google is joining the club.
I'm curious what the next big idea that gets these guys off the couch will be.
Great story you Goog-hatin whores! No way an exemployee has a cross to burn.. dumb fucks.
1) Are we making money? Is it happening easily? Is it likely it will continue for a while? If "no" to any of the questions, goto #2. Otherwise end.
2) Innovate.
Their eyes are fixed on not their customers, or not their users? Many times their customers are not the users of their software.
Can no longer innovate is good. It shows that change for the sake of change is not needed. However the political minded SJW managers will do just that - try to fake it with changes over change over change that does nothing new.
Capcha: deathbed
employment at will.
I've grown to trust Google less and less. After the Damore letter and now this, i'm seriously considering switching to an alternative email service.
Thankfully, adblocking keeps most of their shenanigans at bay, but just the other day I discovered Google Maps Timeline. WTF is this?!
Why, it's a complete list of every location i've been to logged by Google for the past 4 years. Google even had the audacity to post one of their little surveys next to it.
"Does Google make it easy to control your private data?"
Hell to the NO!
Ouch! What do all these things have in common? Every one of them (except Google Cloud and AWS) is utterly and completely worthless from a user point of view. Both Google's version and their competitors' wouldn't be missed if they disappeared. Users aren't asking for this shit.
This guy is making a pretty good case. Ow. Sorry, Google.
For as much truth or insight as his post may contain, he still really doesn't get Google at all. Google's customers aren't the people who use Android, Google+, Google Voice, etc. Google's customers are advertisers that want to have eyeballs and ear holes to blast their ads at and they don't care about innovation, they just want something that works and Google wants to make sure that they keep those real customers of theirs by offering a rival to anything else that is being used to sell ads online. They didn't make Google+ because they wanted a better social network, they made Google+ so that if social networks became the new center of online advertising instead of web search that Google wouldn't end up out in the rain.
Sure, they have some people researching some really cool technology, but so does Microsoft and we saw how little of that managed to gain any traction whenever they bothered to let the public catch a whiff of something. It's the same with Google and for the same reasons that it doesn't go anywhere. They just don't truly care about it as a product and load it down with bloat or other cruft to tie it in with their existing programs or services instead of letting it be something useful on its own.
They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. They simply don't have innovation in their DNA any more. And it's because their eyes are fixed on their competitors, not their customers.
Their eyes on fixed on their shareholders, not their competitors or customers. As I pointed out in another topic related to broken business models, this is EXACTLY what happens to every company. They start out nice, innovate, do good, then IPO, then this, focused on profit, on protecting their market share, etc etc. Another good idea turned to an evil entity.
Took a lot of balls for this guy to step out and speak up about. My hat is off to you sir. Awesome.
Didn't Google start you know... a search engine? Like Netscape and Yahoo and AltaVista? Then they started a webmail service... just like Hotmail and Netscape and Yahoo before them. Oh, then they also started a online map service... just like MapQuest before them. When were they ever anything other than a "me too" company? Have they in their entire history made a single product that wasn't a dig at some other established market? I'm seriously expecting them to target Amazon or Netflix's business plan next.
I see almost nothing about google and a giant wall of text about his new startup
We are Google's product. Soylent green for the ad agencies.
I originally started this post by asking when did Google ever innovate as I would argue that from a product/solution perspective Google has never produced anything before anybody else or entered an under-serviced market with a truly game changing product.
It seems to me that Google's success was in its ability to listen to customers, hear their complaints and produce (or improve existing) products to address their concerns. Google's innovation comes in the form of better/simple UIs and the underlying algorithms.
I think the ability to understand what the customer is saying/complaining about existing solutions is what has driven the innovation and growth at Google. The question is if this is still true.
I suspect, the answer is a qualified no - like any huge company, Google reach has increased and the people with the passion/perspective/skills that made the company a success in the first place can't be a part of/don't have the expertise of the various business groups of the company, which is the cause of the innovation dilution that Mr. Yegge has experienced.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Look at what they did with their software portfolio... analytics 360? Drive? ... big announcement at io17, our android photo now does what Apple users did years ago... oh the pixel 2 launch...it was basically the iPhone X keynote with one or two colors change... all they could do is say their phone does what it does.. but with less...
lol, you're an idiot.
Did they stop innovating, or did their customer base get tired of having the innovation they relied upon killed?
you fuck-tard, he nailed it and you've even admitted it:
Google's customers are advertisers that want to have eyeballs and ear holes to blast their ads at and they don't care about innovation
except for the fact that everyone who has paid money for an android phone or a chromebook is also a google customer, and you and google have both forgotten that
No, MapQuest was in existence *long* before Google and had their first web product in 1996 (two years before Google was founded).
