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?
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.
(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.
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.
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.
a) All change is incremental, it doesn't have to be revolutionary all at once to be meaningful
b) There is no question that these taxi/delivery apps have reduced costs. Not to mention his vision for the future of food delivery has hardly been implemented.
Apps are merely being tacked on to existing business models. This isn't the world Steve's getting excited about... it's the first baby steps.
But once businesses are designed from the beginning with apps, decentralized delivery, automation, etc in mind - just as he mentioned his sister in law did with her Vietnamese food service (by just getting a commercial kitchen with no retail front-end besides the app).
Nor has the true power of Uber-style delivery/driving apps been close to being reached yet. There is tons of potential for change still to be done, which will further reduce costs.
c) Yegge himself said this goes beyond food/transport
> Here’s the thing, though: Transport and food are only scratching the surface. Same-day food delivery can be generalized to same-day anything delivery, for instance. We’re going to see major disruptors happening yearly (if not faster) for many years to come. Payments and financial services are up next, and they’re a staggeringly huge opportunity.
>"Yegge himself said this goes beyond food/transport"
"Yegge" said it? OMG. The cult of Yegge! I am completely baffled by the swooning on HN over this guy. Wow, he worked at Google?! OMG. He wrote some blog entries 10 years ago?! OMG. What a giant!
That blogpost yesterday was so cringeworthy that he had to walk parts of it back today in another blog post, making him look even sillier. The content and claims were absurd and laughable. My first thought when I read it was "I bet this person has never been abroad before." I would ask anyone apologizing for him and his absurd claims would you be doing this for any other random person writing on medium.com whose name wasn't "Yegge."
I doubt its healthy for people to sit around all day while everything is delivered to them so they never have to go anywhere nor interact with anyone else socially in public.
Big picture: once food delivery has really taken off and become "normal", the costs of producing that food can drop. In a dense urban setting, which do you think costs more: seating + servers + greeters + dish pit + front desk for payments, or contract delivery drivers with an app? If that turns a $15 restaurant meal into an $8 meal with $5 delivery, that ain't no bad thing.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Someone who is barely making rent could go pick it up from a kitchen only restaurant, drop off another order on the way home and get a meal that would be cheaper & healthier than buying it from a fast food place with full building costs.
Lol laziness. Is someone who buys food from a grocery store instead of growing it in a garden? Are you lazy if you heat it on an electric stove instead of chopping wood for a fire? And don't you dare tell me you used a lighter instead of a bow drill.
The whole point of technology is to enable and lower the cost of things people want. It's hard to top food on the list of things people want.
What does that have to do with anything? The US has cheaper and better food than most of the world. If anything the health problems in the US comes from people eating whatever they want rather than staple foods and vegetables.
I wouldn't trivialize food delivery. Eating is literally something everyone has to do, multiple times a day. Improving it by eg making it cheaper, or healthier, is an enormous benefit to society.
I mean, I didn't think about it much before, but now that I have a child, the days of just throwing together random things from the fridge doesn't cut it, and ordering takeout is too expensive. It's either cook every few days or spend tons of money.
If the market starts giving me cheaper, healthier options than ordering pizza, then I'd consider it a huge quality of life improvement, not to mention a huge time saver.
If someone came out with a service where I could get healthy meals delivered to me, with decent nutritional macros (a bunch of protein, not just vegis), and costs which were substantially less than eating out, I would be standing outside their offices on day 1 waiting to sign up. Healthy food delivery services do exist, they just end up being astronomically expensive when you look at the amount of food (calories or macros) you get for your money. I was looking at one a few days ago which was trying to charge me 10-12 dollars for a single 400 calorie meal. As a lifter who eats 3500 calories per day, that is an absolute non-starter.
>"Improving it by eg making it cheaper, or healthier, is an enormous benefit to society."
Just making food cheaper is not an "enormous" benefit to society. For evidence of this see the dollar menu at McDonalds[1]. Food delivery has existed for years now in the US and EU. Please provide any evidence that these services have resulted in either cheaper or healthier food consumption.
err I did write cheaper or healthier. Obviously both is a good option, too.
