What’s amazing to me is how timid companies get when there’s limited resources. Instead of making another big bet to get back on the revenue train, they chase trends. Like Google getting caught off guard on AI and now chasing that instead of leading here or elsewhere.

I don’t know the answer. Part of the problem is you went from company leadership focused on a domain (search) to generalist business types. The domain experts had a strong conviction about their domain. But the business types are good at executing an existing business model, but not the domain wherewithal to find another big market. Even if internally there exists someone with such a conviction or idea, if it threatens to take focus away from the current cash cow, and leadership doesn’t have the expertise to understand the idea, such innovation will be discouraged.

You also tend to attract stability oriented careerists once people see how likely it is to make sustainable salary, with stock, by getting in. Once in I don’t think you’re incentivized to take risks or rock the boat of the existing business model.

And thus, and forever, cycles of business will continue. It’s hard to create a big company that has both a stable business model and takes the right risks.

A classic (and timely) counter-example to this is when Boeing bet the entire company on the success of the 747 in the late 1960's. It worked and it Boeing survived but it was an incredibly aggressive and risky bet for a big old company.

Unfortunately the Boeing of today is the exact opposite (or worse). Instead of investing in a clean sheet redesign of the 737 they used the R+D budget to buy back their own stock - at the cost of 338 lives so far.

So the leadership (CEO + Board) can make this go either way, regardless of how big and old the company is.

And yet, for centuries people have done it.

It's easy to create a big company without a stable business model that refuses to take the right risks when meaningful competition and regulation do not exist, and there are long periods of unconventional monetary policies (QE, ZIRP). Will the company last. Question for the reader to decide.

For example, Big Company A has survived for 172 years by taking the "risk" of hiring journalists to produce news. Big Company B has survived for 25 years by not hiring journalists and instead using the product of Big Company A's employees as bait to lure in ad targets. What "risks" did Big Company B take, if any. Were they the "right" ones. Let the reader decide.

Big Company B just seems like a giant leech. What happens when the blood supply from Big Company A is exhausted. Find another host?

As for the folks Big Company B did hire to share in the immense bounty, as it happens they are just a non-essential expense that can be cut at any time. Some of them brag online about how they only work two hours a day. They loved the benefits. They saw no evil. But what risk was taken in hiring them. Question for the reader to decide.

This is a variant of the principal-agent problem.

Thaler's book is titled "Misbehaving" -- well worth listening to the audiobook if you have a commute!

????

I was at Google in ‘06-07, and again ‘09-11, and already there were obvious differences. You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year.

And at some point you need just plain-old-“good” engineers to make the A/B tests happen and all the other stuff that doesn’t excite the PhDs. And at some point you need product people too, because you start to build products you’re not in the target audience for. And at some point your employees aren’t all going to be fabulously wealthy from an upcoming IPO, and so they’ll start playing political games for coveted titles and $1M+ comp so they too can have their house in Tahoe.

At some point the real world just gets in the way.

Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public?

Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands.

Did Valve corporation do something like that?

There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve. They are not behind any more of a moat than anyone else.

What strikes me as a bit odd with relation to specifically competitors to the Valve client (essentially a game library and store rolled together), the competitors that come to mind are...

* EA/Origin

* Epic

* Ubisoft

EA and Ubisoft are only selling games they publish, IIRC. Epic sells games from other publishers, but always gives Fortnite preferential treatment (and has the Unreal Editor in its own tab in the client, or did last I paid attention).

Valve is still by a large margin the only one that comes to mind that feels as close to a neutral store/library as you can find (even when they released Artifact and Alyx, neither of those were permanently pinned to the top like Fortnite is in the Epic store). Of course, developers can still buy preferential treatment, but it at least feels like you're competing with other developers and not "the house".

I'm not making an argument that Valve's being anti-competitive here, just it's surprising to me how hard these competitors -aren't- trying to be a real competitor. I expect due to internal pressures from their respective game publishing branches.

One might argue that YouTube and Android should go in that list, but I disagree. YouTube was acquired and it never managed to become something really big (it failed to compete with Netflix for video streaming, with Spotify for music and with TikTok for social network). Android also, was acquired and without a pletora of hardware vendor supporting it, it would have failed too (I'd say that Android without Samsung is nothing -- of course, it's big on embedded things, like cars or TVs, but it's not a world-wide product like gmail).