What Google did was make quality maps available for free, easy to use and then, listening to customers (see my post below), added Street View.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Steve Yegge will be on a lot of black lists now. No one wants a big mouth working for them.
And programmers are not engineers. When programmers call themselves engineers, they just sound stupid and pretentious,
I've noticed their search has been getting worse as well. Google has been using their search results to penalize sites for things other than quality: not using HTTPS, not using Google's AMP for mobile pages, etc. Those are fine things, but.....
When you stop making "page quality" your primary focus, the search results are going to stop reflecting page quality. Even yahoo search is as good as Google now.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Comic addressing that point.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Same as any other oligopoly.
Table-ized A.I.
The innovators are always in the spotlight, but for every successful innovator there are 1000 failures.
When you are small and have nothing, it absolutely makes sense to risk being an innovator. You don't have much to lose, and if it takes you can win big.
Once you are big and have a lot, that stops making sense. There is a lot to lose, and you have safe money sitting right on the table.
What I am getting at is....there is no moral failing in ceasing to be an innovator once you have built your empire. It is natural and ok to shift to the conservative. And it is also ok for people who dislike that corporate environment to leave (and be replaced by people who prefer the new, less risk-takey corporate environment).
There is no cause for lamentation here.
Not sure if joking or moron.
I'm pretty sure that's the entire reason that Google was rolled up under Alphabet. The larger entity can take chances, while allowing Google to entrench itself in safe business decisions. As long as that cash keeps flowing in, they can invest it in many dangerous ideas separate from the Google brand. Sounds like this individual made a good sound decision. They aren't a good fit for the culture anymore.
This "department" should be physically separated from the rest of the company, headed by folks who have shown creativity in software and hardware - and anything else that comes to mind - development and given the charge to think beyond what seems currently possible. In other words, innovate. Google has the money to do this it just needs the will to spend it on innovation.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Google docs is also improving and chrome browser is improving where google wants improvement. They want auto play videos, no matter what I do they sneak it in.
They are not good in lek. ( A lek is a clearing in the forest/woodland where male pheasants gather and strut. Females choose to mate with fancy foot work strutting males, in theory. In practice, it is crowd behavior. Females pick the male picked by most females. It is an unstable system. Using robots scientists could make the females gravitate towards one, and on command, the robots to another one and the females follow suite. My sincere sympathies to the frustrated males in that experiment, would perfectly understand them going postal ;-).
On platforms like Facebook, Twitter, the winner is whoever most of your friends and family pick, regardless of quality, price or security. It is a lek. It is very difficult to break into lek dominated apps. One can only wait for it to collapse (like myspace or geocities before that) and pick the pieces, and bide your time. Build capacity, build the technology to be ready to capitalize when the lek leader fumbles.
In personal computers Microsoft was an early lek winner. All the companies picked Microsoft because all other companies are picking microsoft. When it stumbled, Firefox pounced, when it was fending off firefox, Google pounced and reduced the cash flow from Office apps.
So all these me too platforms from google are simply waiting for a fumble by Facebook or Twitter or Apple.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Grace Hopper would beg to differ.
Look at Apple or Microsoft, Google is just another company falling prey to protecting what you've got don't take chances. When your not doing well or your company is young its worth taking risks. Apparently none of these engineers realize the reality of business. Maybe this engineer should look back at home many projects Google did inspire but they mostly fell flat and nobody cared. I certainly don't see Google as a IBM giant unable to innovate, but its obviously most of these companies follow each others lead on products and rightly so.
Ya, he's just a hater, nothing of substance to his or other's comments about google. Anything negative about google is just hate, right?
n/t
Googles goal is to amass as much data as possible for sale and their side projects (AI etc.) and in order to achieve this goal they have to replace every application every user may ever want with their own data-farming product. Making new stuff may be fun but copying existing stuff is enough to farm 99% of the user base.
I think this engineer has a serious lack of understanding how a large company works! First off of course they're conservative! What they're doing is obvious working because they're making money and succeeding in what they're doing. They're not going to do a risky change just as an experiment which could risk sinking the entire company. Second politics are obvious! There's no large organization that is politics free, the only way you're going to not have politics is either everyone is the same which is lie or your company is very small. Otherwise expect some politics. Google still innovates with the AlphaGo (AI) research projects and their self-driving vehicle projects among other things. I think this engineer is just bitter that they can't just go up google and say I have this awesome idea, give me all the resources I want now.
And there's merit to keeping focused on your core products. Google to today still makes a rock solid search engine. Compare that to Microsoft who's Window releases switch non-stop between disasters and great products. Chrome grew from a non-existant browser to the market leader while Microsoft's IE or Edge despite all their effort has lost as former market leader. Things like this don't happen without a company doing what customers want.
