Slashdot Mirror
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.
This. It seems that the guy who left doesn't seem to understand this, or if he does, he doesn't explain how Google is no longer being innovative for people who buy or display ads. I'm a user, not a customer. And yes, as others have said, by being a user, I'm the actual product; that is, my eyeballs and clicks on ads make other folks money. Which is why I have no compunction about using ad-blocking software.
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
Without Jobs, computers would be ugly and unpleasant things to use.
Now, I didn't think OS/2 was that bad...
For explanation, without Jobs working on MacOS, Gates and Microsoft wouldn't have been scared enough (or able to) steal the MacOS code to create Windows 1.0. It also means that OS/2 might actually have been finished earlier instead of being sabotaged by Microsoft. Presuming that Microsoft sabotage OS/2 because they didn't need it once they had Windows. Now, Microsoft might have just stolen the OS/2 code, but that might have more difficult to do. In any case, it's conceivable that we might have had two decades of IBM's OS/2 operating system instead of Windows.
I'm not sure how Smartphones would have turned out without Apple, though. Maybe they'd all be Blackberry clones, or maybe the iPhone touch screen design is so obvious that someone else would have created an equivalent at around the same time.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
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.
Look at past large companies, especially monopolies. They don't keep their eye on the ball any more. They do a lot of things, but nothing really remarkably well. In 1980 IBM was considered unassailable. The microcomputers were gaining popularity. IBM released its own PC which was expected to set a new standard and crush the existing competitors. It did mostly crush most competitors except for most notably Apple. Then along came Compaq and then other PC compatibles. Along with a standard OS: MS-DOS. Once the universe of software developers could develop to a standard platform built by multiple hardware manufacturers, the whole industry became ablaze with competition. IBM attempted to regain control again in 1987 with the incompatible PS/2, but the whole rest of the industry "just said no". Think about it. As a software developer you could rework your software for the PS/2, or simply do nothing and be compatible with many millions of installed existing PCs. Hmmmmm. Which to do? Eventually IBM threw in the towel on PCs.
In the 1990s Microsoft was considered unassailable. Open source began growing and growing. Slowly. Gaining a toehold, then a foothold then a beachhead into everything that was NOT a desktop PC. Anything that wasn't a desktop PC ran Linux and open source by the 2000's. Today here we are with Microsoft trying to embrace, mimic, and copy open source. Offering SQL Server and a counterpart for SQL Server Management Studio on Linux seems to me to be an admission that their once monopoly wasn't safe any longer. Servers everywhere run Linux and it's simply too big to ignore. Offering Windows Subsystem For Linux is also an attempt to draw developers back to Microsoft. Who would have ever thought that Microsoft would need to draw in developers to their platform. I'm not saying Microsoft is dying. But it's monopoly pricing days are surely in the past.
A few decades ago I heard an interesting saying.
Once a company exceeds a certain size it is run by MBAs.
Then once it exceeds another certain size it is run by lawyers.
Why is this? Because at some point, the company is so big that the results of failure would be unthinkable. So the company becomes risk averse. And there is the pressure of always increasing shareholder value, even if you cripple yourself in the long run. Everything becomes short term focused. Then the lawyers take this to the next level because the organization is now so big it is a target of all kinds of meritless and maybe also legitimate lawsuits.
Even ten years ago people were saying that eventually we would see this all happen to Google.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
This is why they created Alphabet; to be the holding company of their cash cow (Google) and all of their other innovating companies. If you think that Google is not innovative, then transfer to one of the other bets that are more innovative.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
This. It seems that the guy who left doesn't seem to understand this
Other than the relatively small part of the company that is focused on selling and delivering ads, basically nobody in Google thinks of users as the product. Everyone thinks of end users as the customer, regardless of the fact that 90% of dollars actually flow from advertisers.
(I work for Google.)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.