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Why I left Google (blogs.msdn.microsoft.com)

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[–]ellicottvilleny 112ポイント113ポイント  (79子コメント)

Prior to being at Google he was hired once at Microsoft, then hired by Google, then again by Microsoft, then again by Google, and then back to Microsoft. Right?

[–]zerexim 57ポイント58ポイント  (17子コメント)

I wander if he had to pass through standard interviews all the times again and again...

[–]sonnytron 106ポイント107ポイント  (10子コメント)

"Oh hey James, nice to see you.
So invert a linked list for us."

[–]btgeekboy 16ポイント17ポイント  (9子コメント)

"You realize the last time I did this was my last interview, right?"

As both an interviewer and interviewee, these questions bother me in their effectiveness. Not quite as much as brain teasers, but they still don't have a huge bearing on a candidate's future performance.

[–]Crandom 24ポイント25ポイント  (7子コメント)

As an interviewer who has done hundreds of interviews, I am convinced algo/"write code on a whiteboard" questions are virtually worthless for working out whether a candidate will do well at the company. We now just do a pairing session on a couple of problems, introduce them to something new and see how they learn, which has turned out to be a much better indicator of success.

[–]flamingguts 6ポイント7ポイント  (5子コメント)

As someone entering the programming job hunting market, what kind of new stuff do you introduce? I'd like to be prepared for different things that are thrown at me.

[–]Crandom 3ポイント4ポイント  (1子コメント)

The point is to see how you learn and how you react to being exposed to new ideas rather than making sure you know specific ideas. For junior developers we normally introduce them to TDD and pair programming (both things we do at work - we try to make it as much like working on a real team as possible).

[–]flamingguts 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Cool. That sounds doable. Thanks for the info.

[–]TheImmortalLS 3ポイント4ポイント  (2子コメント)

I see companies asking these as aptitude tests. Know standard algorithms. Also, be personable. It's easier to teach a personable kid to code better than teach a genius hackerdude how2social. Guess who you'd want as your coworker?

[–]Crandom 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

Exactly, we will take "you know nothing Jon Snow" who can learn quick and works well with people over "Antisocial rockstar" every day.

[–]flamingguts 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

Oh I know exactly what you're talking about. I'm an IT manager right now, and I'll take a 5/10 IT skill sociable guy over a 9/10 weirdo any day.

[–]jlchauncey 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

This will always be a better form of interviewing. I absolutely loathe companies that think white board coding is a good measure of a candidate.

[–]Endur 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

It's kindof weird we haven't figured this out, right? My company used to just basically toss every resume that didn't have graduate work on it or more than one degree. We ended up with a company of academic cynics

[–]rabidgnat 32ポイント33ポイント  (4子コメント)

At Google, you have ~a year where you can return without going through interviews, assuming they have headcount for the locations you want. No idea about Microsoft

[–]dasignint 15ポイント16ポイント  (1子コメント)

At Microsoft, you typically used to have to do a full interview loop just to join a different team within Microsoft.

edit: Apparently this has changed. Meaning that I managed both to arrive at the party too late, and leave the party too early.

[–]SeattleMonkeyBoy 7ポイント8ポイント  (0子コメント)

Had to. Now its changed to be much easier to transfer internally. Now you just have two or three half-hour interviews and only if you accept the position do you have to inform your current manager that you are leaving.

Tons better than the pre-announced, full-interview loop system.

[–]zerexim 9ポイント10ポイント  (1子コメント)

Compensation re-negotiation is possible when returning?

[–]rabidgnat 13ポイント14ポイント  (0子コメント)

Yes. I know someone who negotiated a promotion and huge salary increase. This is probably rare; you need director-level support for that kind of thing, and the director loved him

[–]RaffBluffin 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

wonder*

コメントをもっと表示する (60 返事)

    [–]yelnatz 201ポイント202ポイント  (97子コメント)

    Good read, even though this blog post is from 2012.

    [–]rfiok 103ポイント104ポイント  (53子コメント)

    Bit ironic now in an MS blog post, when the Internet is loud nowadays from Microsofts data mining efforts on Windows 10.

    [–]halax[S] 102ポイント103ポイント  (43子コメント)

    I moved from Google to Microsoft after this post was written and I find this to be one of the most unintentionally hilarious blog posts of all time. Everything this guy is criticizing Google for, Microsoft is much worse about, with the exception of the bit about only having one revenue stream.