And likewise it is failing in AI, against OpenAI, which looks like another engineering-first product.

See: https://mannhowie.com/youtube-valuation

Also see: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/28/youtube-is-a-proven-juggerna..., https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/youtube-a...

It's not that it's not big, it's that it is not on the same level than maps or gmail, IMO.

I don't consider creating a product, and then retiring a product after many years a failure myself. Its more like a nuanced then, some producdts don't change with the times, and others dont work.

I did watch that TV series on how some people at google did some unethical things to incorporate the maps idea from a German company. Not sure how true that is, but if it is, then google is just like any other corrupt establishment, willing to do shady things at the expense of the original inventors.

Before YouTube there was Google Video, which was moderately successful (it was just that YouTube was more successful, so it got acquired).

But there are just my opinions, of course.

Facebook marketplace and groups are other successful (IMO) sub-products that might not get built if "stick to your knitting" was the mantra.

And Valve had plenty of competition and they knew their audience pretty well to make digital purchases something to consider for many. Plus, they simply have the better product.

Innovative products every 4 years? Lol, if Facebook waited that long at any point in time it'd have died.

Comparing Valve to Meta head-to-head is simply ridiculous. I'm not even sure which specific products you had in mind. Did you mean "Meta Quest"? Literally, each division within Meta is fighting in a different sector

Valve has been operating in the same market for 27 years and has consequently built a loyal and enthusiastic fan base.

Even if you believe Meta is directly competing with Valve, it's embarrassing for Valve, as someone in their position should be undisputed in their niche and have the market in deadlock.

Meta can tap a billion people to play social games.

[1] I vaguely remember a legal dispute when Valve did release steam years later as Sierra were being cut out.

But Valve has had an awesome record of using it responsibly, and its kind of amazing I can log in, click and 60 seconds later be playing a game I bought in 2003.

My grandfather founded a construction company that became quite successful and remained privately owned by him. When it was time for him to retire, he sold the company to the employees who turned it into a worker cooperative. They have since seen wild success and many dozens of people have made some incredible amounts of money. The culture my grandfather established remains present. I believe the key was never going public and therefore avoiding being controlled by external investors with no stake in the company’s culture.

I appreciate all that publicly-traded companies have contributed to society, but rarely is "going public" ever not the first sign of an objectively downward trend of the company trajectory.

Google (and Facebook etc) are controlled by their founders (some even as majority shareholders). There's no blaming financial markets here.

Facebook was even happy to set fire to a giant pile of cash in pursuit of the 'metaverse', a project that approximately no investors wanted, but that was dear to the heart of their founder.

I always saw it more as priming the market. Throw out this idea, with the apparent weight of Meta behind it, and see how the market jumps on it (or not). If it goes well, Meta as initiator can easily ensure they stay in the lead, gobble up startups and such.

But investors, or at least their opinion aggregated via the share price, had a different opinion at the time.

(Investors are often happy to bet on speculative things, as long as they have a positive expected value.)

It's biggest competitor, Autodesk, has 13,700 employees.

Of course Autodesk has a lot of products and SideFX has practically one so it's not a very fair comparison. But my point is that SideFX is a living evidence that if you want to stay reasonably small you can. SideFX was been existed for 28 years, so we can safely assume it has a positive cash flow.

They've proven you can do a lot by being in touch with your users and being half-decent at what you're doing.

Many companies used to do that both in the US and other countries. Some probably still do.

SAS Institute (well-known maker of statistical and other software) did, for many years, last I checked. Don't know if they still are that way.

Update: Looks like they are:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute

[ In July 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that the semiconductor giant Broadcom was in talks to acquire SAS.[37] In a July 13, 2021 email, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight stated that the company was not for sale.[38] ]

>>SAS Institute (well-known maker of statistical and other software) did, for many years, last I checked. Don't know if they still are that way. Update: Looks like they are:

No... SAS Institute actually wanted to go public earlier in 2020 and then 2024 but they've now pushed the timeline back again to 2025 because of market conditions: https://www.google.com/search?q=SAS+Institute+ipo+2025

Instead of a "no growth" philosophy, the founders Goodknight and Sall have been trying to spread the narrative about SAS's "recent growth" after losing money in 2020 so potential investors will be receptive to an IPO. : https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sas-charts-path-to-...

