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Very interesting to read your "one trick pony...strong pony" perspective, because it has always been the one constant 'red flag' about watching their growth and expansion into new and cool things. The up-and-down, perfectly natural pattern of experimenting and killing off bits here and there that don't work makes sense for any business. It's just that I don't have an easy time with, um, I guess 'aura' is the right word, of crazy-wild-future-whoa sentiment. I think they can do great things, but growing pains are real in all sorts of businesses, not just the tech sector.



What gives me pause is that if "the smartest engineers on the planet"[1] are working at Google, why aren't we reading about Alphabet Space Ventures, or The Alphabet Social Network, or the Alphabet Smartphone company, or the Alphabet Casual Hotel company, or the Alphabet Movies and TV on Demand company, or the Alphabet Electric Car Company. It goes on of course. And the pat answer is that innovation can happen anywhere. But I don't accept that. Google has tried and failed to make phones (Motorola/Android), tried and failed to make social networks (Orkut/Plus/...), tried to make a video business (Youtube Red), Etc and they have been miserable at it.

It hasn't been for lack of spending money, and it hasn't been for lack of "brand reach" or customer acquisition. It reminds me Sun's inability to make anything other than a Workstation when it needed to fight Microsoft on the engineering desktop. Sun was organizationally incapable of winning that fight, and Scott McNealy was unwilling or unable to see the changes that needed to be made to empower the company to do that. How? I think you have to look to companies that have been able to make profitable businesses out of new technologies or products that were distinctly different than their initial success. I don't see Google doing that effectively, and the people who I think were on track to make the changes that would have done that, people like Chris Urmson, leave the company (as the article points out). How is it the organization expells the very people it needs to retain in order to survive?

There is an apocryphal story of the #1 traveling circus that the author saw as a child, and when he finds it again as an adult it is bankrupt. He asks how that could be and the ringmaster tells him that the star of the show would never let any acts exist that would steal any part of the limelight or glory from his act, and then when the star died and there were no other acts and no reason for people to attend the circus.

[1] From some recruiting hyperbole that they spammed out a while ago on LinkedIn.


> What gives me pause is that if "the smartest engineers on the planet"[1] are working at Google, why aren't we reading about Alphabet Space Ventures, or The Alphabet Social Network...

IMO, it's because even if they do have the smartest engineers, the best engineering in the world can't fix a marketing problem. That's marketing not in the sense of ads and such, but in the sense of getting the right product into the right market at the right time. Just on the social network side, Facebook has a near-unbeatable network effect advantage, and Google+/Alphabet Social Network can never overcome that by making a better version of the same thing, no matter how awesome it is from a technical standpoint.

That's not to say that Facebook is invincible or anything - Facebook will go down some day, but it won't be because somebody else built a carbon-copy with a few more features and took their place.


> Just on the social network side, Facebook has a near-unbeatable network effect advantage, and Google+/Alphabet Social Network can never overcome that by making a better version of the same thing, no matter how awesome it is from a technical standpoint.

That speaks to a lack of innovation though. Obviously Google shouldn't be trying to build a carbon copy—but they seem to be incapable of building anything besides that.

Plenty of startups have arisen to challenge Facebook (Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp). Why didn't Google build any of them? Especially when so many startups are founded by ex-Google engineers.


> Why didn't Google build any of them?

Or buy WhatsApp when they had the chance. That non-purchase is as perplexing an Yahoo's purchase of Tumblr.


Helpful to get more details and I can definitely defer to your description; I just have surface-level observations overall. This part though:

>How? I think you have to look to companies that have been able to make profitable businesses out of new technologies or products that were distinctly different than their initial success.

That's a great concept to keep in mind. I've been a big gear head for most of my life, and only later on did I learn that a company like Mitsubishi or Volvo had additional heavy machinery lines, not just automobiles (I'm using the premise they were 'successful' and economics / leadership decisions / market forces notwithstanding). My thought is that you're touching greatly that a company's culture may have critical importance to being able to do such things.

