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Their incentive structure doesn't lead to longevity. Nobody gets promoted for keeping a product alive, they get promoted for shipping something new. That's why

Their incentive structure doesn't lead to longevity. Nobody gets promoted for keeping a product alive, they get promoted for shipping something new. That's why we're on version 37 of whatever their chat client is called now. I think we can be reasonably sure that search, Gmail, and some flavor of AI will live on, but other than that, Google apps are basically end-of-life at launch.

nostrademons 10mo ago
It's telling that basically all of Google's successful projects were either acquisitions or were sponsored directly by the founders (or sometimes, were acquisitions that were directly sponsored by the founders). Those are the only situations where you are immune from the performance review & promotion process.
- sidibe 10mo ago
  They've actually had many very successful projects that make the few products and acquisitions you are thinking of work. It's true most of their end products don't work or get abandoned but it stretches their infrastructure in ways that works out well in the long run
  - nostrademons 10mo ago
    I should probably have said "products" rather than "projects". There's a fair bit of extremely good engineering that goes on in the infrastructure side, but when it comes to consumer products, if one of the founders isn't explicitly sponsoring it it gets killed.
    - Jensson 10mo ago
      They get killed since ROI of putting more people on search or ads is almost always higher than ROI on the new projects, not because the founders doesn't like them.
siliconc0w 10mo ago
It's also paradoxically the talent in tech that isolates them. The internal tech stack is so incredibly specialized, most Google products have to either be built for internal users or external users. Agree there are lots of other contributing causes like culture, incentives, security, etc.
- AceJohnny2 10mo ago
  haha remember Steve Yegge's Platform Rant? [1] nothing changed... [1] Ref: he mistakenly posted what was meant to be an internal memo, publicly on G+. He quickly took it down but of course The Internet Never Forgets https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
nolist_policy 10mo ago
Google released their latest chat app 8 years ago.

nostrademons 10mo ago

It's telling that basically all of Google's successful projects were either acquisitions or were sponsored directly by the founders (or sometimes, were acquisitions that were directly sponsored by the founders). Those are the only situations where you are immune from the performance review & promotion process.

sidibe 10mo ago
They've actually had many very successful projects that make the few products and acquisitions you are thinking of work. It's true most of their end products don't work or get abandoned but it stretches their infrastructure in ways that works out well in the long run
- nostrademons 10mo ago
  I should probably have said "products" rather than "projects". There's a fair bit of extremely good engineering that goes on in the infrastructure side, but when it comes to consumer products, if one of the founders isn't explicitly sponsoring it it gets killed.
  - Jensson 10mo ago
    They get killed since ROI of putting more people on search or ads is almost always higher than ROI on the new projects, not because the founders doesn't like them.

siliconc0w 10mo ago

It's also paradoxically the talent in tech that isolates them. The internal tech stack is so incredibly specialized, most Google products have to either be built for internal users or external users. Agree there are lots of other contributing causes like culture, incentives, security, etc.

AceJohnny2 10mo ago
haha remember Steve Yegge's Platform Rant? [1] nothing changed... [1] Ref: he mistakenly posted what was meant to be an internal memo, publicly on G+. He quickly took it down but of course The Internet Never Forgets https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

nolist_policy 10mo ago

Google released their latest chat app 8 years ago.