Folks complain that google collects a huge amount of information and sells it to advertisers. Good point but without doing that, how do you run a system that large for "free"? The one thing that I believe Google is still doing right is keeping individual information away from advertisers, that is they can't identify you as an individual but instead advertisers get an aggregate view. It might change someday which is frightening considering how much data Google has but till then we can reap the benefits of their "free" services. Don't like it? Switch to a competitor who runs either worse services or does the exact same thing but isn't as "open" about what they're doing.
Props for the rant feedback (a good rant is always entertaining and often enlightening), but Steve has also failed to see that The Patent Wars have not merely stifled innovation. It has destroyed it altogether.
I can try and innovate something very specific, and even if I'm somehow lucky to get my product off the ground, some overly vague patent barely related will be politically pushed into a courtroom by an army of litigators with the end goal of ass-raping the "competition".
No shit innovation is dying. The MBAs of a world fueled by litigation get what they deserve.
I think the ability to understand what the customer is saying/complaining about existing solutions is what has driven the innovation and growth at Google. The question is if this is still true.
The question is, who are the customers? For the most part, you, me, and John Q Public are the product, not the customers. In the modern era, Google is there to connect advertisers to relevant eyeballs, and to do so in a way that doesn't piss off said eyeballs.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Tim Cook knows how to run a business, but since he's taken over the company their products aren't revolutionary, but evolutionary.
So were most of the products that came out under Steve Jobs. Apple only makes 1-2 "revolutionary" products per decade. Their last big one was the iPhone/iPad (really the same product) which hit the market 10 years ago (7 for the iPad). Prior to that was the iPod which came out 18 years ago. Prior to that was the Powerbook (1991) and the Macintosh (1984). The real question is can Apple do another product on that scale again? They are so big now that it's hard to develop products that really move the needle revenue wise. For them to grow just 10% they have to basically build a business the size of eBay from scratch. There just aren't that many things you can do to generate that many billions in revenue. It's (comparatively) easy to look innovative and grow fast when you are small. Not so easy to make the elephant dance.
Apple is so focused on making a buck with iPhone they leave profit on the table.
Well the iPhone does account for well over 50% of their revenue. It is fair to point out that the Mac has been somewhat neglected of late though.
Steve Jobs was for all intents and purposes a smelly bastard to work for, but he drove people to innovate like mad! He really did strive to change the world and didn't much give a fuck about the competitors.
If you think Jobs didn't care about competitors you are mistaken. He cared a lot. See the "I'm a mac and I'm a PC" ads. The difference was that he was really good at product design and keeping the company focused so it didn't seem like he cared. But he had flesh eating lawyers on speed dial (ask Samsung) to deal with competitors.
Instead of bitching publicly in a Medium post (why does that strike me as a generational thing?), he should have already quietly left Google and started up his own "innovative," "disruptive" company.
A company which, he could have ultimately sold to ...Google -- er -- Alphabet.
Hmm, socialist countries are beating us in innovation? How can this be?
Put an MBA in charge of a company and they simply chase the next big thing instead of innovating and creating the next big thing.
Scapegoat much? And who would you put in change instead? Running a large company requires a very particular skill set which not a lot of people actually have. Going to school to learn some of those skills isn't something to be looked down upon any more than going to engineering school. Furthermore when you have revenues in the hundreds of billions it isn't easy to come up with ideas that move the needle. For Apple or Google to grow by 10% they need to build a company the size of eBay from scratch. You think that is a trivial endeavor? And despite your scapegoating and dislike for people who have gone to business school, a lot of them are actually quite good at what they do.
They do this because they are not innovators and creators, they are simply followers and maintainers.
That's a nice little strawman you have there. People with MBA degrees are no more or less innovative or creative than any other category. Some are good at it, most aren't. I can say the same thing about most engineers. Most engineers are not creative or innovators either and a lot of them aren't very good at engineering. Some are great but that doesn't mean all of them are.
It seems to be the plight of large companies to not want to take the risk of hiring an innovator.
No the problem is that the number of people who are both 1) highly innovative and 2) able to manage a large company, is a very small group. It's similar to the problem that schools with high academic standards find when trying to field a quality athletic team. Their talent pool is smaller because there are fewer people who are gifted both academically and athletically. Guys like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk are the exceptions that prove the rule.
I think you forgot that when Jobs came back, it was the iPod that brought Apple back to profitability, not the Mac.
And the iPod had tons of innovations.
You are also wrong on the iPhone, btw. When the CEO of Blackberry (an engineer) opened an iPhone he was in shock because it would take 4-5 years for Blackberry to match the engineering and miniaturization of components.
Congrats Alphabet, you have overtaken Qualcomm and M$ - quite an acheivement!