That and my department of about a dozen can't justify the cost to upgrade to their more enterprise focused, cloud ready new version Viya, but there's not really an upgrade path for 9.4 other than minor maintenance releases. Since no young new hires come in with SAS experience and the whole thing seems like a ticking clock, we decided just supporting Python for new development is a better plan.

If you go public, no way to prevent it.

You have to stay private. But if you took a lot of VC money (and gave them board positions) that's going to be difficult.

If a company isn't "growing" at ~5% p.a nominal, it isn't tapping into the money hose. What would be the point of owning it?

the way i understand it the problem is the product and the market that you’re selling into.

for example: Renaissance Technologies LLC has $130Bn AUM with 310 employees.

It’s growth period.

It’s easy to have a “hire smart people to do whatever” culture when the money is coming in hand over fist. Your investors don’t care.

But when the goose that lays the golden egg dies, nobody is going to hand over money to get a 2% return. Might as well just buy treasuries with zero risk and a higher return.

You’re flipping the cause and effect. It’s not the demand for growth that changes a company, it’s the companies business changing such that the money doesnt come in via fire hose any more.

That demands culture change to show that you actually are doing something productive.

Yes, just don't hire MBAs with fetish for shareholder value

It’s not the MBAs alone that demand an increasing stock price.

Growth and private investment are part and parcel.

The massive return on investment that VCs aim for comes from the public market valuing the VCs shares of the company much higher than what the VCs paid for it when they invested. How do you replicate that without going public?

The problem for FAANGs and Tesla is their valuation was predicated on indefinite rapid growth. Once you have that valuation, the only way to keep it is to actually grow at the rate the valuation priced in. If you don't, the price will drop and all of the various directors and high-level employees whose compensation is largely in the already heavily-priced stock will lose a lot of net worth. This isn't a problem for all publicly-traded companies. It's a problem specific to a very small number of extremely highly-valued companies whose value was based upon the expectation that they would grow very rapidly.

Venture capital is another matter entirely. Being far riskier than owning publicly-traded equity shares, they do demand outsized growth from every investment. But venture capital is hardly ubiquitous. Outside of software devs, all small business owners I've ever known would not have even tried to consider it. If they need money, they ask their parents or a bank.

Meta is the obvious one, but people are all "no, not like that." Those people IMO have rose-tinted glasses. Early Google was a pretty fast-moving place with founders who would breathe down your neck and expect you to deliver. It also had a lot of speculative projects that amounted to nothing much in the end. Around 2011, Larry had a brain wave and fired, IIRC, every product manager at the company. If you squint, modern Meta is pretty close, both in good ways and bad.

The AI companies are not like this. Most of the ones I know about resemble Amazon more than early Google. Other places tried to be like Google, but without to revenue to make that work, and they're mostly in trouble now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page

I think a more general point is that when human organisations scale beyond a certain size, the organisations often become more focussed on self-sustainment (and preservation) than the original function they provided. Sometimes known as the iron law of bureaucracy, in commercial situations. For nation states, this entails preservation of the ruling classes, be they ostensibly profit focussed or not.

dictators make dumb-ass calls often, like Erdogan of Turkey making random (randumb) pronouncements about the currency and causing terrible inflation (or Saddam's "let just fight all our neighbors, Suharto's random evil, etc.).

Saddam I’ll give you but that also led to his removal and it can be argued Iraq didn’t have many good options as historically it’s been controlled by one or more of the surrounding nations so it may just not working realistically due to geography and ethnic strife

This line of reasoning only makes sense when compared with counterfactuals, which seems like a waste of everyone's time. It's easy enough to justify an arbitrary action as rational if you have no basis of comparison.

Anyway, "rational self-interest of the state" is not the same thing as "rational". There are other ends other than self-interest of the state—for instance, self-interest of the constituents of the state, or self-interest of humanity. All states put their own existence before the welfare of their people. A state is not a natural thing outside the vying of capital to institute economic stability for the ends of its own empowerment.

There is absolutely nothing rational about terraforming your own planet to make it less able to support you.

This is typically termed a "belief".

_total_ internal transparency is trivial to scale. partial and no transparency is difficult to scale.

