
Google doesn’t necessarily need innovation - ot
https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/google-doesnt-necessarily-need-innovation-95cea96d0eeb?r=1
======
KKKKkkkk1
_Food delivery is hitting the world like a cat-5 hurricane. You can’t watch a
network football game without seeing commercials about it. It is an
exponentially-growing new industry built atop ride-hailing infrastructure,
which itself only emerged a few years ago. The driver network can pick up food
from literally anywhere and deliver it anywhere within a city-sized radius._

When Steve Yegge just moved to Google, his final posts were about encouraging
his readers to work on Big Things like the cure for cancer instead of cat
videos. And now his Big Thing is food delivery?

~~~
simonsarris
Food is really, insanely important. Way more important than 99% of Americans
give it dues for. In fact food is _more important_ than a cure for cancer. Bad
food will kill and maim more Americans long before they get the _opportunity_
to be struck down by cancer.

And for that matter, "Cancers Associated with Overweight and Obesity Make up
40 percent of Cancers Diagnosed in the United States", CDC 2017:
[https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1003-vs-cancer-
obes...](https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1003-vs-cancer-obesity.html)

And look at this graph (my own work, for something I'm writing):
[https://imgur.com/KUyUwQy](https://imgur.com/KUyUwQy)

(Does America have an opioid crisis, or a food crisis?)

Anything that gets more quality food availability to Americans, especially
healthier cooked food delivered in lieu of microwaving a frozen processed
thing, is an improvement to celebrate.

~~~
marnett
No. It really isn't. This is a luxury service. If you use it to redistribute
uneaten food in-masse, sure. But let's be honest, these services are for those
who can afford laziness when it comes to walking outside their door (in a city
might I add, where huge amounts of food options are available in a small
radius) and getting food.

~~~
jdtang13
You're projecting and not seeing the big picture. Cheap, high-quality, and
healthy food delivery would be beneficial to all Americans, especially the
working class and especially fledgling restauranteurs. Just because you live a
life of luxury doesn't mean that all services are luxuries.

Someone who is working oddjobs from 9am-9pm and still barely making next
month's rent payment would benefit both from having extra time, and hopefully
their health would not suffer if they were eating decent food.

~~~
omikun
Someone who is barely making rent isn't going to splurge on food delivery
fees.

~~~
arebop
New things tend to be expensive, but when and if they become thoroughly
ordinary, they can get cheaper. Why should food delivery be more expensive
than food pickup? It's easy to see that you can deliver to somebody and
somebody's neighbor for approximately the same cost as delivering to just
somebody, and the cost of delivery vs. pickup for one unit is about the same.
It's not obvious that this can't work; the best argument against it is that
there have been many attempts in the past two decades and no successes at
making deliveries much cheaper.

~~~
ntsplnkv2
Because there is value in having delivery-you're essentially selling
convenience. That comes with a cost

> It's easy to see that you can deliver to somebody and somebody's neighbor
> for approximately the same cost as delivering to just somebody,

And it's also easy to see if you have to deliver to one person on one side of
the city and to another side right after it will be much more expensive. Not
only do you have issues of food freshness (which means customer
dissatisfaction) but also wear on a vehicle, insurance, gas, etc. To make up
for it the cost of delivery will skyrocket-and thus people will not pay the
premium.

Also-what about food locations? You're assuming that enough people in a very
small radius will want to order the same food from the same place. That will
almost never happen.

~~~
arebop
In the worst case, one person has to round trip between the source and the
sink. But although the worst case is the same as the best case without a
delivery service, the best case for a delivery service is better. QED.

There is wear on a vehicle, insurance, gas, either way but potentially less
with the delivery service than with everyone doing their own fetches.

Yes, I'm assuming there is enough density for there to be actual economies of
scale. Yes, it's true that delivery/takeaway sacrifices freshness compared to
eating at the kitchen. Yes, it's reasonable to be skeptical about whether any
company can achieve the required density and whether the theoretical
efficiencies will overcome the friction of employment taxes. Etc., etc.
However, pizza delivery has been a very affordable luxury for decades and mail
delivery has been obviously cheaper than hand-delivering your mail for
centuries. So, I don't buy your claim that delivery services are inherently
niche luxuries.