    [–]mjfgates 15ポイント16ポイント  (17子コメント)

    Microsoft has two revenue streams!

    [–]jyper 8ポイント9ポイント  (16子コメント)

    Server , azure, and corporate stuff also bring in a bit.

    [–]WisconsnNymphomaniac 9ポイント10ポイント  (15子コメント)

    Sharepoint is quite profitable despite being utter dogshit.

    [–]do2 6ポイント7ポイント  (14子コメント)

    What's Sharepoint, really? Never understood. I know a guy who specializes on Sharepoint only and it's literally the only thing he knows anymore and praises it like it's the best thing in the world.

    [–]WisconsnNymphomaniac 17ポイント18ポイント  (0子コメント)

    That is a hard thing to answer because it tries to do so many things and does almost none of them well.

    [–]sbrick89 8ポイント9ポイント  (0子コメント)

    so, developer with specialty in SP... probably more agnostic about it than most.

    SP started as a simple concept... CMS for any type of content... and then started surrounding the content with useful features - search, workflow, portal, web based viewing/editing...

    at some point they realized their monolith architecture was a problem, so they started to switch to a scalable SOA design (2010's service architecture)... but then they realized that they couldn't switch everything effectively (infopath, 2007/2010 workflow), and their approach lately has been "migrations and backwards compatibility are difficult... let's start over"... workflow was more or less completely replaced in 2013... and as it turns out, InfoPath isn't a simple rewrite (two versions of failed attempts to replace it).

    Now, they've more or less lost interest in the core content, and area instead working on surrounding services... and because the interest isn't in boring stuff like improving compatibility... they're instead building/buying social networking (Yammer), video sharing, search, etc... and since they are only interested in doing so in Azure, the features are only available online (either all online, or with hybrid)... leaving the minimal remaining on-prem to be the core CMS that it started with back in 2001/2003.

    Further... to complicate the DEV aspects... as a platform, it handles things that most developers don't like to think about (when scaling out, code and configuration consistency), so it's frustrating when things like web.config changes don't work the way they are used to... most developers aren't aware of the various features (search, portal, etc) that can both save time, and provide stability, which causes frustrations... additionally, there's no way to roll back an update, so there's a constant tension between whether to apply updates or not, given that it might break functionality irreversibly.

    as a dev, I like to stay on top of other things as well.. sure, I can talk SP... and the WFE's speak WCF, passing WIF claims back to the service apps, to enable delegated auth within the backend code... i can talk lucene and elastic, and how 4 threads running lucene.net in a simple console app can outpace the SP search of external content... or using Katana to self host some WebAPIs with custom middleware.

    SP is a tool... it's a bit complex, but it's a tool just like any other.

    [–]rawwrX3 2ポイント3ポイント  (9子コメント)

    i have a similar colleague lol.

    whenever i hear him talking about it i think...but google docs can do that as well..for free. and better...

    [–]velogeek 4ポイント5ポイント  (8子コメント)

    I feel like you haven't seen a real SharePoint dev in action then. I have a friend that works mostly with HP's stuff now but started out with SharePoint. We had him build a ridiculous site for us that basically automated 90% of our customer interaction within the Organization. It's a very powerful tool but nobody wants to put the effort in using it to its full potential. It's far from a perfect solution for anything but it's a lot more than just file sharing that 95% of its customers use it for..

    [–]rawwrX3 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

    no i haven't. the guy was simply using it as a "multiuser notepad todo app" :P

    [–]TJKoury 0ポイント1ポイント  (1子コメント)

    So right. I've used it as a web app platform with unified ontology, owssvr.dll doing all the heavy Ajax CRUD lifting. The only reason I don't use it any more is cost.

    [–]jrochkind 0ポイント1ポイント  (1子コメント)

    It's a very powerful tool but nobody wants to put the effort in using it to its full potential.

    We call that 'blaming the user'.

    [–]NotTheBeliever 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

    Enterprise server for manging your ms office files... plus some business management related shit, email server etc.

    [–]RadioFreeDoritos 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

    I don't think Sharepoint has an elevator pitch, but we use it mostly as a workflows platform with Active Directory integration. Works alright.

    [–]Atario 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

    Well, it's not like he's going to find an old-Google to work for.

    [–]Eirenarch 2ポイント3ポイント  (22子コメント)

    I don't see how the things about privacy can possibly be worse for Microsoft. Microsoft simply does not have the usage share of data-driven services to be Google level of evil. For example if Bing was censoring search suggestions about Clinton nobody would notice.