It very much rings true to me after having a lot of low-level retail & some Fortune XXX gigs, and one of the ways I was able to understand it better was to write up a TV pilot / show idea about an R&D department in a toy company during the go-go 1980s. Exploring a culture of development, albeit with significant stakes & external competition, was actually really pleasant because I could (can still?) see Pros & Cons that, um, well define an overall culture. Pardon if I'm convoluted explaining it but I just really enjoyed exploring the concept as a wannabe inventor.


> Google has tried and failed to make phones (Motorola/Android)

But Google tried and succeeded in making a phone operating system that ended up becoming dominant, that gives the rest of their services top billing. Imagine if Apple had kept a near-monopoly on the high end, and/or if the company that leveraged the gap they left at the low end had been Microsoft or BlackBerry.


Every time I am fighting with the Android SDK, and specially with the NDK since they deprecated Eclipse CDT or a new Support Library or Android Studio version comes out, I wonder how many of "the smartest engineers on the planet" do actually work on Android.


I know some of those Android engineers, and I've also done (and loathed) Android development, and I do think they are some of "the smartest engineers on the planet". The only problem is that they're optimizing for their success, not yours (which, if they're smart, is exactly what they would be doing).

At Google, you get promoted for launching something that is technically difficult. So most engineers will seek to implement the most technically difficult feature they have a chance of launching, and then do everything they can to ensure that it actually launches. Nobody gets promoted for not launching things and ensuring API stability. Nobody gets promoted for fixing bugs their managers doesn't know about. Few people get promoted for writing documentation (and if you do, you're probably a techwriter who doesn't call the shots on API design). Nobody gets promoted for doing mundane stuff that might improve the user experience, but isn't technically difficult.

It's the standard big-company modus operandi: hire the best, and incentivize them in ways where it's easy to define the incentives but those incentives don't necessarily add value to the customer. Usually by the time you get to that size, it doesn't matter anyway, since you're working on problems that no startup has the resources to tackle.


It's hilarious, I tried and failed to build an Android project that I'm pretty sure still built just fine 6 months ago. So much useless churn.

Then they announced the new CMake support and it's basically a CMake toolchain file they copied from an older OpenCV initiative and didn't notice it no longer worked with the new NDK, or anything other than GCC, which they have deprecated. It's insanity.


Yeah and apparently ndk-build support on the stable plugin is only meant for backwards compatibility purposes, but you don't see it described as such anywhere, only a few hints on commit messages.

I had to dig out how it all works with the new cmake plugin from their samples, because the new stable plugin still doesn't manage ndk-build properly.

Also there are quite a few features, like OpenMP, that the clang NDK doesn't support, yet GCC is already deprecated.


I think it's a question of culture. For as may things as people fault Microsoft for they sure do know how to build good tooling.

But yeah the NDK is a mess and the whole environment around it is incredibly painful. Android Studio improved things but they still have a long way to go.


By breaking the law to do it, yeah. And now they're under investigation for antitrust in almost every major market worldwide. And the product isn't even that good. It's a security-ridden mess[0] where common sense things like security updates aren't a thing because of the compromises they made to get the widespread vendor support.

[0]Source: I carried an Android (or several) as my primary device for seven years.


Disclaimer: I'm an iOS user so I'm no Android fan boy.

The largest suit that has been brought against them for Android has just been settled: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/google-wins-trial...

While the product might not even be that good, it has clear dominance of the mobile smartphone market in every country other than the US. In the US it's 43.1% market share (which is very strong).

There's no doubt that Google has managed to win this very important market.


The copyright infringement lawsuit isn't what I'm speaking about. They're under investigation for antitrust by a large number of government entities across the globe. Russia just ruled against them. The EU case is proceeding. I believe there are antitrust investigations in India, South Korea, and Brazil. Rumor has it they're back under investigation by the FTC as well, though the FTC tends not to announce such things.


i don't think you read the comment you're replying to...


> tried and failed to make social networks (Orkut/Plus/...)

Google once had the entire Brazilian social network share... And then, they just abandoned it. What I guess just reinforces your story at the last paragraph.


Good engineering is not the only factor in a product's success. There are other things that are much more important.




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