~~~
ntsplnkv2
> However, pizza delivery has been a very affordable luxury for decades and
> mail delivery has been obviously cheaper than hand-delivering your mail for
> centuries. So, I don't buy your claim that delivery services are inherently
> niche luxuries.

I didn't make that claim. I'm not arguing for or against the idea-but there
are many problems with the model. It's not that easy-the costs don't make
sense for the poor. There would be much greater impact for the poor to simply
solve the food desert crisis than to have deliverable mcdonalds.

> There is wear on a vehicle, insurance, gas, either way but potentially less
> with the delivery service than with everyone doing their own fetches.

This is impossible to prove. At worst it's the same as the delivery model-if
there is not enough density. And in places WITH enough density, there are food
options within walking distance anyway. At best, people pick up food on the
way to the store or back home. So there is very little loss to them as they
are already driving and out.

> Yes, it's true that delivery/takeaway sacrifices freshness compared to
> eating at the kitchen.

That's not what I'm comparing it to. It's simply fresher for someone to pick
up there own-the delivery driver has to make multiple stops first-so it's
possible your food will be really cold/unfresh as opposed to picking it up
yourself.

------
brlewis
_" It’s hard to do anything there because for any idea you propose, three or
four teams will run in shouting that they own that, you can’t touch it, and oh
by the way, they’re not working on it for a few years. Microsoft calls this
“cookie-licking”, and it’s obviously not good, but it’s very common there.
I’ve heard from folks at other big names in the area that a lot of companies
have this problem. And it’s ironic, because there’s an infinite amount of work
to be done, and yet somehow it’s entirely covered by their existing staff,
with no room for anyone to do something new. It’s pretty crazy."_

I work at Fitbit and I'm very glad that cookie licking is not prevalent here.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
What really drives me up the wall is this exchange I've had repeatedly:

\- I want to do X

\- But we're responsible for X

\- When can you do it?

\- We're understafed, so years from now

\- Fine I'll do it for you, I need it now

\- You don't have the proper permissions

Basically when some mid-level manager holds a feature hostage so they can grow
their little fifedom, essentially trying to promote themselves by growing the
org chart underneath them.

~~~
slivym
Right but there's a mirror image problem, which is that you're working on Y,
people need Y, your team is resourced for Y. So if you go off and do X, then
why are they paying you to do Y? Let's cut the headcount on Y, and invest in
the team working on X.

When the opportunity for more resources is on the table for X, no one is
available to work on X. When they're looking to cut head count, everyone is
working on X. Where X is some poorly defined but essential feature.

~~~
vanderZwan
> _So if you go off and do X, then why are they paying you to do Y?_

What you describe kind of suggests upholding strict divisions per team like
that is one of the main causes of the problem.

Wouldn't being more flexible of temporarily joining another team as a guest
work? I imagine that for a number of situations this could work:

\- I want to do x, my team needs it

\- But we're responsible for X, and x falls under that

\- When can you do it?

\- We're understaffed, so years from now

\- Fine I'll do it for you, I need it now

\- Didn't you hear we are responsible for X? If x is not done right _we_ are
the ones who get in trouble for that.

\- So make me a temporary guest member of your group, vet my work to make sure
it's ok, and share the credit for x.

\- Ok, that actually sounds like a good return on investment for us, welcome
to the team!

~~~
candiodari
Good luck getting your current manager to agree to this ! Are there any
organisations that allow this ?

I mean in theory Google's 20% time allows for this, but all traces of that
(like the calendar and gmail labs) have systematically vanished from their
products. And that happened years ago, it's not like that was yesterday.