I am not sure what he hopes to accomplish with this. I imagine he thinks this will change something, but will likely soon find the âoearrogance of the weâ doesnâ(TM)t care about any individual. Itâ(TM)s like a boot...
Lets all create startups full of marketing slogans, innovative jargon and doublespeak. Then sit back and watch Google's and Microsoft's of the world rush to compete. It'll be great.
I've numerous innovative projects on the table. Here is a small sampling:
Internet connected toasters with a hadoop "smart counter" able to count slices of bread toasted separately from bagels or waffles. Smart AI technology automatically shares information with all of your Facebook "friends".
--
Light bulbs with cameras and integrated far field microphone arrays and integrated high performance NTH (Nothing-to-Hide) AI cloud co-processor.
When "off" the light bulbs record every sound in the room and emits infrared light in order to photograph everything in sight.
When "on" light bulb records every sound in the room and emits visible light in order to photograph everything in sight.
All collected data is to be automatically shared with all of your Facebook "friends" and sold on FRAND terms to stalkers, criminal enterprise, governments and corporations.
--
Smart wallets. This wallet holds your drivers license, passports, facebook photos and all of your credit cards. Includes integrated magnetic readers, chip proxies and transmits information to anything that asks within a 3 mile radius using latest powerful broadband COFDM encoding across all ISM bands making sure these bands can never be used by anyone.
Smart wallet includes integrated cash shredder automatically detecting and shredding any paper currency stored in the wallet at no extra charge.
It just happened to be better than the competitors at the time. Google has never ever created a new product category ever.
They just announced they are going to try to compete on audiobooks with Audible. Sorry, unless they offer a subscription service where I can stream any book in their catalogue like Apple does with Apple Music, there's no way anyone is going to switch to Google for audiobooks. Moreover, audiobooks can't possible be a big money maker, as I'm sure people are reading this right now going "audiobooks? who the fuck listens to that?".
Unless you're a stockholder. Alphabet is priced at about 3x what it should be for a company that's done innovating, and it doesn't even pay a dividend.
I'm not a shareholder but I think Alphabet is priced reasonably fairly for the amount of profits the company generates and seems likely to continue to generate. The company is something of a one trick pony (advertising) but it's a really good trick. Innovation doesn't drive stock prices except insofar as people believe it will result in future profits. (intentionally ignoring bubble cases like Tesla as they are temporary exceptions) Alphabet's profits are about as good as they get and their stock price reflects this fact.
The Macintosh Toolbox was not stolen by Microsoft.
Windows, even in its 1.0 iteration, was completely different than the Macintosh System software.
The only item at issue in any of the lawsuits was "Look and Feel". Code theft was never demonstrated. And anyone who used the Mac back in the 80s knew that Windows never really came particularly close to emulating the Macintosh look and feel before Windows 95, which was after the timeframe of the lawsuits.
Educate yourself before repeating more bullshit.
From one of the links in TFS:
But in the U.S., people love to hate on Uber because “their drivers are slave labor.” The driver has to pay for a car, maintain the car, insure it, pay for fuel, clean it, etc., so on the whole Uber is viewed as somewhat predatory. I honestly don’t know how much of this is truth vs. perception. But given that millions of drivers are opting in, and given that people are generally pretty clever about optimizing their income, the economics would seem to be at worst a moral gray area in the States and Europe, and more likely a pretty good deal for most drivers.
It's a pretty big and highly questionable assumption that people are good at optimizing their income. If he did just a little math on being a ride-sharing driver, he'd see that it amounts to something like a reverse mortgage against your car. You're not making money, you're just extracting bits of it over time against something you own.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"Focus on the user's personal information and all else will follow."
they are mired in politics, which is sort of inevitable with a large enough organization;
is wrong. It's inevitable in a large organization with weak leadership. Strong leadership creates predicatability of accepted behavior. Weak leadership necessitates community bonds which can only result from politics.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
another fascist jumps the ship. /pol/ was all the time, mother efing right, the whole time.
I know that many of you get sarcasm/hirony as trolling, but this is the reality. Big companies have to comply with idiocy, e.g. real time gender spectrum analyzers, vegans, internationalism/globalism, don't hurt the jews, pet the mentally unstable in the back and feed them hormones, let the boys dress like barbies and cut their dicks.
For fucks sake, Apple, a fucking company that used to have wozniak building PCBs and computers, has a fucking diversity chief. Google has one too, facebook the same.
Those, supposed to, big technology companies care more about the restroom their employees use, than promoting minds. They promote political correctness.