    [–]halax[S] 36ポイント37ポイント  (21子コメント)

    We've instrumented the OS that virtually every consumer uses to send back a lot of information about what users do, and there's a dark pattern that causes users to get unintentional forced updates to a version where everything they do is tracked.

    That doesn't affect me because I don't use Windows as a consumer, but normal people don't use Linux (or even Mac) on their desktops, so they've been forced into being tracked. At least with Google apps consumers have to opt into to using the app (with the exception of google analytics tracking, but since that's javascript anyone who cares about privacy can block that with an ad blocker if they care).

    I was at Google during the dark ages of Google+. Employees were up in arms about how Google+ was forcing its way into everything, which eventually caused a reversal. People here don't really care in the same way. Similarly, while I was at Google some groups started making things opt-out instead of opt-in, which caused huge outrage, which eventually caused those groups to reverse their course. People simply don't feel empowered to cause that kind of change at Microsoft. Another thing that caused major internal outrage was Google's use of dialogue boxes that had "Ask me again later" and "Yes" as the only options. Again, the internal backlash caused those dialogues to all get removed. But Microsoft saw those and thought it was a great idea. We have tons of dialogues like that now.

    [–]Exodus111 10ポイント11ポイント  (0子コメント)

    Google+ was/is such a tragedy though.

    Facebook is a house of cards that EVERYONE wants to leave, just waiting for the next thing to come along, and Google couldn't even figure that out.

    [–]hakkzpets 7ポイント8ポイント  (9子コメント)

    Doesn't Android basically track your every step?

    [–]Faps_McTickle 5ポイント6ポイント  (8子コメント)

    In more ways than one. Example, Google bought Waze for its traffic tracking feature. If you have your GPS on, you are feeding Google's traffic data to help determine if a route's line should be blue, yellow, or red.

    [–]BigOldNerd 9ポイント10ポイント  (1子コメント)

    I was lost at night in St Louis. Was driving slowly on an empty side road. Opened up Google maps on my phone and it reported medium traffic on the empty road I was on. That's when I knew that Google was watching me.

    [–]Somegeezer 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

    You stop the car, and slowly turn your head towards the back seat... Suddenly... The route turns red.

    [–]Hans_Sanitizer 5ポイント6ポイント  (4子コメント)

    Yeah, that example doesn't really worry me, because I can see the direct reason for the app using that data.

    [–]mr___ 7ポイント8ポイント  (3子コメント)

    Oh. they also keep the information about where you go and how long you stay there, forever, for any purpose they can think of.

    [–]deeper-blue 1ポイント2ポイント  (2子コメント)

    You can always go into your location history and delete stuff - and turn off tracking your location history at all. On top of that all things google knows about you can be accessed/deleted via your google account dashboard.

    [–]icantthinkofone 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

    I guess you're scared to death that your phone service provider knows where you are, too.

    [–]Alacritous 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

    Everything tracking related that is in windows 10 is also in windows 7 and 8. Except for Cortana. There's very little new as far as that goes.

    [–]alanbriolat 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

    We have tons of dialogues like that now.

    Even ones which treat the window close button as a "Yes". You know you have a problem when your OS acts like malware...

    [–]boompleetz 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

    Yeah it's like this guy cannot escape being at the wrong place at the wrong time. I mean, Director of Google's most infamous unsuccessful product? He has to rationalize it some way.

    [–]erwan 6ポイント7ポイント  (8子コメント)

    Additionally a good part of the post is talking about forcing Google+ down everyone's throat, and they actually cooled down on this one.

    [–]Yojihito 4ポイント5ポイント  (2子コメント)

    Yes because nobody wanted G+ in the beginning.

    They only shut it down because they completly failed ....

    [–]icantthinkofone 6ポイント7ポイント  (1子コメント)

    They shut G+ down? I guess I better tell everyone on G+.

    [–]icantthinkofone -2ポイント-1ポイント  (4子コメント)

    They force Google+ down your throat? How so? I've used it on occasion cause someone linked me to it but haven't in a long time. I don't feel forced in any way because I don't use it.

    [–]erwan 10ポイント11ポイント  (2子コメント)

    Requiring a Google+ account to post on YouTube, having a dumbed down version of hangout of you don't have a Google+ account, moved Picasa Web to Google+ photos...

    But as I said they calmed down on that, they separated photos again for example.