And I don't know for sure that these new delivery services will result in cheaper and/or healthier foods. I'm guessing (and hoping) that, as per the article, relying on these new delivery "layers" will provide more options, and more options will translate to lower prices.
But either way, that doesn't matter. My disagreement with parent was only whether it's valuable to improve things like food delivery, and I pointed out that the food industry, in general, is incredibly important to most people's lives, so trying to improve it is a huge value to society.
Well, per Steve Yegge's original post, it's distribution in general. My understanding of his general argument is that when distribution is controlled by Amazon, everybody buys everything from Amazon. When distribution is controlled by thousands of independent drivers, everybody buys everything from thousands of independent businesses (like the couple selling food out of their kitchen that he mentioned) and the cost of starting a small businesses goes way down. For a related argument that vertical integration, especially with respect to distribution, leads to homogeneity, see www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/craft-beer-industry/550850/
I've read that the biggest problem in B2C businesses in general is often distribution, so I think the idea is that if grab is successful, they'll boost southeast Asian entrepreneurship and collect a portion of all of that growth
People who purchase a service from Grab are purchasing from a company. Not from independent businesses. There is no difference whatsoever from buying from Amazon. Delivery people perform tasks just like the people working in Amazon's warehouses or delivering their packages.
That was probably around the time when SV was trying to justify its existence with arguing that it could also do 'hard science'. The hype around Theranos maybe being the most prominent example.
I don't think the Grab is innovative either, but it is just as innovative as the majority of popular things coming out of SV in the last decade. I think a lot of the skepticism has to do with it being in Asia, outside the reality distortion field of SV.
What food delivery needs is someone to open big neighborhood commercial kitchens and pump out delicious, healthy, locally sourced food that is reasonably priced and maybe vertically integrated w/ delivery to eat some of the margin currently taken by uber/doordash/drivers.
The Soylent founder had this idea of 'deprecating kitchens' and while I'm not a huge fan of soylent I really liked the idea. We really don't all need kitchens - it's a huge waste of space and everyone cooking for themselves generates a lot inefficiency and food waste. It makes a lot of sense to get your food from local communal kitchens - which is what much of the world does - but there also needs to be a bit of a culture shift around 'food as religion'. It's become a source of virtue signaling and everyone has such specialized food requirements it makes it difficult to economically scale. Right now food delivery is a luxury product but I'm not sure has to be.
> What food delivery needs is someone to open big neighborhood commercial kitchens and pump out delicious, healthy, locally sourced food that is reasonably priced and maybe vertically integrated w/ delivery to eat some of the margin currently taken by uber/doordash/drivers.
Maple tried this in New York City. They had delicious, healthy, locally sourced food and more or less replaced my lunch orders while at work (they were not available in my outer borough).
They couldn't hack it, though - the margins weren't high enough and they ended up selling to some UK company and dismantling their New York operation.
Munchery tried this but, at least IMO, the food quality was not great. They had to use a lot of salt and preservatives to make the food hold and transport from their central kitchen. Also they did a lot of things to improve efficiency and cut costs which made the food taste unnatural...
>Food delivery is hitting the world like a cat-5 hurricane. You can’t watch a network football game without seeing commercials about it.
So the "world" is the US? Because the rest doesn't have "network football games" or "food delivery" ads, and tons of countries have had perfectly thriving delivery businesses, even open 24/7.
Anecdote. I can't drive for medical reasons. I lived in an area where the walk to a grocery store was difficult. No public transit either. Seven miles round trip. It was doable, but the store didn't have the best selection.
This was several years ago, and grocery deliveries to my area. Carried a 50 to 60$ delivery surcharge. There are a growing number of food deserts. Delivery of take-out meals isn't that big to me. But delivery of good quality food, that's a bigger deal.
This was transportation in general in South East Asia; coupled with thee possibility of becoming a non corrupt banking system (reading a bit into it there; but if everyone has a ride sharing account with money put in, and they are viewed as more trustworthy than the banks; why not?)
No, his Big Thing is banking. He goes on at some length about how southeast asians don't use banks and don't trust banks to hold their money, but they do trust food delivery companies to hold their money.
However you break into the market, holding everyone's money is a good business to be in.