~~~
mic47
I have expectation of any reasonable manager to agree to some form of this; at
least to work on that feature you need and support it so that you get
unblocked. This is at least practice at Facebook.

~~~
candiodari
In my experience, while they will do it as a last resort, what's much more
likely to happen is that they will continuously "compensate" for lack of
features by overloading their current employees, then have them complain about
lack of headcount. This is especially true where it comes to things like
reports. Reports don't have variance ? Why not have someone copy everything
over into a spreadsheet and manually calculate whatever statistics other
managers want to see ?

They will actually _fight_ having an "export to google sheets" feature,
because it would cost them a lot of headcount.

And of course, demanding that managers learn a bit of basic (and I do mean
basic) programming ("querying" would be a more apt description) to, for
instance, do SQL queries on the database so they'd include those statistical
measures ... that's just so out of the question it's not funny. There seems to
be this need for managers to be the dumbest, most idiotic (but agreeable)
people that just do whatever their boss asks of them, mostly by subtly
threatening whoever is below them. "Good" companies leave 1 level above the
rank and file that actually gets promoted from the rank and file to prevent
the worst of the inevitable backlash. And yes, Facebook also definitely works
like this, from what I've seen during an extended interview.

I can think of 10 examples of this I've seen where I work in the last year.

------
cletus
I'm conflicted by the world "innovation" just as I am about describing
products as "revolutionary". Like if I have to sit through another iPhoen
announcement to hear some "journalist" bemoan that the iPhone N+1 is
"evolutionary not revolutionary" I'm seriously going to go berserk.

The problem with "innovation" is it's actually kinda hard to define and
somewhat subjective. Steve goes into this.

I'm not sure I entirely agree about his point about Google making competitors
though. I actually think that's worse than it used to be. The height of it was
Google Offers (anyone remember that?) that was a response to Groupon,
allegedly when buyout talks failed (I have no inside knowledge of this; just
what I read here and elsewhere).

To echo Steve's point, I do kinda wonder if there are too many engineers at
Google now. Or, more accurately, more than is required for what they do to do.
The problem with that is they'll find work for themselves to do, good idea or
not, part of a coherent strategy or not.

Generally speaking (rather than Google specifically), the danger with this
kind of situation with large companies is decisions tend to then become
political rather than merit-based and also you tend to end up in situations of
endless internal reorgs, which seems to be a defense mechanism by middle
management (in that a given org structure can't succeed or, more importantly,
fail if it's never given long enough before the next reorg).

Disclaimer: Xoogler.

~~~
remir
Google could be more focused, but for that, you have to say NO to a lot of
things and perhaps Google feels like this would create frustration among its
most creative talents, so they're willing to ship multiple duplicates of the
same thing to give them a sense of freedom to keep them motivated to work
there.

The result of this is multiple messaging apps, multiple framework, etc...

~~~
digi_owl
In other words, they could use a bunch of Torvalds clones to tell the
"snowflakes" off.

------
vthallam
I feel like this post is more of a self justification on why he wants to work
for Grab. A company which started itself as a copy of Uber, I don't know what
Innovation they do made him pick them. Like UberEats and UberEverything(will
be out soon I guess) will be doing exactly the same.

Also, Uber was out of China more because of the biased policies in China,not
because they were not competitive enough. Their exit was also profitable, so
to say they were defeated doesn't make sense.

~~~
rocky1138
Building software for a very alien (read: different, not bad, not passing
judgement) environment can be a fun and engaging challenge in itself. That
sounds like what he wants.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
Then he should have said just that instead of bitching about Google's lack of
innovation.

~~~
Apocryphon
It's a good thing to keep elephants on their toes. Then they can dance.

------
dustinmoris
Innovations:

\------------

Google Search Adsense Google Analytics AdWords Google Docs, Sheets, Slides,
etc. Google Calendar Gmail Google Maps Google Earth Google StreetView Google
Translate Google Chrome Kubernetes AlphaGo Spanner TensorFlow AI Self driving
cars Go (programming language) reCaptcha Firebase

Special projects (not making money from it, purely to make the web/world a
better place):

\------------

Project Zero Google Fonts Google Crisis Response

Acquisitions:

\------------

YouTube Android Waze (and now Waze Carpool)

Excellent clones (where I consider it better than competition):

\------------

Nexus and Pixel phones Google Home Google Cloud Engine Google Drive Google
Photos Google Play Movies/Music/etc.

So yeah... I think Google is not any less innovative than they have ever
been... I mean Google literally changed the web, from search, to mail to maps
to everything. They are not doing anything different today than they did 15
years ago. Just in recent years they released things like Go, Spanner,
Kubernetes, etc.

If they wouldn't have such a huge portfolio of so many other products then
just these 3 products alone would be proof enough of how innovative they are.