    [–]Caraes_Naur 1ポイント2ポイント  (1子コメント)

    But I still won't post a comment to Youtube because it's still prompting me to use my real name.

    [–]arcticblue 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

    You should read those popups more carefully. There should be a link where it allows you to create an alternate profile just for Youtube and you can use whatever alias you want. When I go to Youtube, it uses my "arcticblue2" profile by default which is linked to my G+ account (so I have 2 separate accounts that are linked together and I can switch between them). I've never been prompted to use my real name.

    [–]adrianmonk 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

    I think the blog post means they forced Google+ down the engineers' throats.

    From the blog post: "Social became state-owned, a corporate mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name invoking the feeling that Google alone wasn’t enough. Search had to be social. Android had to be social. You Tube, once joyous in their independence, had to be … well, you get the point. Even worse was that innovation had to be social."

    Contrast that to elsewhere in the blog post where he says that, previously, innovation had been "the result of entrepreneurship at the lowest levels of the company".

    He's saying that at one point, an engineer or a low-level team could have an idea, pitch the idea of building it, and the culture within the company would actively support that kind of thing. But in the days of Google+, things changed and good ideas were rejected if they weren't related to the vision of social.

    [–]j_lyf 28ポイント29ポイント  (39子コメント)

    Since this post, seems like their investments in AI and Machine Learning has paid off. Systems software guys like this blogger are left in the lurch at Google.

    No wonder he left.

    [–]lawstudent2 14ポイント15ポイント  (5子コメント)

    Dunno why you are getting down votes. Tons of awesome shit coming out of Google X labs. Lots of research, lots of great products. The reality is that 3-4 years is a good "chapter" length in a professional life and it sounds like he didn't want to be a part of bottom-line-driven corporate politics but wasn't able to get onto a moonshot / research driven project. Such is life.

    [–]kt24601 1ポイント2ポイント  (29子コメント)

    I think AlphaGo is super cool, but have their machine learning and AI investments paid off? I haven't heard of much that's made it to consumers (or even advertisers, for that matter).

    Google Now is cool, but.....

    [–]ohfouroneone 40ポイント41ポイント  (22子コメント)

    • Google Search
    • Google Image (and reverse) image search
    • Google Photos
    • Did you mean...
    • Search suggestions and answers (like weather, how-tos etc.)
    • Gmail Spam filter, categories and important email

    Almost all Google products base their most useful features on machine learning, and some (like the google.com) would be impossible without it.

    EDIT: Speaking of advertising, collecting user data and displaying relevant ads is via machine learning.

    [–]Eirenarch 15ポイント16ポイント  (12子コメント)

    So which of these were not available in 2012? If they were available how has the investment paid off since then?

    [–]caliform 7ポイント8ポイント  (7子コメント)

    There's a massive increase in machine learning being applied in search results that wasn't a thing in 2012. Today, you can basically ask questions and often Google will infer the answer.

    Google 'temperature butter melts' and in 2012 you'd have a list of websites, now it shows "35 degrees C" with a blurb underneath and a source. Machine learning here figured out what you were looking for (a temperature) with context (at which butter melts) and surfaces the answer.

    This goes for all their services and results.

    [–]MarchewaJP 1ポイント2ポイント  (6子コメント)

    What?

    [–]caliform 1ポイント2ポイント  (3子コメント)

    So confused right now. Maybe it is your language setting (is that Polish?).

    [–]MarchewaJP 1ポイント2ポイント  (2子コメント)

    I've tried with Polish, and it didn't work too. It worked with the water though so probably algorithms as always are 100% geared at English audience. Would be nice if English results worked here too, I use English more anyway.

    [–]ohfouroneone 0ポイント1ポイント  (1子コメント)

    You can go to https://www.google.com/ (or whatever you Google home is) and click "Use Google.com" on the bottom right corner.

    [–]MacASM 0ポイント1ポイント  (1子コメント)

    Try go to google.com/ncr and query again. Worked for me.

    [–]rm999 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

    Google photos is new. As I understand it, the inclusion of machine learning in search is fairly new.

    [–]RedSpikeyThing 3ポイント4ポイント  (2子コメント)

    These all existed in various forms in 2012 but the quality has improved dramatically since then. Photo search on Android, for example, is fantastic. Image search on Google.com now has things like "similar images" which isn't possible without AI. I also imagine translate - especially the translations of text in photos - has improved significantly.