I think it takes a serious amount of motivation to shift onto the medical field. Large body of knowledge, large regulations, structures of trust. You don't step in and get the spotlight like that. It's vast and not trivial.
> 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?
It's where the money is. Online food delivery is growing ridiculously and still have tons of room for growth since it is following the growth of smartphones and the rise of "online taxis". It isn't just food delivery. Grocery delivery, liquor delivery and all other delivery services haven't caught up to smartphone/online taxi service yet.
It's similar to what amazon did with their AWS. Most of their servers were idle. So why not turn that unused capacity for productive use. If you think about it, most taxis ( even online taxis ) are in idle state. So why not use that idle time for delivery.
Also slogans from large corporations or people working for multinationals are just PR nonsense. "Do no evil", "fair and balanced", "just do it", etc are marketing PR rubbish. Steve Yegge, like alphabet, is in the business of making money.
Cancer research is high risk/high reward. Food delivery is low risk/high reward.
What you say is true, but - and I believe that's GP's point - it's also an admission of defeat. There will always be low-risk/high-monetary-reward trivialities to cater for. But when you see your visionaries getting into them, instead of working on the actually important things, that's when you realize, with sadness, that they no longer care.
We only think food isn't important because we have enough of it. It's still at the base of Maslowe's Heirarchy. Having it arrive automatically after pressing some buttons on a smartphone seems like a big thing, no?
Malnutrition and hunger in the world are not "last mile food delivery" problems, and hence can't be solved by last mile food delivery solutions such as UberEats or whatever Grab calls its service.
People who are dying of hunger aren't dying because food is available 2 miles away from them and they can afford it but don't want to go get it.
If you are going to invoke Maslow's hierarchy, consider that getting food at the click of a button is WAAAAY high in the pyramid.
For the elderly and home bound, food delivery can literally be a life saver.
I know it's not why a lot of these companies get started. The average person doesn't need food delivery for any substantial value in their life. However, the average person being interested in these types of services make it better for everyone.
"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.
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.
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.
These two are a very common form of dysfunction in large companies. The team trying to do feature Y needs feature X, the team responsible for feature X is behind because feature W is taking longer than expected. Sometimes a person can see that feature W is hung up waiting on feature Y, and you discover an structural form of deadlock.
At the ground level engineers are frustrated because if they could just get "those idiots" to do the one thing they needed they could make progress. Without ever realizing that they were the "those idiots" in someone else's dependency tree.
If you are a senior technical leader (or want to be one) it is always worthwhile to follow these threads to figure out what is going on, even though it might seem like a distraction. The larger the organization the more challenging this can be but most people will tell you what they are working on and why its important (which is to say what will be fixed/improved/made possible by its delivery)
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.
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.
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.
I get your general point, but it also depends on the scope of X and the scale of the organization.
If X is big, say, "build a new data mart (over the next 6 months)," then your considerations are very relevant. That should have a plan and buy-in from all of the relevant stakeholders; it's a legitimate project and needs the organizational ceremony involved in such.
If X is small, say, "make this internal API return an additional integer field from a datastore it's already using," then that sounds like bureaucracy and politics needlessly impeding development. This is a minor enhancement.
I guess the trouble is that even a small change like my example could be substantial in a large enough organization. Maybe adding the integer field means a new version of the API has to be published, or maybe adding the integer field means DB indexes or caching strategies have to be updated. Even so, the API team should have established processes for solving these issues. So instead of a simple change taking a few hours, it takes a few days, still not a huge divergence of resources.
From the parent using the example "Fine I'll do it for you, I need it now," I'm assuming they're talking about very small scope problems, which would not substantially affect the schedule for Y.
And remember, Y is already being affected, because it requires X to get completed.
So it's not really a matter of working on X when you should be working on Y; it's that progress on Y has halted due to a missing X dependency. What can we do to get Y moving forward again?
Current Googler: in my experience that's still the case; generally if I ask a team for something that's on their roadmap but they won't have the resources to get to for another few quarters or longer, they're thrilled to support me doing it for them.
DRY as a concept needs to have better bounding. I think it's counter productive in many instances. (Albeit highly useful in others.)