*By shared context, I mean there is certain background knowledge and assumptions that all parties involved have. Since they already have this context, they don't have to explain any of this and can skip ahead. Compare a theoretical physicist explaining their work to other physicists (lots of shared context) to them explaining it to a reporter (little shared context) -- in the second case it takes a lot more work to convey the same information.

It's also an argument to break large companies into smaller ones. This has to cut both ways, not just to fire people by cutting off whole org branches.

OpenAI?

This is a cartoonish interpretation of what Generative AI does. You might be coming from a good place trying to defend the "little guy" who supposedly is getting ripped off by GenAI (they aren't), but in practice you are helping copyright trolling and big rusty corporations that live off the perpetual copyright scam.

If someone publishes GPL licensed code on github, and OpenAI then modifies that code in some answer it provides to someone asking a coding question, then OpenAI is in violation of the GPL license if they don't also license their stuff under GPL.

Just because an entire industry has their entire future riding on courts eventually deciding that "Yeah, but copyright doesn't apply to AI", that doesn't make it so.

I've read a lot of code in my career, much of it GPL. When I now write code, it's based in part on that previous code reading. I think most people agree that doesn't mean that all code that I write must be licensed under GPL. In other words, they agree it's not derivative. Even if I write a C strcpy implementation that's functionally identical to one in glibc, I think most of us agree it's not derivative, even if I've read glibc's implementation before. Or if someone asks me "how can I write strcpy in terms of memcpy and strlen?" and I answer them with code I write that's very close to glibc's implementation.

Is AI-written code fundamentally different from bio-intelligence-written code in that regard? (I think the answer is uncertain in terms of "how should it work?", not that it's clearly one way or the other.)

That's a very biased characterization that downplays a debate that people have right now as basically being already solved. It's simply not truthful, unless they started a side business in developing a torrent tracker or something.

Everybody and their brother sued Google early on for a huge variety of their products. Google News got sued for showing headlines from news websites. Google Books got sued for copyright violations for, y'know, making a copy of everybody's books. Back in 2007, Google would've been in the middle of the the Viacom vs YouTube lawsuit. The whole idea of a search engine is fundamentally about taking all of the useful and mostly copyrighted content out there owned by others and profiting off of it by becoming the gateway to it.

OpenAI, similarly, works by taking all of the text and art and everything in the world, most of it owned by others, then copying it, collating it, and compressing it down into a model. Then they provide access to it in novel ways. I make no representation about whether it's legal or ethical. It's transformative, useful, novel, and really cool, but it's clearly taking other people's data, and then making it useful and accessible in a novel way.

They do, juste look at all the art being generated that uses well known brands and characters.

I agree that Google should have been forced to pay licensing fees, and OpenAI should too.

We know from history that's unlikely to happen.

It's going to be a very messy landscape for copyrights and intellectual property in the next years.

Physical force, the ability to wipe something (or someone) out of existence, is the ultimate arbiter. Law just an upstream proxy.

It's a nitpick that's becoming increasingly relevant as we see institutions that support that proxy collapse or transform.

> Today, at a Senate hearing on AI’s impact on journalism, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle agreed that OpenAI and others should pay media outlets for using their work in AI projects. “It’s not only morally right,” said Richard Blumenthal, the Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law that held the hearing. “It’s legally required.”

> Josh Hawley, a Republican working with Blumenthal on AI legislation, agreed. “It shouldn’t be that just because the biggest companies in the world want to gobble up your data, they should be able to do it,” he said.

https://www.wired.com/story/congress-senate-tech-companies-p...

Whats the solution ?

Instead Google had more drama with the inappropriate behavior kind.

> he most incredible and unusual thing that struck me about Google's early culture was the tendency to value employees above all else

At that time, those employees are Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Rob Pike, Paul Buchheit, Lars, and etc. Nowadays we got employees who bragged about their “lifestyle” on TikTok

I might be wrong here, but part of newer product releases from Google over the last few years (not Deepmind) reflect the quality of motivation/talent they have at their disposal. I have heard stories about Gmail, about how Waze was integrated with Google maps over a weekend, and today you see half baked products which are shutdown within a year. We still use many of the early products today, but I find it hard to think of any new product which has been released in last few years I use regularly, except Google Pay maybe. Not talking about enhancing existing products but new products.