    [–]sirin3 1ポイント2ポイント  (1子コメント)

    Video search still sucks

    Often I use the normal text search, when I want to search youtube to get better results

    [–]RedSpikeyThing 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

    I assume it's a harder problem because there's SO much data.

    [–]BeowulfShaeffer 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

    And Google inbox and speech recognition which are transforming the way I interact with email, my calendar and my phone. I am rapidly growing dissatisfied with the offerings at the bigco I work at. Google-style tech could completely transform the org.

    [–]j_lyf 4ポイント5ポイント  (1子コメント)

    It's used in every major product at Google, which are the most used applications in their respective categories.

    [–]joeflux 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

    It's true. Their Q-learning innovations (in machine learning) are really cool, and each improvement is rolled out company wide very rapidly.

    [–]jorge1209 0ポイント1ポイント  (2子コメント)

    What is your definition of ML/AI.

    Do you not consider pagerank to be ML? If not what do you think it is?

    I'm from the school of thought that considers plain old boring OLS regression to be a form of ML. Granted it is a basic one, but I don't know where you draw the line between it and something only slightly more complicated.

    [–]llbit 0ポイント1ポイント  (1子コメント)

    Page rank is not ML, it is a smart heuristic.

    [–]jorge1209 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

    What is your definition of ML? What does it include?

    [–]WisconsnNymphomaniac 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

    The have integrated their AI tech deeply into Google Search.

    [–]icantthinkofone 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

    Yeah. Maybe they'll come up with something Google can't like self driving cars or something.

    [–]TaviRider 1ポイント2ポイント  (1子コメント)

    I read this before looking at the date and thought this was from 3 years ago. Since then Alphabet happened, which probably changed the atmosphere that the author complained about. I haven't seen any insider reports about whether or not it was an improvement over the G+ days.

    [–]kt24601 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

    Since then Alphabet happened, which probably changed the atmosphere that the author complained about.

    When companies start adding corporate layers and looking more corporate, things tend to get worse and more corporate internally too (although there are often shining departments among the morass).

    [–]noNoParts 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

    This, so much.

    [–]ChiperSoft 31ポイント32ポイント  (3子コメント)

    “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.”

    His teenage daughter is incredibly wise.

    [–]taqfu 24ポイント25ポイント  (27子コメント)

    So what's the consensus here on whether or not Google has abandoned innovation for the pursuit of advertising dollars?

    [–]TheCid 50ポイント51ポイント  (24子コメント)

    With the exception of [x] and their self-driving car project, Google has absolutely cut ship on everything that isn't immediately profitable.

    I've heard Google employees refer to the rest of Google as "Google Business Machines".

    [–]Terran-Ghost 41ポイント42ポイント  (14子コメント)

    As Googler who works on a product that is not "immediately profitable" (ad-wise it is actually the exact opposite), I tend to disagree with this statement.

    [–]sean151 5ポイント6ポイント  (12子コメント)

    Could you explain why?

    [–]Terran-Ghost 28ポイント29ポイント  (8子コメント)

    Because I work at Google, neither in [x] nor on self-driving cars, and my product is not immediately profitable. In the 7-8 years that the product has been alive and in active development, Google has not cut ship on it.

    [–]DaimlerAG 4ポイント5ポイント  (7子コメント)

    How do they get value from the product? Is it internally used?

    [–]Terran-Ghost 24ポイント25ポイント  (6子コメント)

    Nope, it's externally used and visible to all users. They don't get any immediate value from it. It just provides for a better user experience, and incidentally, exposes the user to less ads. Examples of stuff that are done on my team, are dictionary and unit converters. There's no immediate money to be gained from translating feet to meters. They're not placing ads for rulers on those searches. When someone searches for "define vibrator" there aren't ads for vibrators (just checked it; there are ads when you search for just "vibrator").

    Sure, you could argue that they get value from it since more users will use the search engine, which will increase Google's bottom line in the long run, but it's still not immediately profitable. In the end, Google spends billions of dollars a year on providing a better user experience. I'm not claiming this is unique to Google; all multi-billion companies probably do the same.

    [–]MrBrian1987 21ポイント22ポイント  (3子コメント)

    I think you are underestimating the value of providing a better user experience. That draws more users, and through that brings in revinue. Sure, may not be any contracts linked to that priduct, but generally things like you are saying are accounted for and an expected cost of improvement.

