
Google’s product strategy: Make two of everything - pandatigox
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/10/googles-product-strategy-make-two-of-everything/1/
======
ridiculous_fish
During my time at Google, I definitely had the experience of "my" product
being killed in preference to a competing product. In one case, I did not even
know that the competing product existed until the public press release.

What was most frustrating is that the decisions did not seem to be motivated
by product superiority. The "winner" was not a better product, or at least
this was not demonstrated. Instead the decisions were driven by whichever
product better aligned with the internal political winds this week, such as
the tension between the Nexus partner model vs the Pixel in-house model. These
"strategy shifts" were often preceded by senior leadership shakeups, which
were themselves frequent.

It was hard to escape the conclusion that the quality of my work was
irrelevant. It was demoralizing.

~~~
gargarplex
You're one of the most prolific and impressive programmers around. I'm sure
you could have your choice of product manager...

~~~
onedev
who is he/she?

~~~
smcl
Take a look at [http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/will-it-
optimize.html](http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/will-it-optimize.html) and
more posts on that blog, some very interesting stuff there.

------
gooooooganon
There is no strategy. The thought of Google having a central product
management strategy -- and successfully executing it across many teams -- is
hilarious to people who work there. It's chaos that outsiders try to read
into.

This is a consequence of bad internal economics and incentives. Google PMs and
engineers are incentivized to create new products and ship them by quarterly
deadlines (perf/promo cycles) rather than align their teams towards a cohesive
user experience. Thinking this way would occasionally cause teams to, gasp,
not build a product they wanted to build. Everyone needs to ship something,
ideally something new. After all, you don't get promoted for deciding not to
build something. I've seen awful products/implementations go out the door and
get killed or reimplemented soon thereafter. And people still list these as
"achievements" on promotion packets (and they get promoted despite the product
failing!).

The company is _kind of_ trying to address this by changing promotion
criteria, but it's culturally ingrained and won't change for some time.

~~~
72deluxe
Informative, thanks.

Is this why Google announces sweeping changes every year at i/o and redesigns
the Android UI every single year?

eg. use the dedicated search button on the phone, btw this button no longer
exists, respond to the menu button, btw this button no longer exists, put
menus at the top, put menus at the bottom, use hamburger menus, don't use
them, use swipe navigation, use swipe navigation if it fits with your app, do
things to ENCHANT and DELIGHT the user. According to the UI guidelines,
clicking a button should cause the user to burst into tears of joy due to the
delightful experience they have just had.

Is it because they need to appear to be producing new things all the time? If
so, it'd also explain why some products get released to much fanfare (and
applause from the BBC Technology news team it seems) and then get no updates,
maintenance and get binned a few years later. (Many examples of this). The
most annoying of these was the Talk replacement for Android (Hangouts) which
got rid of features of Talk and still has an abysmal tablet interface and
general bugginess ("Did you not get my call???" "No").

I am not meaning to be overly critical, but the constant change for the sake
of change is wearying. I have been using Android since the G1 and every i/o
they have redesigned the interface. The examples of "bad UI" and "bad text"
are all from their own older versions of Android. It makes you wish they'd
make their mind up.

~~~
tdkl
That's exactly the thing that pushed me from Android after 5 years. If I'm a
paying customer, I want to be treated as one, not a beta tester with
$currenthypedthingwedemoedatIO. That's why I'm still convinced that Google
doesn't make products, but tech demos.

~~~
72deluxe
That seems a good evaluation of it! It is particularly starting to grate on me
how I rarely get updates for my phones despite the security holes found in the
versions of Android I am running. Also, I look at reviews of Android M on Ars
Technica etc. and realise that I will never ever be running that version of
the OS on my devices, not in the foreseeable future. It saddens me.

~~~
Grazester
Reviews of M exist? Wasn't this just the development version released? I
really question this. Get a Nexus device. updates are guaranteed for 2 years.
Blame your phone's manufactures for not getting updates not Android or Google.

I would love to know how many years of support does qualcomm guaranteed for
their chipset driver updates. I remember reading this was an issue for Google
updating the Galaxy Nexus.

~~~
72deluxe
You're right - they were just overviews of the previews of M. I did notice
that many things were changing in them too - I found it odd that the way pages
were laid out was so fluid/changeable compared to the previous M preview given
that UI guidelines should dictate how things are laid out.

The fact that things move around so much would be indicative of not being
really sure how it should look (despite the UI guidelines), perhaps? If I was
buying a car and the next version of the car the next year moved the dials to
the other side of the dashboard or swapped whether the indicator stalk was on
the right or the left of the steering wheel, you'd ask what the heck was going
on. Yet this appears to be normal for Android.

I would love to blame my phone manufacturer for not getting updates, apart
from Android was started with the Open Handset Alliance. It doesn't appear to
be much of an alliance to me.

It's a daft situation. If you bought a laptop and could only install hotfixes
and KB releases via Dell, yet Dell did not give them to you, would you be
happy with Microsoft? Would you take their advice to just buy a Surface Pro
from them? That would be unrealistic because it would ignore the massive
market that is Wintel devices; rather you would expect Microsoft to only
provide Windows to Dell if they agreed to provide hotfixes Microsoft gave
them.