And bicker around Blind about "TC" to show off how much money they are making. It's like a new generation of yuppies but instead of working in finance in the 80s they are working for Big Tech in the 2010s-2020s.

I've been in the tech since the early 2000s, right after dot-com bursting, it's been very palpable the change on types of people who wants to work in tech, before it was geeks who learned to fiddle with computers since we were kids, the later cohorts came specifically through a path of learning CS to apply for jobs paying US$ 100-200k as their first salary.

at the same time, I also wonder if this is a symptom of a larger problem. chasing TC becomes less surprising when you consider how expensive it is to live these days.

it is definitely not the company that it was pre 2010. from my lowly IC5 (when I left) position, it felt like something happened in 2014 or so that really put the company on a different track. eric had already left and the founders had started stepping back and the people left running the show were, not them. i guess they were able to maximize shareholder value. but it was clearly at the expense of something.

anyway, I dont have anything to say that hasn't been said more eloquently by ben. except, I saw this change too. and it bums me out because I got to see the place before.

My money is on Ruth being the biggest change to Google.

But Ruth: she could be anywhere in the corporate world.

and I don't say that disparagingly. that was endearing.

(i'm probably getting some details of that wrong, it was ... dear lord, a long time ago)

It seemed like maybe Eric Schmidt's departure had something to do with it, though it's possible that was just coincidence.

Another option is that he saw the trajectory of the company culture and wanted out.

I have a tiny little cynical voice in the back of my head having a good laugh, but I might be wrong.

They’re paid 50% of what their contracting agency is paid for them, they have poor benefits if at all and live in a constant consciousness about who is higher class than them. They attend different Christmas parties, for goodness sake.

That the end worker is getting ~50% isn't that crazy to me. If directly employed, they'd be getting only about ~65-70%. (which is less than the direct fringe ratio because someone has to fade the PTO/sick/hiring lag flex to ensure the trash cans get emptied consistently and the agency is doing that in the other case).

Famously the chef running the employee canteen was one of the early Google millionaires. (I doubt it's like that now, but the point of the post is it's not like that any more for the programmers either)

With required support services, if Google was in one place it’d likely cause a company town of over a million.

Big tech is in a really tough spot when it comes to innovation. Google has developed a reputation for killing off products too easily. Many have commented here and elsewhere that you can’t trust them to invest in using their new products because they might just kill it off and leave you in the lurch. Of course, you get a self fulfilling prophecy as then too few people use the product for fear that it’ll get killed off.

But I’m guessing Google is also more hesitant to launching a new products that since it neither wants to worsen its reputation for killing them, nor does it want to support a product indefinitely, even if it’s not profitable.

So then what? The answer probably should be that Google should buy up startups that have figured out product-market fit and just need to scale. They can’t do that though because the FTC is already breathing down their neck with anti-trust suits.

Google actually is investing in a lot of very transformative technologies—AI obviously, but also quantum computers, biotech, and autonomous vehicles. Those are things that just aren’t well very well suited to 20% projects.

That wasn't only a 20% project but a secret one! For several months I told my manager in daily standups that today was my 20% day, and that it was related to what the team did, but not what the project actually was. Everyone was cool with it.

It's possible that this was achievable only because I worked in an operational role. We had firefights that sometimes disrupted my ability to take the 20%, but you could partially bank the time and there weren't top-down imposed project deadlines.

I also used and experienced many other people's 20% projects whilst I was there. Many were small internal tools and systems that made working life easier but weren't the right size/shape to be staffed up as a full project with management attention, but some were products. At one point someone did a project that let you bid against yourself in the ad auction, to experiment with how to pay to remove ads. IIRC that was a 20% project. Google's early reputation for ML skill was established on the outside by Google Sets, a (for the time) astonishing demo that revealed Google was no mere fancy keyword matcher but had semantic understanding of words too. Pretty sure that was also a 20% project.

I felt pretty strongly at the time that the 20% policy was one of Google's secret weapons. The disdain and disinterest with which it's so often greeted outside of Google's walls is puzzling and sad, as is the quasi-myth that it didn't exist at all. I can believe that it existed to varying degrees depending on where and when you were, but, it's definitely not a myth.