    [–]Terran-Ghost 19ポイント20ポイント  (0子コメント)

    Hey, I'm not claiming Google is doing it out of sheer good will. Of course they're doing it to bring in more users. But if Google were only interested in what is immediately profitable, there'd be no reason for things like that. Because if anything, it hurts ad impressions to provide an immediate answer, live sport results, or the current weather with a cute frog mascot.

    Google, like any other company in the same line of business, is interested in providing a good user experience. Google's large profit margins also give it the freedom to invest in things that are not immediately profitable, such as the ones I've listed above.

    [–]jnkdasnkjdaskjnasd 3ポイント4ポイント  (1子コメント)

    I can vouch for this. Being able to type math expressions, unit conversions, "define" expressions, etc, keep me on google.

    Previously I used to google "unit conversion" and a website would come up that I could use. Now I just type it directly into Google. Google has more market share of miscellaneous "widgets", and so a bigger share of my time (of which I now spend less on other websites too).

    I also now associate Google with providing all the little "apps" and widgets that do these small little utility tasks, so I'll generally see if Google has an option before I go elsewhere. The Google widgets tend to be of a reasonable high quality as well. They tend to just work.

    [–]cparen 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

    There's no immediate money to be gained from translating feet to meters. They're not placing ads for rulers on those searches.

    These products are actually my go-to examples for secondary effects in the value of a product in software. Even though users can switch search engines at any time, it's easier to use the same one for everything. The search engine that defines things better is also the search engine they'll use when it's time to shop for something.

    [–]behrangsa 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

    Off topic but are any teams working on Blogger these days? Why has it not evolved for years? It's become worse than Tumblr, Medium, etc.

    [–]jldugger 2ポイント3ポイント  (2子コメント)

    The TensorFlow ASIC stuff seems pretty long term investment-y.

    [–]kl0nos 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

    People tend to forget why they get free captcha, google analytics, gmail, google maps etc. All those free services are making profits for google because they give them information to serve ads better, information is money in ad business.

    [–]the_mighty_skeetadon 2ポイント3ポイント  (3子コメント)

    Yeah, I'm a Googler and completely disagree with that. How about VR, or chrome, or Android, even? The grand majority of Googlers work on things that literally make no direct money and don't even have plans to.

    Deep mind, maps, skybox... The list goes on and on in terms of things that have basically nothing to do with ads or a truly sustainable business at all.

    [–]TheCid -1ポイント0ポイント  (2子コメント)

    I didn't say ads, I said profit. The Play store is immensely profitable too, for instance.

    [–]the_mighty_skeetadon 1ポイント2ポイント  (1子コメント)

    Eh, kind of. But the bigger point is that most people that work on Android actually have nothing to do with the play store. VR and a thousand other things we're building really don't have an immediate payoff. Chrome is a huge team, a whole product area.

    You have to understand that even big areas of Google that make money aren't key to our financial strategy. Waze is never going to sustain our business, it might not even ever pay is own costs to operate. Gmail retired all of its traditional ads a while back - the new ads are so hard to find that I'd bet most people couldn't find them if asked to.

    Yes, we've got a bunch of stuff that makes money now - it's part of what keeps Google a healthy business that can afford to spend money on stuff like contact lenses that monitor blood sugar levels or self driving cars or reusable rockets. But to think that making money is the focus of most Googlers is just flat out wrong.

    [–]im-a-koala 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

    But the bigger point is that most people that work on Android actually have nothing to do with the play store.

    But aren't they more or less directly associated with getting more people to use Android, which means more users buying things from the Play Store?

    [–]iciPiracy 0ポイント1ポイント  (1子コメント)

    But what about Google Cloud Platform, that seems like quite a big commercial service, where Google's investment in hardware and software is paying of?

    [–][削除されました]  (1子コメント)

    [deleted]

      [–]bfops 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

      It's not just the software that matters, it's how well you can ship it to people.

      ..and Google serves software to millions (if not billions) of people without even shipping it to them.

      [–]pietasterkid 6ポイント7ポイント  (4子コメント)

      I'd love to see what kind of effect this had on future hires, careers etc. Just generally the long term effect of writing something like this about an employer.

      [–]turbov21 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

      Reading now, but I can't imagine it's worse than Steve Yegge's piece about Google not having a platform mentality a few years ago.

      [–]UniverseCity 1ポイント2ポイント  (2子コメント)

      Meh. Google is still a super-profitable company. Others can disagree, but at the end of the day most people want to work for a company that's known for hiring good talent and that pays a ton of money. Google still does both.