I hate to say that, but
I am struggling the last year to get a PhD position in a public research center and I cannot compete fairly with other candidates, because they had 8% of females 2 years ago and they are trying to reach 15%. I don't know if I am useless or if I ca compete against them, but having a 30 year tradition of hiring 90% and suddenly the last years you switch to 90% women and 10% men, says a lot.
I won't bother analyzing cases like Mass Effect: Andromeda, Anita Sarkeesian, Thief, Equilifax, Yahoo and similar countless cases in every field.
I get the feeling you don't like Jews.
I hate religion as much as the next person, but could you include lists of every negative thing Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus have been associated with as well for comparison? Your rant seems strangely one sided.
the person who wrote TFA was not using conservative in the political sense but in the sense of being cautious and not wanting to take a risk.
If he thought it was different, he must have been there a long time. First was when they raped DejaNews. If he came in before that he stayed too long. Igf after it, he should have known.
Jews believe this of all they call goyim/gentiles (any non-jew): Jews = biggest racists of all (for which they "jew guilt" you for no less! They're hypocrites known as thieves all thru history or were Argentines in the 1940 under Perrone, Spanish inquistion & Spain 1492 (Christopher Columbus the jew https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22C... sailed to the US for them to create it), France (1306), Egypt (despoiled/robbed by jews), Arabs (pre & post 1948), England (1330 Edward longshanks), Romans under titus, Russia pogroms and Germany who got rid of them from their nations nazi german's too? No. Driven into DESERTS ages ago! Don't wonder why after all those exilings above. Should anyone doubt any of this see Jacob Javits' crony Rosenthal spill the beans on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4zMVZ8HnFI/ where he called all Christianity fools for helping Israel and the biggest scam of all time per their beliefs below from their Talmud. This is the province of the synagogue of Satan (Khazar/Pharisees whom Jesus Christ himself kicked to the curb out of the temple & they killed him for it. Jeremiah did the same to them also + the Essenes could not stand them either breaking away from the pharisee corruption):
Maria Abramovic satanist spirit cooker pal of Hillary Clinton the Voodoo queen is a jew https://www.google.com/search?... just like Hillary Clinton's mentor Saul Alinsky author of rules for radicals book dedicated to Lucifer
"Most Jews do not like to admit it, but our god is Lucifer â" so I wasnâ(TM)t lying â" and we are his chosen people. Lucifer is very much aliveâ Harold Rosenthal http://www.thetruthseeker.co.u...
Jewish rabbi openly admits to satan worship use white children's blood they kill for passover bread, infiltrating and subverting the catholic church, creating the Jesuit order https://www.youtube.com/watch?... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Barbara Spectre, a jew, tells everyone it's jews orchestrating the muslim migrant problem in Europe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFE0qAiofMQ/ . No migrant raping of women in Poland. Tons in Sweden. Do the math. Use common-sense. This is to get muslims and other goyim/gentiles to wipe one another out as incompatible cultures that will clash and always have.
Rabbi A. Finkelstein ADMITS their greatest enemies are ARABS and WHITES (blacks too) whom they wish to kill one another in a 'theater of war' which they find AMUSING https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Finkelstein also admits JEWS DID 9/11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?... profiting by it (and that 3,000 jews employed there did not show up for work that day knowing about it beforehand).
Finkelstein also admits JEWS are going to destroy the U.S. Dollar and dumping it for other world currencies and gold to destroy the United States.
George Soros who funds groups to create division in the USA?? A jew. One who sold his own jew people into death for the nazis. Zucker @ CNN is another frying publicly for lying about "russians" and John Bonifield a producer @ CNN said it is bs. Van Jones did also.
What World-famous Men have said About the Jews https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MYPzKNQUE0/
Bernie Madoff (who made off with everyone's money, especially construction union pensions)
Or is "RULZ" the better (woke?) spelling? And should I start with a titular apology to the author of Work Rules! (by the head of HR at the google)? Just one of the many books I've read about how the google fights against the problems that Mr Yegge addressed?
OF COURSE the google failed. That's the nature of corporate cancer. I used to call it the problem of #1: Once you've got to the top, the only major change is DOWN. That's actually enough to explain 3 of his 4 problems, but the deeper cause is actually the death of capitalism. What we have now is corporate cancerism, where only ONE rule counts:
There is no Gawd but profit!
Lots of ramifications. For example, the stock market used to be about raising capital for projects that were too large for anyone to fund. Now the stock market is just a casino for computerized gamblers whose ONLY shopping criterion is the faith that some bigger sucker will buy the value-detached-from-reality shares at a higher price. OF COURSE all of them think they're as smart as the googliest googler and will cash out before the bubble bursts and the market caps implode.