That being said, I’m not sure whether it is you or I who does not know what “quasi” means.

It's because some media stories used GMail as an example of a 20% project -- and -- those stories also end up being cited in places like Wikipedia:

- >Google is credited for popularizing the practice that 20 percent of an employee's time may be used for side projects. At Google, this led to the development of products such as Gmail and AdSense. : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_project_time#cite_note-:1....

The Time Magazine article is one of the places where they say GMail was not a 20% project:

- >Gmail is often given as a shining example of the fruits of Google’s 20 percent time, its legendary policy of allowing engineers to divvy off part of their work hours for personal projects. Paul Buchheit, Gmail’s creator, disabused me of this notion. From the very beginning, “it was an official charge,” he says. “I was supposed to build an email thing.” : https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/#:~:text=Gmail...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39054947

I’d be glad to hear your perspective or thoughts in this thread or as a reply to my post re: Google Earth/Keyhole.

Be like Chad Hurley.

Thanks for mentioning that for the rest of HN’s sake.

DoubleClick and Waze are two other big ones that I remember seeming important at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

I’m pretty sure it was Keyhole, for what it’s worth. Curiously, both Google and Keyhole are In-Q-Tel investments, although I’m not sure if that impacted/steered/influenced the acquisition, however.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History

https://web.archive.org/web/20130605121646/http://www.busine...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

From that page:

> As of 2016, In-Q-Tel listed 325 investments, but more than 100 were kept secret, according to the Washington Post. The absence of disclosure can be due to national security concerns or simply because a startup company doesn’t want its financial ties to intelligence publicized.

> […]

> While In-Q-Tel is a nonprofit corporation, it differs from IARPA and other models in that its employees and trustees can profit from its investment. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that in 2016, nearly half of In-Q-Tel's trustees had a financial connection with a company the corporation had funded.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160831020609/https://www.wsj.c...

Which is to say, apparently insider trading isn’t just “illegal except when Congress/the President does it, except when it is illegal, actually,” if I’m parsing all this correctly; apparently In-Q-Tel gets special treatment too, in some cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_congressional_insider_tra...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#By_members_of_...

Actually, that last one makes a lot of sense for pushing for more GCP adoption.

* Code at Google3 is one giant monolith that has dependencies on things that aren’t open sourced. Even if they could be, they don’t make sense outside of Google

* most services internally run on internal services like Borg and GFS rather than GCP for historical reasons. That maybe has changed now but I suspect a lot of stuff depends on internal infra not available on GCP

* A product can often have data dependencies. Just being able to spin up a separate copy may not mean much in terms of keeping a product alive past Google’s interest if the data is locked away behind Google’s private data stores. Then you want Google to start adding easy export options so that data can be exfiltrated from Google’s onto 3p versions of the product which is a legal, business, PR and technical risk

* Google has invested some amount of money and resources into a product. If a competitor takes that concept and is successful it’s embarrassing to execs at Google who missed the opportunity. Google Wave was dropped even though in many ways it’s a precursor to slack (it was open sourced though and went nowhere).

It’s a nice wish but I can’t imagine any realistic scenario where any business would go down this road until their shown a successful roadmap by a more enterprising business first.

I’ve heard this stated before, and something about it feels off. There’s no way all of Google’s code is in one repo.

Like, does that monorepo contain the full Android operating system with Google Services and the firmware for all the Pixel devices? I feel pretty sure multiple teams at Google must have forks of the Linux kernel for one reason or another, would those be in there too? Is Chromium in there too? What about the whole golang project?

Even if I’m off about some of this, it feels like the statement “Code at Google is one giant monolith” needs some qualifiers.

It does contain forks of tons of open source code in the third party folder. I don't recall if the Linux kernel is in /third_party but I would not be surprisied if it is.

A fair amount of the operations are actually documented publicly, ex. https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/thirdparty...

Yes - Google chose a monorepo because of the engineering and business advantages it gave them. For example, all binaries had a common dependency that implemented all sorts of common functionality they found binaries on their servers needed out of the box - that’s why a simple c++ hello world on Google3 results in a many many mib binary that includes an http server for performance monitoring. It’s an opinionated codebase but the opinions are largely documented and explained and aren’t crazy (just because you may make other decisions or prioritize things differently doesn’t mean Google’s choice are wrong). And again, please don’t hyper focus on what I wrote as “oh it only has this one advantage”. There’s lots of advantages and I’m just giving very basic examples. It’s been a fairly long time since I worked at Google and someone who works there is going to have a more authoritative explanation of how things work now as things will inevitably changed some.