      [–]pietasterkid 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

      Totally true! I'm just curious about his prospects, relationships etc after the fact. Interested to find if there was any negative or positive that happened to him personally.

      [–]speedisavirus 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

      I would never work there and this article has nothing to do with it

      [–]TechnoL33T 10ポイント11ポイント  (7子コメント)

      Am I alone in thinking social should jump ship to decentralization?

      [–]bortkik 5ポイント6ポイント  (3子コメント)

      I've long had a fantasy about creating page design and encryption standards that could create a sort of social network out of independently-hosted websites. It would be an open source social network, if you will. Obviously, we've had homepages and blogs forever, but they can't compete with some features of services like Facebook. If we could create that software, we'd take the power away from them, just like we did with Linux, Firefox, Open Office, and a number of other projects.

      [–]TechnoL33T 6ポイント7ポイント  (2子コメント)

      How would that differ from Diaspora?

      We've pretty well had great standards for communication for a good long while now, but noone has an easy time wrapping their heads around it. What we could do is make a nice graphical wrapper for things like IRC, Email, and all the other good things, as well as making it all pre-built on a raspberry Pi for people to host in their houses. Also check out Matrix.org.

      Wanna make your fantasy come true?

      [–]bortkik 0ポイント1ポイント  (1子コメント)

      Wanna make your fantasy come true?

      Yes!

      Since we're on this topic, I've also been looking for a good chat/SMS solution. I looked at Open Whisper Systems. No desktop client, except for Chrome. My friend told me about Tox. We're currently using Telegram. All require the other person to use the same app, so differences are minor compared to the network-effect limitation/requirement. Matrix does look intriguing.

      As for Diaspora, there's a lot of info to go through. I don't see any central FAQs that answer all of my questions.

      [–]TechnoL33T 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

      I use google voice for free texting.

      You gotta realize here that the absolute biggest hurdle to any of this is getting all our zombie friends to ditch Facebook.

      [–]seattlyte 2ポイント3ポイント  (2子コメント)

      No. Indeed the internet and web was originally architected with decentralization in mind. This decentralization is what inspired people with ideas about its democratizing effects.

      Pretty quickly adware and spyware got incorporated into institutions like Google and turned the decentralized technology into a feudal one.

      [–]unpopular_opinion 2ポイント3ポイント  (1子コメント)

      For the Internet, you need to beg to a central authority to get an IP address. How is that decentralized?

      Most routing has been designed such that you can easily spy on it on mass scale and proposals to make it harder have failed for mysterious reasons.

      [–]G3Kappa 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

      [citation needed], although I do agree.

      [–]psi- 23ポイント24ポイント  (5子コメント)

      When google killed the google reader, even this dimmest lightbulb got the message.

      [–]SolarShrieking 7ポイント8ポイント  (3子コメント)

      RIP Reader

      [–]wordlimit 5ポイント6ポイント  (2子コメント)

      What was the real reason it was dropped? I feel you could add ads and allow google ads through RSS more than its newer services like Keep.

      [–]the_mighty_skeetadon 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

      Usage was really low, apparently. Here's the issue - huge nerds love feeds and feed readers, but regular Joes don't care.

      Thus, when we retired Reader, the only people who really used it were internet power users. Unfortunately, those people generate the highest volume of pissed off internet board comments.

      Personally, I think we should have kept it around for that reason, but it wasn't my decision, obviously :-P

      [–]theedgewalker 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

      Such a sad day for the internet.

      [–]onan 6ポイント7ポイント  (1子コメント)

      Uncoincidentally, this is also a big part of why I left Google.

      Everything about the way that Google Plus was handled internally was bungled in every conceivable way. Every single other project was suddenly a second-class citizen; resources, deadlines, and whole products got the axe left and right for not being part of it. There was not a single engineer in the company who spoke of Plus with anything but disgust.

      And the worst part is that none of this giant top-down mandate was actually for a good reason, which seemed clear to every engineer in the company. Trying to be the next Facebook was a bad goal in the first place, even if such bad means weren't used to try to attain it.

      One of two things must be true about social networks: users are fickle, and will hop from one to another, or; users are sticky, and won't be pried away from their current tool.

      Either way, trying to be the next Facebook is a terrible idea. Either users remain with Facebook and you fail (which obviously is what did happen), or you get all the users only for a few months until they move onto the next shiny thing. The only possible outcomes are to fail immediately or to fail slightly later.