~~~
nieksand
Adsense, Analytics, Docs/Sheets/Slides, and Google Earth belong in the
acquisitions bucket.

------
ordinaryperson
Great article, although to paraphrase a famous (building) architecture quote:
"You can't have a revolution every day of the week."

No one can really say what the right balance is between world-beating
innovation and soul-destroying bureaucracy, but it's easier to blog about then
execute in a company with 72,000 employees.

But I appreciated the essay, and from an employee POV it's much more
satisfying to ship new products than sit in meetings for 6 months talking
about process and budget codes.

------
lettergram
I actually just wrote a post on "Is Search Solved?":

[https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/](https://austingwalters.com/is-
search-solved/)

In which, I actually discuss the fact I think Google is not going anywhere,
but... I do think their search algorithms are starting to breakdown.

However, it really doesn't matter. They have the market share, the money, and
more importantely, the best search query parser (for the moment). Even if
their searches do get worse and worse, people aren't going to jump ship.

So I fully agree, "Google doesn't need innovation", they simply need to keep
users happy - which IMO they are doing well enough (although we've started to
see cracks).

~~~
tenpoundhammer
I agree, I use [https://duckduckgo.com](https://duckduckgo.com) for the
majority of my searches now and it just keeps getting better. Plus ddg has
much better privacy policies.

~~~
golfer
DDG misses the mark for me way too often.

Simple query like "pizza near me" shows awful results. Places that are 10+
miles away. I live in a big city. There's hundreds of pizza places closer to
me than the ones it shows.

Movies -- doesn't show listings close to me like google.

No sports scores, like Google.

etc etc. I applaud their efforts, but it's got a long way to go to be anywhere
even near Google in terms of utility.

------
sssilver
Most of my software engineer friends that work at Google are, in fact, pretty
arrogant. Not without merit, because they're all pretty exceptional
programmers, but still somewhat annoying.

------
inlined
I often ponder company culture and how what's good for the customers and the
users can often be at odds.

I find it interesting that "cookie licking" is terrible from the inside,
though whenever there are overlapping products from Google customers complain.
What's the best way to let the wild ones innovate without confusing the
overall product lineup?

------
pascalxus
I've been a very long time reader of his. ever since the early days of his
interesting and dramatic posts.

i can't believe it's been 13 years since he joined google. I still remember
reading that he joined google and it doesn't seem like that long ago. i guess
it's because he hasn't written quite as much in the last decade.

------
yeukhon
This is not Yegge's first criticism on Google known to public.

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3138826](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3138826)

------
lukasm
so in other words Google is the biggest private equity firm that does search.

~~~
melling
They are an ad company. When people start asking their watches, phones, cars,
and voice only devices questions, they need find a way to serve ads.

I already skip search if I think Amazon's Alexa can answer the question.

[UPDATE]

Not sure why I'm getting downvoted. I'm not saying anything that isn't already
being discussed.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/amazon-is-threatening-
google...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/amazon-is-threatening-googles-ad-
space-monopoly-wpp-ceo-martin-sorrell-says.html)

~~~
encoderer
Wait, Alexa answers questions for you? It’s always useless for me.