You may say they dug their own grave while the internal teams find it helps them run services and maintain things because there’s 1 way of interacting with the artifacts of lots of different teams. And they weren’t going to open source EOL projects anyway and maintenance decisions have nothing to do with google3 and are product and engineering led decisions.

Also, they have a bunch of tooling to manage open source projects that mirror google3 projects. It’s doable for projects that care / who it’s important to but it is also a lot of work (eg can write rules that bidirectionally rename files, functions, c++ namespaces, comments that can strip out code before outgoing synchronization, etc etc). if I recall correctly the tool itself was open sourced too.

As for customer trust, again I point out that not only is the Google3 aspect a minor detail, open sourcing wouldn’t even impact customer trust in a large way. It might with a certain segment of the technical population, but that’s not the people Google cares about in terms of public trust. And any open sourcing also has to find motivated maintainers who are not going to be motivated by 0 pay and a huge amount of bug reports and feature requests from users who started with maintenance support of paid engineers and focused product vision. Make sure not to extrapolate your own predilections as a tech engineer onto the general population.

> but that’s not the people Google cares about in terms of public trust

Exactly. At the beginning, Google cared a lot about perception from technology-minded people. It was necessary to rise. Now, this original audience doesn’t matter to them, as you very well explain it, with your explanation that they weighed nothing in the balance of choices for all of the (perceived) upsides of their architecture. Because it’s a megalith with well-established business streams, which puts them outside of danger from the whims of public perception.

The business streams are:

- Workplace: Google is an email provider,

- GCP: Infrastructure company (who doesn’t care about developers, remember),

- Ads: Basically a leech. Everyone associates Google’s services to spying people by any means necessary (hi Chrome, hi Analytics, hi Google Search).

- Youtube: Who likes Youtubers? It’s the most degrading title in society, no-one would like their son-in-law to be a youtuber.

Morally, it has lost its stance. Technologically, it’s behind Microsoft. Socially, it has incentivized verbosity on the web so much that nothing is searchable anymore, shooting their own foot, and shooting the entire web with it.

The glorious USSR lasted 80 years on the remains of their former glory (and on the remains of food that was still produced). I just hope Google’s descent will be less painful, hopefully overnight.

Sorry no. You’re overestimating the importance of techies here. Techies were the first on the web but in no way were techies critical for Google’s growth. Heck I was in junior high in Canada when I first came across Google and our librarian thought Yahoo was the better approach because manual expert indexing was surely better - we may have been nerds but none of us cared about open source. Google was just a novel technology that was better than its predecessors. And in terms of what made Google a success was figuring out AdSense. Without that Google would have died.

> However, one has to notice that Google has lost the upper hand over the web since ChatGPT came about.

That’s a nice claim but there’s no actual objective indication that’s actually true yet. It may well be true that the inflection point happened but please point to concrete data suggesting this rather than a blind assertion.

> The glorious USSR lasted 80 years on the remains of their former glory (and on the remains of food that was still produced). I just hope Google’s descent will be less painful, hopefully overnight.

The glorious USSR arguably came back around under Putin’s regime (call it whatever but it’s a very Soviet style political and social culture again).

Google is a massive player in the search space - bigger than MS was with operating systems in the 90s and MS still maintains its healthy dominance in that space for laptops/desktops even though Apple is the “cool” one and ships a lot of iOS devices and Google ships a lot of Android devices and only marginally beats out Windows market share (38% vs 31% vs 17% for ios [1]).

Anyway, you don’t like Google. We get it. But none of this has any relevance about whether open sourcing sunsetted products would in any way alter their trust in a broader sense - their customer base hasn’t been tech heavy since GMail took over from Hotmail (maybe even before then) and I think you’re over thinking how much influence tech nerds have especially as the broader community has gotten more technically adept than they were at the beginning. People now ask their “techie” friends for advice where techie now means I buy and use a lot of electronics gadgets and software tools and not I’m an engineer working in the field.