      But one of Google's flaws is hubris, so it was believed that their offering would be so much better that everyone would come to it and stay there. The problem is that there was never any hint of an idea of exactly what would make it so much better, beyond just "we're Google, of course it will be great."

      And all the while, Google ignored what they should have been doing, which was trying to be the next Amazon. Amazon has very unceremoniously inserted themselves into the middle of most money that gets spent on the internet. Most times that anyone buys anything, Amazon gets a cut in the middle, even if they never handle or lay eyes on the product at all.

      Oh, and Amazon also knows way more about you in the ways actually matter for advertising, and is in the best possible position to place extremely germane, low-friction ads for further sales in the process. Facebook showing ads is a pretty shaky business model. Amazon showing ads, and also directly getting a cut of the sales, and also having pretty much the entire rest of the internet be one big walking ad for it, is a much more solid foundation. And Google missed it completely.

      [–]kilroy123 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

      Goes google still act this way towards Google+?

      [–]eldred2 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

      I was at CompuServe back in the day. This same sort of thing happened there. At the time America Online (AOL) was fairly new and was growing very fast. The management decided they wanted to enter the same market, and sunk almost all resources into it's version of AOL called "WOW." Within a couple of years, CompuServe was on life support, because who in their right mind goes with the second best AOL? I still have a stack of the mouse pads CompuServe was trying to give away to promote their new AOL light.

      [–]shevegen 7ポイント8ポイント  (3子コメント)

      Google simply became too big.

      [–]XANi_ 39ポイント40ポイント  (0子コメント)

      More like beancounters took over. Doesn't bring direct profit? Shut it down.

      [–]hookeslaw 8ポイント9ポイント  (0子コメント)

      There is still a lot of innovation going on in a huge number of fields there. Sure gmail, chrome, android etc were great innovations that happened in the past (and are still improving), but the public perception is 'what (new things) have you done for me lately?'.

      Those billion user products come few and far between. Maybe driverless cars, maybe android auto, maybe google home, maybe google assistant on allo etc will be the next.

      I still see them as being one of the front runners on this planet in terms of driving innovation in tech. It's big, but being big isn't killing it's ability to innovate. They will continue to release new billion user products, but noone knows what or when the next one will be.

      [–]bxblox 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

      You mean went public

      [–]Smiliey 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

      Really sounds like Hooli from Silicon Valley.. lol.

      [–]The_Pip 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

      Getting rid of the 20% and google labs was a clear sign that Google had changed.

      [–]funny_falcon 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

      Who did nothing, those never failed.

      Google does too much. So some failures are unevitable.

      But it is still one of largest company in a world. And it will be, cause it does much.

      [–]WilyWondr 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

      One reason why

      127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com

      Should be a part of everyone's host file. I favor adding a lot more than that.

      [–]FullBetaReduction 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

      they made go and dart?

      [–]fuzzynyanko -1ポイント0ポイント  (1子コメント)

      A user exodus from Facebook never materialized

      It's starting to, but hard to tell how far

      [–]QuirinusMonroe -2ポイント-1ポイント  (0子コメント)

      Let's all use Bing for our next search query as a symbolic gesture of supporting James! Just this once, then let's quietly go back to Google, because we really don't care about what he thinks and we all use google.com simply cuz Bing just sucks.

      [–]cowbandit -1ポイント0ポイント  (0子コメント)

      I understand what he's saying. But the thing is Google has been an advertisement company since day 1. The core focus never shifted or changed. Google is very much like the television analogy he gave - it's as much about ads as great TV shows are about ads. But still, the TV show still wants to make as much money as possible.

      I think he is actually complaining about the shift of responsibilities of his own job. Before he was perhaps working on innovative stuff, then he was moved to responsibilities more about ads and started seeing more of it, then he stopped liking it and changed jobs. I guarantee you if he was on one of those projects with GoogleX he wouldn't have left. No one wants to be a part of the 95% of Google (Ads, marketing, tracking people, etc.) Everyone wants to be in the 5% with the self-driving cars, AlphaGo, and whatnot.

      [–][削除されました]  (5子コメント)

      [deleted]

        [–]anttirt 6ポイント7ポイント  (2子コメント)

        Then why the hell are you reading someone's personal blog?

        [–][削除されました]  (1子コメント)

        [deleted]

          [–]plumshark 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

          blogs.msdn.microsoft lol

          [–]jhiva 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

          Self importance too.

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