I've observed discussions with people citing it becomes particularly pathological when DRY is employed by Enterprise Architects. From my experience I tend to agree with that statement. I think RFC's (SHOULD, MUST, NOT, etc) with a reference implementation are a much better approach. If you want to move quickly use the reference. If it doesn't fit your use-case for whatever reason, document why you're branching out and get on with it. Obviously this approach poses an issue where documentation diverges from reality but ideally writing it down first will help clarify the objectives. Ideally the ABI/API for anything that's shared wouldn't be changing that much so maintaining the document shouldn't be too erroneous. If it is it might be an indicator to encourage duplication.
Pieter Hintjens RFC's for ZeroMQ is a great example of what I mean;
Yes all of these things take time to write up but if you're going to constrain someone by saying "use this and under no condition nothing else" then it should be well documented.
It'll come at some point, even from your own team perhaps.
It occurs when there are two teams that have a common need and one of the teams has deep knowledge of the space and maybe has a working POC but is too busy with other work to do anything. The cookie is licked at that point unless the culture is that the team with the POC will freely give up their work to another team. Its not human nature to do that though.
For now. This is a kind of cultural shift that happens when companies grow. It doesn't happen overnight, nor does anyone actually want it to happen. But in practice it seems to nearly inevitably creep in. I'd love to read more about reasons why, and what can be done about it.
Part of it is about changing the incentives and how people are "paid" for their work in large organizations.
What drives performance for individuals or groups within an organization, isn't necessarily going to ensure that the organization as whole operates without friction. For me, this fits under the topic of "alignment" that leadership teams in large organizations talk about, but many people are ignorant to, especially when coming from acquired startups.
If you decide that identity (user management, directory services or whatever broad feature) is a core service and put a group in ownership of that then every other team may end up with a dependency on that group. Initially, pooling resources seems like a good idea, but it becomes the critical path and they end up taking more and more incongruent feature requests as the rest of the organization grows.
Eventually identity are a bottleneck, but are challenged with feature request brokering between other teams. Relative to other groups in the org identity becomes this monster team and you are left wondering if it should really be one group, or include leadership from other parts of your organization to ensure it can account for all requests and more effectively broker.
And then you, as a high level manager, throw the rudder entirely the other way. Now every department, or even every team has their own account database, their own chat, their own ticket system, their own crm, their own docs, and everyone else gets locked out of all of those.
Maybe these orgs are just too damn big. Google is 75k people, MS 124k. Those are on the small side, I can't remember which tech company, but they're at 600k. They're also chained to stock prices and earnings. They can't commit to any product for any sizable length of time.
I'm gonna preach it until I try it or die and figure out it doesn't work, but my genuine belief is these companies are too big to effectively function or to counter threats. If your company population is a small town, how many middle managers do you have? Tens of thousands?
Not necessarily a tech company, but I worked at Disney for a few years. They have about 500K employees. It's such a large company that their own companies sue each other. Like, our team couldn't use some Disney IP because we had to have our legal team clear with their legal team. That's when you know a company is too big.
Edit: by "their own companies" I mean all of their subsidiaries.
If they are too big to effectively function or counter threats then how did they get that big in the first place?
Clearly size has benefits that compensate for some of the undeniable downsides. It's almost a tautology.
Also, look at the great organisational and cultural variety among big companies. Size is not the only thing that defines organisational complexity and effectiveness.
That is a huge problem at the majority of places I have worked. I think that really comes into play when they have too many employees and not enough projects.
There is ALWAYS enough work to do; there are always enough projects. Most software companies are constantly failing their customers, including Google.
It's just that nobody WANTS to do that work :-( Usually because, rightly or wrongly, they feel they won't be rewarded for that work. Or because they don't have the expertise to work on it, or the patience to attain it.
Yegge is pointing this out, and I agree with him (although I honestly I didn't find the pitch for his new company to be particularly compelling.)
I can't remember where but I read that Nest initially wanted to build the Echo competitor but was blocked by Alphabet because another team wanted to create it. That's the kind of stuff that would infuriate me.
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).
> 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.
You might be interested in Andrew Norman Wilson's take on Google's Culture: Workers Leaving the Googleplex from 2011. It's been discussed here before[0][1].