I use it almost exclusively for smart home control.

~~~
melling
"Alexa, who won best actor last year?"

"Alexa, how old was Ronald Reagan when he became President?"

It seems to know about movies and people.

I hear that Google Home is a lot smarter. I'll get one when it goes on sale
again.

Siri is the assistant with the problem. It can't answer those questions:

"Hey Siri, who won best actor last year?"

"Hey Siri, how old was Ronald Reagan when he became President?"

------
dustinmoris
The truth is that Steve is a fairly old engineer who's been working his entire
life for big companies working off his soul for nothing but a plain salary.
He's not achieved anything for himself or progressed to any top level position
in either companies and probably just got bored of doing the same stuff for
too long now. Google has been innovating in many areas and perhaps Steve
wasn't part of it for too long so he craved some change and in order to
justify the move from Google to an Uber clone you gotta tell yourself how
boring his current employer is to convince yourself to such a change.

Grab is a startup in a foreign country far away from silicon valley,
everything seems exciting, different and ground breaking when in reality it's
not. They are just cloning Uber in their own region, perhaps even with the
hope to be bought up by someone like Uber one day.

I have been to South East Asia many times, actually I've been to all countries
in South East Asia and many islands and I'm going to Asia for another 5 months
this year and apart from the normal cultural differences which you have
there's not much difference to Uber (or a clone) there than anywhere else. I
think he should chill out for a bit and first experience it for at least a
year before claiming any groundbreaking wisdom he thinks he got from visiting
this part of the world for the first time in his life probably.

~~~
posharma
As per his linkedin profile, he was a senior staff engineer at Google. That's
a pretty damn respectable position to reach at Google. So I would politely
dismiss that he didn't progress to any top level position in any company.

~~~
dustinmoris
Let's agree that your definition of a top level position in a 72k+ huge
organisation is very different than mine. However, this doesn't mean that I
think badly of him in any way, just that I can see very well where his
motivation comes from to try making a bigger splash in perhaps a smaller pond.
Nothing wrong with that though, just a note to myself and anyone else who's
reading this blog post that everything needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.
I think Google is extremely innovative, but the sheer amount of products which
they have might give the impression that the innovations which they release
out every now and then are a lot less than they actually are.

------
sgt101
In the original post..

>Google’s Cloud Spanner, BigQuery, TensorFlow, Waymo and a few others

yup a few exceptions... I think we can safely end this discussion now.

------
balls187
The parts where he praises Bezos makes me think Grab's long term play is
acquisition by Amazon.

------
i6Respawns
Great article. Very well written. Refreshing.

------
thriftwy
I didn't know Steve is on Medium. He's my favorite tech blogger, so that's an
awesome development.

~~~
mcherm
Why? I see the move from independent blogs to universal use of Medium for tech
blogging as a step backwards.

~~~
lmm
Medium offers a consistent, no-nonsense design which is a nicer reading
experience than most blogs, and made more so by not having irrelevant
differences between different blogs.

~~~
rocky1138
RSS solves this problem, since the content from many disparate sources appear
in one place in whatever format you prefer. This is done without being
beholden to one company who can change things on a whim (often to negative
effect).

~~~
lmm
Only for reading (and even then, I've yet to find an RSS reader that looks as
nice as medium). If you want to respond or comment then the RSS experience
falls apart.

~~~
rocky1138
It's true that RSS is only good for reading. I think that's part of its name,
though. If you want an RSS reader that looks as nice as Medium, then other
people might also want that same thing! It might be worth a weekend project if
you feel strongly enough about it.

~~~
lmm
I don't think there's any money in it (I don't think there's any money in
Medium either, frankly), and in terms of personal satisfaction I find Feedly
adequate, though not as good-looking as Medium.

------
_pmf_
That's comforting for them, since they have not innovated anything externally
observable since GMail.

~~~
gautamnarula
Android? Waymo? Tensorflow? I get what people are saying but it's not like
Google's been coming out with nothing new and useful for over a decade.

~~~
crucifiction
They acquired Android. Waymo and Tensorflow are cool r&d but not businesses.

~~~
joshuamorton
Are you suggesting that Google did not innovate at all with regard to Android?
That the product they purchased in 2005 was essentially the same as the one
they began offering in 2008, or the one today? (just as an example, android
was redesigned in response to the iPhone)

Waymo appears to be on track to a business?