Funny personal story time? It all comes back to the anecdotes? I was recently recruited by a large corporate cancer. Turns out my focus on solving real world problems, helping people, and making the world better are completely misdirected. When it came down to brass tacks, I had to prove I was a square peg who would fit in one of the square holes. Tanks, but no tanks, as the joke goes.
That's just my initial reaction to the story. It seems to have provoked a quantitatively large discussion. Maybe there are some funny or insightful comments to react to? To the searches...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
A better story is the rest of TFA which has nothing to do with Google. The author's opinions on the benefits of ride hailing services in SE Asia
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Well, they had Boston Dynamics. If that is not an innovative department, then i don't know what is. I do understand, Boston Dynamics is only about the robots, but that's the kind of innovative departments Google, or any company, would need. They gave up BD. If you want a department that can invent anything at any time, that's lots and lots harder to get together than specilized departments.
Good comment and deserved the insightful mod. Reminded me of an aspect that hasn't appeared in any part of the discussion I've read so far:
Change is going to happen. The questions are not not "if" or "how to control it", but "when" and "how much" and "does it hurt". I actually think evolutionary change is better than a revolution. The defining characteristic of a revolution is that someone gets badly hurt, and the huge problem of a revolution is that there is no assurance that the outcome will be better.
Yes, on the long-term average, things have gotten better, but the oscillations are unpredictable. Sometimes things get better and sometimes they get worse. If the oscillations get too strong, you can go into the negative territory with such outcomes as death, bankruptcy, or extinction. The way things are going, I'm afraid we're heading for a no-survivors outcome.
The corporate cancers that are in control are NOT worried about survival. They are inhuman and unthinking and not worried about anything. They are only programmed to generate the largest possible profits, but infinity is NOT possible, even if the cancer could actually understand why there is no Gawd but profit.
Yeah, I have a fixation.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
First, I want to preface this by saying that I think you're a stupid person. Now that we're on that friendly note and you're going to (justifiably) ignore every word I'm about to write...
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? You just admitted that you use Google for email service. Dude, the time to realize you can't trust them, is when they offered their obviously ridiculous email service, where THEY FUCKING ADMITTED they are reading your emails for ad-targeting purposes.
HOW THE FUCK DID SOMETHING HAPPEN ***AFTER*** THAT which made you trust them less? The Damore thing is irrelevant, as well as this other guy's opinion that Google isn't innovating. Innovation(or lack thereof) and internal strife don't matter to this problem. Those aren't reasons to distrust Google. The reasons to distrust Google are the ones that GOOGLE OPENLY TELLS YOU, you slobbering fuckwit. You don't need anyone to tell you to distrust them, because they tell you they're untrustworthy.
If there's a silver lining to Google's email service, it's that they didn't dishonestly hide anything (just like with the GPS timeline thing, which they also told you about before you decided to opt in to it). It's as though cigarette manufacturers put warning labels on cigarettes of their own volition, before the Surgeon General even knew cigarettes or cancer even exist, much less are causally related. "Do you want cancer?" pops up and you answered "Yes" and then also manually typed "Yes I want cancer" to the paste-disabled blank that came up when the astonished computer asked "Just double-checking: are you really sure you want cancer? Because I was expecting you to say NO to that."
You come to the right conclusion, but for absolutely irrelevant reasons, ten years too late. In a comically illogical way.
Good insightful comment. I'd approach the analysis from a different perspective. Right now I think people tend to fall into three groups based on their highest priorities: (1) People who put ideas first, the idealists. (2) People who want stuff, the materialists. (3) People who put people first, the humanists.
I think innovative companies are created by idealists. They are also good in such fields as mathematics and programming and philosophy. If the company is going to succeed, the idealistic leader needs to have some strengths in other areas, but I'd be extremely interested if you can give a single example of a really innovative company without some idealism at the top.
Then the materialists (especially the MBAs) take over. The "good" ones will cause the corporate cancer to grow enormously. The "bad" ones cause bankruptcies, but that's okay because they always have lovely golden parachutes. (I think HP is the saddest story there.)
The humanists are not particularly useful to corporate cancers, except for the lowest levels of management. They are actually more successful as teachers or in direct sales.
I can't resist a bit of political commentary: What priorities do you attribute to #PresidentTweety? The answer should surprise you. Hint: None of the above?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Don't feed the trolls, brother!
Microsoft spent decades queering the word "innovation" until the conversation degenerated to this level.
Look up every time a Microsoft executive spouted the word "innovation" as one of their first-paragraph talking points. (Try not to break Google while doing so.) Every damn time "innovation" was used in the context of product innovation, as if that's the only (or main) kind of innovation worth paying attention to.
They did this because Microsoft was a spectacularly innovative company, but their preferred field of invention was "business methods (unethical)". They didn't really want people asking how they became worth hundreds of billions of dollars with very little product-side innovation under their belts. (The other explanation conveys a bitter whiff of anti-trust.)