If you had a MacBook Pro and El Capitan would not run on it, yet you were
aware of all the security holes in Mavericks and some in Yosemite, would you
accept advice to just buy a new MacBook to get security fixes? Or would you
expect Apple to backport fixes when they know that a sizeable percentage of
customers are connecting to their App Store with older versions, given your
purchase fee of the hardware?

The solution to not getting updates for a device is not to buy a new device.

Google boasts how many devices they have all over the world (see last year's
io keynote) and how Android is everywhere, yet it failed to mention the
important point about Android being everywhere: that it is insecure outdated
Android that is everywhere.

Google know how many people are connecting with older versions (the Play
dashboard tells you what percentage is running which version), so they should
push out updates or mandate in their agreement with phone manufacturers that a
timely update cycle should be followed, or the agreement would be terminated.
There would be no other way to keep control or maintain a high standard.

I say this with a plethora of Android devices and with my dayjob of writing
Android apps. It is a rubbish situation for security.

~~~
brazzledazzle
You assume they had/have the leverage to "force" manufacturers to let them
centrally update their handsets which isn't very fair.

~~~
72deluxe
All devices have Google apps on them, and phones without these are considered
"lesser" and won't sell. (When's the last time your Android phone from a "big
name" seller came without Google Play market?).

If so, they have access to a central repository - Google. Google could just
refuse to give them the OS with Google apps unless the manufacturer/carrier
pushed out updates. It would be in both party's interests to agree to do this
- Google because it would stem the tide of insecure phones and the stench of
dodgy apps being prevalent even in the official market; and for the phone
manufacturer, updates and apps, and happy customers.

At this rate I am not going to get another Sony, that's for sure.

~~~
tdkl
I owned only Nexii from 2011 on and I'm not even sure Google wants to update
those thoroughly. They sacked 4.2 for Nexus S, 4.4 for Galaxy Nexus although
they can run it (and they did with custom ROMs) just fine.

Last straw was the Lollipop update for the Nexus 5, where it turned out a
perfectly working device into a nightmare with memory leaks, mobile radio
drains and camera freezes, where a daily reboot was actually mandatory. Their
bug report tracker is full of complaints, yet they didn't do anything and are
casually talking about M. Sorry, I don't have to wait a year, then pray if my
current device is going to be supported, or just cave in and get a new device
the new Android revision will enter the market with.

So until customer experience becomes a priority, I'm not investing a single
cent or a second of my time in Android.

------
dkarapetyan
This isn't a google strategy. This is a generic Big Corp. strategy. The same
thing happens at eBay, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc. It's not a good thing. It
is usually an indication that the higher ups don't trust each other or are
trying to one up each other for the year end bonus round. It is just a
wasteful strategy overall and only happens at places that can afford it.

~~~
nostrademons
It's usually encouraged by the even-higher-up, i.e. the CEO. It's actually
fairly rational from his perspective: he has more options, he can cover more
of the market, he insures against product failure, and his reports can't get
complacent.

Yes, it's wasteful, and yes, it's demoralizing as hell when you're the
ordinary employee whose product just got canceled. But then, you should
understand (at least at some level) that your work is meaningless when you go
join a big company: the reason they're big is because their product is already
"good enough" for millions of people.

~~~
gohrt
It's not different at a small company. At a small company you have "pivots" or
"going out of business" or "competition from another company", instead of
"competition from another team"

~~~
nostrademons
Almost makes you think that the part that's wrong is the narrative that we're
sold as kids, y'know "Work hard and good things will happen to you." It's more
like "Work hard and there is a ~2-3% chance good things will happen to you,
but if you don't work hard there's a 0% chance good things will happen to
you."

~~~
dorgo
Be clever and good things will happen to you.

~~~
soft_dev_person
Be clever and make good things happen to you.

------
ChuckMcM
Old inside joke at Google, you know your project is "important" with two or
three other groups are working on exactly the same thing. When I was there, it
was debated whether or not this selected for the right attributes (it tends to
reward groups that execute fast versus ones that execute well). It did not
help that some times when they didn't do that (just let one group build it)
they didn't always get the result they wanted either.

~~~
jsnell
The worst offenders were probably workflow / pipelining systems; just about
everyone needed to write sequences of mapreduces, and thought that the
existing solutions weren't a perfect fit. IIRC there were at one point over a
dozen different workflow systems in use and advertised to at least some degree
to other groups, which made picking one even harder due to the paradox of
choice. The solution was of course to write a new one.

~~~
thechao
When I studied library design, the situation you described was the basic
indicator of "domain misunderstanding": no one understands the domain well
enough to produce a suitable abstraction. If the problem persists for a couple
of decades, it might imply that domains have been improperly mixed.

------
rconti
Well, now we know what happened to all of the previously-good Google products.
I hate to complain about free products, but will make an exception for Google,
which constantly removes features and usability as if a PM's bonus depends on
it.

Give me back my color-coded GMail threads, ability to edit the subject without
multiple clicks, and view features not hidden by submenus.