Are you suggesting that, with tensorflow, innovation doesn't count if its
infrastructural and not consumer-facing?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Android is a bit old of an example, but I'd argue it's not a good one for the
parent's point. I would argue Google's last in-house consumer success probably
is Google Drive? Circa 2012 or so. Everything newer has been a rebranded
acquisition, a clone of a competitor's product, a failure, or a combination of
the three.

Google+: Fail. Allo? LOL! (Let's talk about Duo, Hangouts Meet, Helpouts,
etc.) The third or fourth rebranding of Google Wallet? Okay. Inbox caused an
internal riot at Google when they tried to replace Gmail with it. Currents?
Newsstand?

At the end of the day, almost all profit at Google still comes from ads, and
all of their success comes from abusing monopolies they developed ten years
ago, like Search, Android, and Chrome.

You guys are Oracle. With a brighter colored logo.

\----

Waymo is built on hype, not substance, it only works in limited areas which
are excrutiatingly mapped in advance, and most of the marketing videos showed
capability that predated the cars actually being so capable: They're staged. I
suspect actual car manufacturers will far surpass Google's own offerings here,
they have experience and they get how to make a consumer product that lasts
more than three years without needing to be replaced.

~~~
golfer
With your consistent anti-Google bias, I'm not surprised you posted this. But
every large company has hits and misses. You can't name a large tech company
without plenty of failures. That's just how it works. They all try things, and
many of them don't work out. The projects that succeed are fed, and the
projects that fail get shelved.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
It's not that they have failures, it's that I find so few successes.

Note that if you have a pro-Google bias, it's pretty easy to dismiss
legitimate points as "anti-Google bias". Unless you're going to characterize a
13-year-veteran Googler like Yegge as "anti-Google", maybe you should realize
the bias is yours.

~~~
golfer
Google has 7 different products with a billion users [0]. So few successes
indeed.

[0] [https://www.popsci.com/google-has-7-products-
with-1-billion-...](https://www.popsci.com/google-has-7-products-
with-1-billion-users)

------
cs702
Yegge's blog post rings true.

I can't help but wonder if Google should split itself into many smaller
companies -- effectively, having offspring.

And I don't mean housing different business units into different legal
entities, each with its own team. Google has already done that, in the form of
Alphabet. I mean splitting each business unit into multiple equal-sized
competing businesses. Imagine multiple smaller companies offering Google
Drive, fighting each other for customers, improving the service in different
ways over time, each with a different brand.

Perhaps corporate death and giving birth is the only way to avoid this kind of
stagnation.

I realize this is a possibly controversial, non-orthodox idea. I'm only
wondering.

~~~
simonsarris
> Imagine multiple smaller companies offering Google Drive, fighting each
> other for customers

If you haven't read about Google's myriad competing voice and chat
applications and services, I have bad news...

~~~
cs702
Imagine assigning every Google Apps/Drive customer, say, to one of 10 bins,
and then creating and spinning off 10 independent companies, each offering
_the same exact service_ (Gmail, calendar, contacts, docs), each one under a
different brand, but powered by the same code. Over time, these 10 companies
would be forced to innovate to compete with each other. In other words, take
the successful business units, break them into smaller units with the same
product and a similarly sized customer base, and release these offspring
companies to the wild.

~~~
joshuamorton
[Googler, I like to run with these examples].

Who manages the hardware and infra in this situation? Do all of these systems
continue using the Google account you have with their tools running in
Google's datacenters? Or do you now have 10 datacenters with 10 identity
management tools and 10 different backend storage solutions that all need to
be globally distributed and managed by teams of 5 or 10x as many total SREs to
maintain the same level up uptime guarantee?

~~~
cs702
I like to run with crazy ideas too, and sometimes I even come up with them :-)

All good questions.

Without doing a lot (a _lot_!) of work, I don't know what the "right" answers
are for them.

The motivating question for proposing this crazy idea is: would it result in
less bureaucracy, less paralysis, less stagnation, more innovation?

I don't know the answer to my motivating question either, but I'm wondering...