Indeed in the critiques you outlined of why you don’t like their income streams, nowhere do you even bother mentioning any sunsetted products you thought would be good. If anything, the lesson business leaders probably take away from what happened at Google is that letting engineers make product decisions is a bad idea and results in products being launched without strategy that then hurts the company image because you can’t keep running unsustainable products indefinitely if you’re trying to maintain some semblance of fiduciary responsibility. This is because they look at Facebook and Apple and Microsoft who rarely if ever cut products and only do so if they’re changing strategy drastically or there’s no significant user base (for Apple since they primarily do hardware this is easier and just means they don’t do refreshes of a failed product line or postpone that refresh for a few years).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_sys...

There was a time when Google was also Guava and a myriad of Java libraries helping the rest of the world. It’s a design choice, they chose to stop helping, because of their repo. Perhaps it also helped avoid leaks, since copied code can’t be used outside of Google.

And for damn good reason. That kind of behavior quashes competition and encourages that ZIRP era thinking of growth at all costs so you can get acquired before everyone realizes your business model sucks. Maybe they should just focus on their core business so they don’t get buried in the shift to AI.

There is little to no, this is an experimental project by x team. It is this is a Google product.

If everything is a product and you don't support most or expect most to die, then you damage the collective product that is the Google brand. And as a result how your employees feel and are treated about experimenting.

(I'm just kidding; I don't actually hold a grudge against Google for terminating projects. Although I do miss Inbox. And it does looks like Google Labs was killed too?)

They communicated quite clearly when products were in beta. For example, they communicated clearly that Gmail was in Beta until 2009 (launched in 2004). What’s less clear is what makes a beta, when a tremendously successful product remains in beta for so long.

Another product that came out of beta in 2009 was… drumrolls… Google Reader[1].

[1] https://www.alphr.com/news/home-and-leisure/125603/google-re...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Labs

The truth is, the early Google would have had no patience for the "problems" Googlers cared about between 2014 and 2020. The levels of internal hubris and employee activism about every random topic were insane. People cared more about cafe menus and banning words like "deficient" and "all hands" than doing things users cared about. They cared more about working three days a week than delivering a project. And they still expected to be paid top 5% of the market and to get pats on the back for being amazing and oh-so-smart.

By the time I left, it was normal to see a team of 10 people taking a year to deliver something that would've taken me a month on my own in 2012. Something had to give. It's justified to give employees rock star treatment when they are actually 5-10x more productive than their peers at Microsoft. When they're less productive, you have to ask yourself "am I being taken for a ride?"

I think it's not unlikely that Sundar's mission statement from the founders was explicitly to get rid of this culture. It's clear he doesn't want or know how to turn the current Google into the innovative, bright eyed tech company it used to be. So the next best thing is to turn it into Oracle.

But the Google of ~2015 deserved to die.

I remember plenty of early career people around the time were given advice to start your career elsewhere, and then join GOOG in order to maximize the rest-and-vest life.

There needs to be a middle ground between Google's QoL and Amazon's laser focus on execution and customer value.

Makes sense that Google of 2024 is basically like Microsoft in 2009.

This ruined the shine of a Google resume, for me. It’s still great, but it’s just a job now. I look at the specific skills applied during an applicant’s time there, as opposed to previously presuming some level of excellence as a result of working with what I at one point thought were other great engineers.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Which it's not really, as it only considers the US version. "The characters portrayed here are based upon other characters that RG invented."

Before even considering why someone might not choose to do so, I would like to point out that selfhosting email is not even that hard to do nowadays. I spent a couple hours a few years back manually setting up a stack on a dummy domain just to see if its as hard as developer circles make it out to be. It was not. Furthermore a quick search today nets half a dozen docker containers you can spin up that claim to be one stop solutions for email. If even a fraction of them succeed in what they claim you could self host email with one command and an env file. You could even use the dockerfiles as a template to run the software on metal, its all there.

Even with this newfound knowledge, and as someone who tries to selfhost equivalents to any service I find myself using regularly, I would never attempt to host my own main emails. My bank accounts are linked to my emails, my investment accounts, my insurance, my loans, things that I am not willing to risk compromising my ability to access as the result of some sort of overly prideful sentiment.

Just because someone has the ability and knowledge to host their own email does not mean they should or would even consider it.