I first saw this as a live performance, which was 30 minutes with a lot more social commentary. In that performance he compared the strange cultural division within Google to the Alpha/Beta/Gamma/Delta/Epsilon division of society in Brave New World[2]. Your comment reminded me of that, but I don't know if this recording includes it.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
For me a key point of search stagnation is the search field / keyword search. There's so much more we could do if we enabled users to be explicit about search _context_ but it's hard to express that with the humble search field. Googles solution to context has been collecting tons of data on us and trying to guess. But what if we enabled users to be explicit about context e.g. looking for restaurants enabling users to express "I'm looking for a romantic location we haven't tried before for an evening with my wife" vs. "I'm at a client at 1pm and need a quick snack on the way"
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm gonna give a shoutout to POSSE[0]: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Nothing wrong using Medium's infrastructure to serve one's articles, but the canonical version should always be under one's own control.
Thanks for this term, this is the model I'm using for a Vodcast for the past month or so... POSSE to RasPi for recording and syndication, serve edge-cache optimized segmented video content from CDN, RTMP to all the other networks. I'm mostly doing it to show that if it can be done for a Vodcast from a RasPi, it can be done for anything and inspire my artist friends (and have a platform for my creations as artist0 :). POSSE all the things.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I agree with the consistency point however there is never going to be a perfect for everyone version of consistency (in the same way there will never be a perfect pasta sauce that everyone picks as their absolute favorite).
For example I really don’t find their designs to be particularly no-nonsense.
I would actually prefer a more no-nonsense, absolutely minimally styled html. Like under 10 lines of css.
Because I really like contrast, really really don’t care for a position sticky element right where my eyes naturally scan on mobile obscuring stuff, am fine with Open Sans, don’t need the extra page load time spent on who knows what. If there is a dial between form and function I would like to jam that dial to 100% function. Other people with vision issues really need large text formatted as white in black. Others still much prefer the aethestics of font other than Open Sans.
It would be nice if somehow we could define precisely how we wanted our reading material formatted across all our devices and across all the varied ways we receive textual information. (Eg it would work with kindle, or in the growing number of electron apps, as well as in all the other software we use).
And then sites just had to provide a minimal use of semantic html elements to make it work.
So while medium does cleanup the box of chocolates mess of going to random blogs it turns all those chocolates into the one with the same minty flavor and some folks really don’t care for mint chocolates.
So when they see a random blog post to them it’s a box of chocolates where they have a shot of winning, with medium it guaranteed to be something they don’t care for.
Case in point I read another recent post don Stevie’s in my rss reader and that was pretty nice. Not sure if that will still be option (or for how long) now that he’s moving to medium.
The consistency results in everything looking the same, and most would argue that the design is hardly no-nonsense. There is a lot of needless nonsense thrown in there.
I had to create an account, begrudgingly, to follow. This is just silly when I have a perfectly good feed reader that works for everyone else I care to follow.
I wouldn't blame your reader; Medium only puts the RSS tag on the main blog page (https://medium.com/@steve.yegge) and not on each post, which is IMO not a good practice.
You are right, I would have to be asking the reader to special case medium or search up the path from the post. In this case it is Feedly which is excellent and does special case the xkcd alt text so I was a little surprised they didn’t do the dirty work.
I went through this same process. Registered for Medium... googled on Bing how to subscribe to RSS, and then added the feed to my reader and logged back out of Medium.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Both you and Yegge label things you like as "innovative" and dismiss others as "not innovative" while never clearly articulating what this means.
"cool but not R&D businesses"
Yegge complains that Android was not an innovation but then says "Jeff Bezos is an exception. He innovates all the time, and he doesn’t fear failure. Many of his innovation attempts fall flat, but he almost never throws the idea away."
So somehow Android isn't innovation but Fire tablets are. Seems inconsistent.
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?
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.
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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.
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.
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.
A success by pretty much any metric (no seriously). Yes, its essentially facetime, but I don't really think that matters. It still was the right decision. (and don't get me wrong I have some issues with Google's messaging strategy, but Duo isn't reasonably one of them).
>Inbox
I must have missed that?