There was at least a decade where Google was easily one of the most innovative companies ever founded.
The core innovation was figuring out that they could only monetize each search result to a fraction of a cent. Hence they had to deliver each search result for far less than a fraction of cent. Their innovations in algorithmic efficiency, parallel computing, computing at scale, data center management, hardware efficiency, and internal network efficiency are legendary, and with just cause.
On the revenue side, Google innovated running a sponsorship auction on every search result (I don't know this side very well myself, but Laszlo Bock talks about it in his recent book).
It's hard to say how this all rolls out internally, but Google remains formidable in the machine learning space. AlphaZero is one of the most jaw-dropping results of my lifetime, and I still remember 1972 with a fair degree of clarity. My family was so insular, I barely understood that hockey was part of the Canadian zeitgeist until the Canada–Russia series. Somehow that culture shock woke up my internal PVR, and I've been archiving my impressions of the greater world around me ever since.
Frankly, at this point, I'm not actually sure that Google should be in the business of innovating whole new product categories. When Yegge signed up, that was probably part of the mission that attracted him, but the world changes, and not every company grinds away in the same groove forever and ever.
Google's manta is "organize the world's knowledge" and the various product categories they developed were a means to an end. ML is far more instrumental to their long-term vision. Page understood from the beginning that ML is highly dependant on big data, so they innovated preferentially in product categories with an accrued data payoff (geography, the social graph, speech recognition, machine translation).
The problem for Google at this point is that they have become king of Passive Advertising Mountain. I'm using the word 'passive' here to mean that their advertising approach is largely based on influencing the lizard brain.
'Active' advertising (for which the word 'advertising' might not even be appropriate) is finding out where your users want to go in life, their deep goals and aspirations, and then helping to filter out everything that does contribute to this.
Filter bubbles are great, so long as the bubble is a mentorship cocoon with your own best interests at heart, rather than sculpted out of libidinous landfill.
99% of silicon valley is presently suffering from VC lock-in to libidinous-landfill business models.
The opposing business model hasn't been figured out, yet, so far as I can see.
One could envision a Guild system, rehashing MOOC technology, where a person signs a contract with a Guild, wh
Are there any surprises by where the company is in the life cycle?
How much risk was taken on to start Google (resource, money, etc)?
How much momy has been made on a core product such as web search?
It is human nature to protect the âoegolden gooseâ and not do anything to âoeruinâ future revenue streams.
Not POLITICS but CORPORATE POLITICS. With the moronic musings of James Damore still getting him pageviews there's a lot of people who will read that and assume "SJWs" are ruining google. They're not.
Just another second banana
I didn't know a Google+ post could go viral. I think you need more than seven people to see it in order for it to qualify as viral.
I used to use Google Buzz a lot. It was a simple way to share crap without spamming everyone. It was also great for those family members who did nothing but find stories, pictures and videos to email out all day long. I also used Google to track location but now everything has followed open social networking. I dont care about that. Google should step back and really think about where they were and where they are at now. Along with being "me too" they, just like other companies, have tried to cram everything into whatever service they have. Its like taking the small grocery store at the corner and putting everything under the sun in it to buy (kind of like wally world). You just want to buy bread and milk, you dont care about lawn mowers, mountain bikes and toilet seats. If I want to share with others I dont need Google suggesting to me 50 things im not interested in. Keep it simple. You want the busy Google+, fine, keep it, but put Buzz back down for those who just want something lean and to the point.
Third, Google is arrogant. It has taken me years to understand that a company full of humble individuals can still be an arrogant company. Google has the arrogance of the "we", not the "I".
What does that mean? I once heard someone say that Google employees have a very strong sense of being an employee of Google - these people considered it to be part of their personal identity. Is that what Steve Yegge meant?
They even Me Too'd Me Too from Microsoft!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I worked on a Google R&D project last year. If it worked properly, it would have revolutionized several industries and for sure made a shit ton of impact and money. It was original and would have been a killer against several of Google's enemies. Someone else might take over and continue working on it because it has so much benefit, I hope so. But it's only something that can be done sinking 9 figures... Just wanted to point out they ARE trying and spending fuckloads of cash, just don't always expect a winner when inventing cutting edge technology. But I'm optimistic they'll have another breakthrough technology in the next few years.
steve. if you cant handle money. get out of the bank.
The CEO SUX and has been destroying Google. Pichai is worthless and is more focused on his portfolio than on Google's long-term prospects (basically, he should go to work for the OLD GE and help destroy them).
However, what would be smart, would be for the silicon VCs to start going through the google ppl and trying to find innovators and encourage them to start up new businesses.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So it goes...