And that's just GMail, and that's just off the top of my head.

~~~
tracker1
LOL.. I switched to Hangouts (from Voice) for my SMS, voicemail and
messaging... on my phone, it works pretty nicely... on the desktop actually
sending an SMS from my GV number to a contact is nearly impossibly without
entering the phone number by hand.

~~~
icelancer
>on the desktop actually sending an SMS from my GV number to a contact is
nearly impossibly without entering the phone number by hand.

Yes, this is absolutely ridiculous. I have to look up the phone number using
Google Voice plugin (which is nothing but a directory search now since
Hangouts disables it), copy/paste the number into Hangouts, and SMS/call from
there. It is completely unacceptable.

------
BurningFrog
One reason that small companies so often beat big ones is that if you have 10
startup teams competing agains one big company team, one of the 10 will
probably make the winning product.

So a big company that is open to doing 2-3 similar things at once should be
more likely to produce winners.

That said, as an ex Googler, I agree with others here that this is probably
more an accident of internal dysfunction than a brilliant strategy. It might
still work though.

------
vladikoff
Article from 2014 - "Oct 17, 2014 5:00am PDT"

------
porter
Eric Schmidt used to say: "Our goal is to have more at-bats per unit of time
and effort than anyone else in the world."

------
agentPrefect
I must admit - this is kind of why I started moving AWAY from Google. You just
don't have any guarantee that the product you're using won't be shelved in leu
of a "better" (newer) solution.

------
hartator
They forgot Picasa vs Google Photo!

~~~
Digit-Al
They put Eclipse vs Android Studio, but Eclipse is not a Google product.

~~~
thescrewdriver
At first glance I read that as "...but Eclipse is not a great product"

Android Studio is based on IntelliJ which is a far more polished IDE.

------
ctdonath
I recall Apple's norm is running a half-dozen competing designs at once,
choosing the best and killing the rest come delivery date.

------
bane
Yay, more wood behind fewer products!

And no wood behind things people actually want or use!

And the wood behind the ones we liked ended up all warped and weird!

------
burd691
What about search?!

~~~
nostrademons
Shortly before I joined in 2009, Google had embarked on a project to rewrite
Search from the ground up. It was canceled after a couple years, and in many
cases the work of individual subteams was folded into the main search engine.

Search also periodically rewrites _parts_ of the search stack. Caffeine [1]
was a complete rewrite of the indexing system, Hummingbird [2] is a near-
complete rewrite of the ranking algorithm, Panda [3] and Penguin [4] were
partial rewrites of the ranking algorithm, the serving system continually gets
rewritten, and we redid the visual design every year starting in 2010
[5][6][7][8]. You'll notice that there was no 2012 redesign; it was canceled.
That's what happens when the "new" search isn't better than the "old" search.

[1] [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-
index-...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-
caffeine.html)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hummingbird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hummingbird)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Penguin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Penguin)

[5] [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-
metamorphosis-...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-
metamorphosis-googles-new-look.html)

[6] [http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-
ho...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-how-larry-
page-engineered-beautiful-revolution)

[7] [http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-new-unified-
desi...](http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-new-unified-design-for-
mobile-devices-172991)

[8] [https://www.google.com/design/spec/material-
design/introduct...](https://www.google.com/design/spec/material-
design/introduction.html)

~~~
boomzilla
Can you disclose how much "better" for such rewrites? And what metrics were
measured? I guess there is a conflict between CTRs on organic results and ads,
so one has to be picked (or maybe a combo of the two). And what the magnitudes
of the improvements? a few percentage or a few bp?

~~~
nostrademons
I can't disclose which metrics are measured, sorry. Basically, they had to be
at least metrics-neutral with strategic value (where "strategic value" means
"some exec thinks this is a good idea and we really need to do it"), or pretty
strongly metrics-positive without an exec's personal interest. Conflicts
between CTRs on organic results vs. ads happen less often than you think,
they're usually an issue only on full-page redesigns. I was an informed
bystander for a few of them - I can't detail the precise process, but let's
say that it's a complex balancing act that tries to balance the interests of
all constituencies: users, webmasters, advertisers, and shareholders. (The one
constituency that _doesn 't_ get a break are the poor engineers and PMs that
have to implement it all..we often had some incredibly complex solutions to
make the page marginally more user-friendly.)

------
amelius
> A report from The Economic Times of India says that Google is working on a
> fifth instant messaging program. This one reportedly won't require a Google
> account and will be aimed at Whatsapp.

And how will Google be able to get onto the Whatsapp network and use their
proprietary protocols?

~~~
xienze
I think they mean the new app is "aimed at [surpassing] WhatsApp", not that
they're building a clone that runs on the WhatsApp network.

------
pftom
It's just a waste of productivity. Not a strategy.

~~~
Symmetry
Back in the day people explained the USSR's superior economic performance
(according to the public data at the time) as being due to the USSR not
wasting resources on competition like capitalist countries did.

If you assume the planner knows the right thing to do is that's actually a
perfectly valid argument. It's actually pretty heartening to see the people
leading Google don't believe this about themselves, though, because people who
think that usually aren't correct.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect)