Also, you kinda glossed over the whole infrastructure thing. Is infrastructural innovation not innovation?
>At the end of the day, almost all profit at Google still comes from ads,
Sure, but a quick check says that Google's revenue from not-ads today is about the same as Google's total revenue when they released android.
>and most of the marketing videos showed capability that predated the cars actually being so capable
So is your argument that Google isn't the innovator in the space, or that they won't be successful? Because I think both of those are totally wrong, but I want to clarify.
And in both cases, who do you think the innovators were, and who do you think will instead be successful?
>They're staged.
I, don't have words, this is just denial of reality. Tesla staged and inflated its autonomy. Waymo (and, to be clear, other companies, like Cruise) haven't. I see their vehicles driving around every day.
One of the earliest videos involved a blind user going to a drive through. At the very least, we can safely assume given that a Google car can't even find a parking space, that it operated on a preprogrammed route to use the drive through.
Months after Urmson was bragging about Waymo's ability to interpret hand signals, a Google engineer confirmed to a Slate reported that your cars would run a stoplight if Google's maps didn't already tell it the stoplight was there, and to look for it. And of course, that Waymo cars could not function on a road that wasn't excrutiatingly mapped to centimeter detail in advance.
While Google's marketing their upcoming launch of Waymo as a service being "fully autonomous", the car has to be remote controlled by a contractor when it gets confused.
Google likes to brag, like you did, about the "X number of miles", while intentionally ignoring real statistics that matter. (Driving the same mile over and over can be thousands of miles, but gains you really no understanding of the world of driving. Circling Mountain View isn't really as valuable as you'd believe.)
Contiguous miles without failure is a super interesting statistic for driving capability, but Google would not like to advertise that it fails and needs human help as often as one currently fills up on gas. That sort of statistic has usually showed up in the DMV reports while Google hasn't talked about it much. Hilariously, they're launching their service in Arizona where they don't have to disclose those statistics. When "no accountability" is what leads to the location choice for a product launch, you have to ask what they have to hide.
There's a huge discrepancy in the practical reality of what the technology has been capable of and what Waymo has claimed it can do. It's been so repetitively dishonest, I don't think I could ever trust the company or the cars based on their behavior alone.
I've seen a Google car park. More to the point though: I feel like your definition of preprogrammed route is broad to the point of uselessness. Either that or you don't really understand the difficulty in SDCs.
>the car has to be remote controlled by a contractor
For legal compliance.
I'll repeat the question you avoided: if Waymo isn't an innovator or a leader in this space, what companies are, and what are they doing to demonstrate their superiority?
Your argument appears to be tautological. Google is not innovative, therefore nothing Google is doing can be innovative. If Google appears to be doing something that is innovative, someone else is doing it better or Google is lying.
No evidence can convince you of the contrary, because that evidence is simply Google using its immense power to mislead you or the person you're talking to.
Duo is an app with a 4.6/5 rating and has been downloaded more than 100 million times. I would call that a very successful app by any metric. I realize your anti-Google and like to disparage them at every opportunity you get, but being disingenuous does not help your argument.
Having a lot of installs isn't successful when you illegally[1] require everyone to preinstall it on all of their phones. They have 100 million installs because they've sold 100 million phones since then. Does anyone actually use it? Has anyone voluntarily installed it on their phone because they wanted it?
"Google announced that, starting December 1, 2016, Google Duo replaced Hangouts within the suite of Google apps Android phone makers must pre-install on devices"
[1] Yes, illegally. Russia has already outlawed this behavior and fined them for it, the EU is expected to levy a fine against Google for it that makes their previous record-breaking fine look small, and it's a blatant violation of US antitrust law, where Google has paid a significant number of politicians to avoid being sued for it.
It has more than one million five star reviews, so yes.
By the way, while I'd say Google has been definitively abusing its control of the market with Android, I don't think Duo is a good example; I expect a phone to come with a way to make calls, and nowadays I'd include video calls too. Rather than preventing Duo from being preinstalled, the EU should force the industry to come up with a decent open video call protocol.
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.
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.
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?
Either they have to talk to each other, which means standards, which slows innovation, or everyone will switch to Office365 because they don't talk to each other
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?