I dealt with him, only one time. Not a large sample, but he didnâ(TM)t impress me. He may be a good engineher and a long time google but that doesnâ(TM)t confer any business or social acumen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Let's say that I recommend to you a better search engine called blahblah.com. You check it out and it is much better in all the ways you might care about. You will recommend this to most of your acquaintances and maybe on your blog or whatever. How long before google has lost 90% of their regular search engine users? 6 months? A year at most.
I suspect that without that driving the company the rest is in immediate trouble. Gmail, docs, and those other products nobody cares about can fund google as it is now. So the cutbacks would be fast and furious. Once that happens you just have to look at previous shining stars like yahoo, Blackberry, or sun micro to see the future of google at that point.
I suspect that in the early days of facebook that myspace just laughed at them.
This has happened and will happen over and over. Some companies can pivot a little bit and start to regain lost ground but most just get to a point where suddenly revenues are tanking and they are simply doomed. This is often founded on decisions made long before the tanking began and it is then too late to change.
I have a standing bet with a few friends that 2 or fewer out of the 5 companies (Facebook, Google, Apple, Oracle, and Amazon) will be players in 2030. We all agree that Yahoo's present state would count as dead.
Except there are not too many at Google either and then we all know that real talent is not that easy to come by. H1B-Ranjid and H1B-Priya are of course much, much cheaper hires but there is one golden rule in this world to live and abide by that will save you from many a disappointment: You only get what you pay for. So yes, a good engineer, particularly a good American engineer is a loss. Another thing to think about is that most google employees are not engineers. They have a huge overhang of non-engineer posts, a glut of project managers and an army of internet censors inspired by their Chinese counterparts. Plus since their hiring process favors the hip transsexual communist black female over all others with straight, white and male at the bottom and talent is only a secondary consideration, I would think they should want to isolate what capable staff they still have from the insanity of their leftist culture, or these will leave for greener pastures.
Maps? A healthy adult can navigate without maps. ...are not actually useful. ...are not actually useful.
eMail? We already have phones and SMS, use them.
Music? Mp3 players.
Photos? Digital cameras.
Games?
Social media?
Waste of time? Not useful!
Need security patches and is vulnerable anyway? Not useful!
Needs recharging twice a week? Not useful!
Yes. You can only say nice things to yellow-scaled wingless dragonkins. Otherwise you are a hater and is equal to Hitler, and can be legally punched in the face. And then Google will fire you.
google recently axed project tango which was very innovative to begin ARcore which is very much like apples ARkit.
I knew Steve Covey long before his writing of "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," one of the most popular books in the world, and eventually became a student of his. He would say that Google needs an urgent change of leadership or it will fail.
One Monday he walked into class, obviously distracted -- and angry. He explained that as part of his weekend consulting business he'd visit/inspect major corporations for efficiency issues, etc. He said that weekend he'd been evaluating IBM, which was then perhaps the leading company in the world. He predicted the company would suffer a major downfall within 10 years. Shock around the room, audible gasps.
He went on to explain that the president of the company had realized his vision of the company and now expected to revel in glory forever, not stepping aside, even though he saw nothing for the company to accomplish in the future. Lawyers (risk averse) and accountants (short-term thinking) had taken over in the lack of a vision for the future. He'd encouraged the president to either get a new vision or step aside. The president claimed he'd been successful so now they could continue in that "success" forever. Of course, Covey was right, and the president was eventually disgraced.
This is what has happened at Google. Their leadership needs to step down or become forgotten/laughing-stocks in the future, and become a shell of what they once were, just like IBM.
The whole silicon valley stops innovating either.
A number of early execs were from Sun, Sun Labs to be precise.
Egos and in-fighting killed the innovation and eventually that company.
Meetings were trash-talking the other guys colleges. 'The Big Game', Stanford vs Cal, stopped work for a week.
Lone voices could be heard saying 'Intel is the enemy!'. Instead, all eyes were on SGI, a one trick pony.
What can we expect from Google with the Sun DNA?
Why does everyone feel that they need to "out" their employers when their goals no longer align? Google is what it is, if you don't like working there, then quit. No need to run your mouth about how horrible they are on the web.
I am not a google fan, but you are a little bitch for acting this way, grow up, loser.
There may be some truth in this but this is largely borne out of fatique and stalemate experienced by eny one who has served in the same place for a long time .So, It is time to quit and rekindly the innovation spirit within.
Yegge's rants are frequent, long and well articulated. His rants are usually (always?) based on wrong premises. He's awesome as a writer and editor... yet he must be a distraction in any company that employs him. Do you focus on work... or have everyone spend their time discussing their opinion on his semi-technical articles. Yegge is to the rant, what Trump is to tweets.