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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.
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!
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.
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!
Apple went without Jobs twice. During the first run, they came up with innovative things like the digital camera and the PDA. Only thing was they were too far ahead of their time. When Jobs returned, he dumped the innovative projects and started selling Macs in fancy colors. He had timing and flare, not necessarily innovation. He made people want the products. Technically, the iPhone wasn't any more innovative than what Palm had already created. But it combined the right things at the right time to make people want to buy it.
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.
Na, the previous CEO's were innovators.
The current CEO is an MBA.
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.
They do this because they are not innovators and creators, they are simply followers and maintainers.
It seems to be the plight of large companies to not want to take the risk of hiring an innovator. So they look for someone who "knows how to run a business." They get what the look for, stagnation.
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.
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
"During the first run, they came up with innovative things like the digital camera"
They sure as fuck did not, that goes to Kodak in the mid-1970s.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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."
Apple in a perfect example of this! (I'm a fan, so moderate your opinion accordingly...)
Tim Cook knows how to run a business, but since he's taken over the company their products aren't revolutionary, but evolutionary. They're often released before they're ready and riddled with bugs / issues. Apple is so focused on making a buck with iPhone they leave profit on the table. (The Mac mini hasn't been updated in over two years. The Mac Pro just got dusted by the iMac Pro, which is absurd.)
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.
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.
Whatever. Dude, I owned a Palm back in the 90's. I also, shortly before the iPhone came out, bought my first "smartphone" -- a Symbian device -- which made me conclude that there just wasn't really any use for having a smartphone.
The iPhone completely changed the game for smartphones. They made it actually useful. Just like they did for mp3 players back in the day.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
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
I still don't see a use for a smartphone - I'd take a feature phone with Audible and Kindle if one existed. And Apple's MP3 players were shiny garbage - they were always the worst, from a geek perspective, and not well liked on Slashdot back in the day.
Jobs's genius was in turning personal electronics into jewelry. Having an iPod, and later an iPhone, was a status symbol. He invented that! Didn't matter whether the actual products were any good. Pure genius.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If you had actually read what I wrote, you'd know that it was Street View I was actually talking about.
I even put an asterisk beside "terrestrial virtual presence" in case you didn't know what i as talking about.
Being able to actually see what your destination looks like from ground level before you go to an unfamiliar location is damn convenient, and has remained a significant reason why Google Maps is so preferred to many alternatives.
On a slightly related note, I don't recall seeing a map like Google Earth by MapQuest... all I can remember them having was the standard Miller Cylindrical projection, and certainly nothing resembling an actual 3 dimensional globe.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
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.
Apple in a perfect example of this! (I'm a fan, so moderate your opinion accordingly...)
Tim Cook knows how to run a business, but since he's taken over the company their products aren't revolutionary, but evolutionary. They're often released before they're ready and riddled with bugs / issues. Apple is so focused on making a buck with iPhone they leave profit on the table. (The Mac mini hasn't been updated in over two years. The Mac Pro just got dusted by the iMac Pro, which is absurd.)
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.
Where/when the REAL innovation took place was when Woz, Jobs, and Gates were working out of garages.
Small businesses and startups are where real innovation occurred most of the time in the past. The problem is a Jobs, Gates, or Woz could not do the same today. A large reason why much "innovation" happens in megacorps today is that there are so many regulatory/legal/financial/taxation barriers in place that a random guy in a garage stands almost no chance even with a radically innovative idea with large potential. The lower rungs of the "ladder" have been sawed off by existing businesses using government taxation, legislation, and regulation to keep raising the barriers to entry for potential future competition.
Without serious competition, stagnation becomes inevitable.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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!!!
Hmm... No relation to diamonds? I still think you should have gotten a nice mod point or three, but moot to me since I never get a mod point.
Per my longer comment on types of people, I think management is only concerned with two types of people: Humanists are good for lower management and Materialists for upper management. The innovative founders are idealists and normally disposed of as soon as the corporation has become sufficiently cancerous.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.