Newflash: Google is not an open source project that you can bitch about not including you in the loop on changes. I think the attempt by the author to paint Google engineers as aloof and out of touch was trite and intellectually lazy.
Google is a mature service now that many rely on and then as a result feel as though they should have a say in how it's changed (or not). Combine this with the fact that almost any extension of Google's service can encroach on established business models and you get a veritable sh*tstorm anytime Google rolls out anything new and different.
This search feature actually serves Google's core purpose well: To help people find what they want .. quickly. Google's mission is not to protect existing business models (Amazon) or boost web traffic to your site.
I could say that the article is written by the average European wannabe-socialist "intellectual". I convince myself of it when I read "luxury buses". This is the typical hate argument of any wannabe socialist.
> Google’s disconnect from the outside world keeps growing.
> Google has a chronic communication problem.
I actually think these things are rather true. This article did really nothing to persuade me and was argumentatively weak. Also, the part where the author essentially tells the 70% white male tech crowd to check their privilege was a non-sequitor as well.
Agreed - the article feels anecdotical. Or does JLP have insider knowledge on something deeper?
I can relate in London on how Google's culture obsesses with IQ, compared for instance to Apple who's more on the EQ side. Yet I don't see how this conflicts with a new search box that actually solves a problem with minimum risk (JLP himself mentions the problem is more on Amazon side for using the new feature).
Google doesn't offer a salary that would attract a top IQ in London as far as I am aware. That's the biggest problem with London - lack of strong and fair tech presence.
Google's lack of communication I believe is a "feature" of their culture rather than a "bug" in it. Not sure if it will make a difference down the road, but it's worked all right for them up to this point.
Exactly. Google is an Oracle: we pose it a question and it provides the "right" answer given it's near infinite amount of information. That perspective is built so deeply into Google that it's one of the few things it will never be able to change.
I also think that will eventually be its undoing because can we, if we draw a parallel to real life, think of something more valuable than someone who always has the "right" answer? I certainly can and I'm convinced that will be the end of Google's dominance.
We've seen a lot of articles talking about big dangers to Google lately. It's an interesting topic but I'm skeptical there's anything there. Because Google has got so many things going on everywhere, it's easy to find and latch onto missteps that fit with your preconceived notions of why Google is in big trouble.
In the meantime, big picture they are still the best search in quality, market share and revenue in 200 countries and continue to out-innovate the competition. The primary threat to their existence over the first decade, MS/IE, has been vanquished and Android is the future global OS and Chrome is the best in breed browser. Despite the constant privacy chatter, Gmail is still the #1 platform a decade after launch and they are again out-innovating everyone else in the email space. China is of course a problem for Google but that's a decision they are comfortable with for now.
What you're describing, except search, are all "moats"[1]. They're all ways in which Google monetizes and generates revenue.
Any threat to their bottomline has to come from people getting access to information in other ways: native mobile applications, Facebook's walled garden, television etc.
To their credit, they saw the mobile juggernaut coming early unlike Microsoft and they dealt with it effectively, ditto for browsers and email. They did not deal with social that effectively. In each case, it was their ability to foresee an information flow paradigm and get on top of it.
The argument here that can be made is that they're no longer that force that can monetize new information flow paradigms and that FB, Amazon, Apple are eating their lunch in some ways and whether they can make money without new sources of income (their new bets have not paid off yet). Whether this argument against them is stupid or thoughtful, the fact remains that this is a point that has been raised - not how good their products are, but how much money they can make, which is something a for-profit business must consider.
Facebook did to Google what Google did to Microsoft, which is to tangentially hit the old guard hard enough that their ability to move into new areas is severely hampered. (Facebook have been quite good at buying up anyone that might do this to them, but it's not clear how long that approach will last).
No one is going to displace Google in search for a long time, but a lot of that moat is going to end up being eroded.
Google has only one thing going on that gives a lot of profit, ads. So if Google gets a problem selling ads they would be in trouble. It doesn't matter how good gmail is, and i also don't think that MS/IE has been vanquished yet, the condemned live longer.
French CEOs aren't in charge of creating products. Neither are traders.
If you're dependent on creating products that people love with features that help people in their day-to-day lives, you can't afford to be completely insulated.
A trader who is focused on a numbers all day - can.
> If you're dependent on creating products that people love with features that help people in their day-to-day lives, you can't afford to be completely insulated.
> A trader who is focused on a numbers all day - can.
Though I agree that insular corporate cultures can be bad, I do not find this argument very compelling. I thought part of Google's operations was turning things into numbers so they can make decisions based on those numbers. Yes, in practical terms, the features of Google products are what is important. But with a huge user base, they can afford to do A/B testing, try new features, etc. and turn it all those things into numbers which can be analyzed for trends. I suspect that is what they are doing when they kill things like their RSS reader, modify Google+ requirements, etc.
I just wanted to say that top careers are limited to specific people same way across different industries, and IT is not the worst case at all. You have to graduate from specific places and have a specific background. It's a general problem.
>You have to graduate from specific places and have a specific background. It's a general problem.
It's only a problem if you believe that these places are being favoured over others with merit being thrown to the way side, and I'd be interested to see any evidence of such a thing.
This is particularly annoying because it would appear from that statement that google is sexists and racist.
Start with 'mostly male' anyone and everyone in the tech world knows that most software engineers are male. So whats google to do hire many more female engineers who are less qualified just so they have equal female representation?!
Regarding the white part 61% is less then the overall us white population representation (63%), so what exactly is the issue here?
While the specific problem he pointed out is relevant, the rest of the article is just speculative. Does he have any proof that parts of Google is disconnected from each other? He seems to have an issue with the perks of Google (really just perks of tech) and sort of seized upon this one insistence to expound on that and other things he doesn't like.
He's not talking about the perks but rather how it insulates Google's worldview to that of an 70% white, 60% male work force.
That, along with being bussed into work & having all your meals, medical, etc taken care of on campus limits their perspective of what other non-tech people experience on a day-to-day basis.
His argument is that Google tends to think up these ideas in their own space, but since they're isolated from what the average american that uses their products experiences - they have no feedback component that tells them they're losing touch with their customers.
I think this is worth addressing in reverse order:
> Two: Google has a chronic communication problem.
This hasn't hurt them so far. They do a poor job communicating - but their products so far have been up to snuff & there aren't real alternatives (yet). This could & will only hurt them if they screw up the next point.
> One: Google’s disconnect from the outside world keeps growing. More than ever, it looks like an insulated community, nurturing its own vision of the digital world, with less and less concern for its users who also happen to be its customers.
This I think is the bigger threat. They keep pushing innovations or new things on people Google really wants to see happen, that real people are saying "no, we don't care about." Stuff like G+ for users and stuff like this example where they're actively making their advertisers angry.
The big issue here is that if they keep producing things that people don't care about - then the product quality drops and opens up space for competitors - which really could hurt them.
Very rarely do you see these massive companies shrink because of some new startup that jumped into the space with a superior product - typically it's because they messed themselves up internally and opened up an area for another company to jump on.
i think it's more accurate to say their lack of communication hasn't been fatal yet. I think it has hurt them, with some of their dead and/or dying products.
Good point - their growth has been so stratospheric that it hasn't hurt them (yet). However, if they keep putting out products / features that don't resonate with people - it could have serious repercussions if a newcomer comes into the space that excels at communication.
Calling it "free" is somewhat misleading; it's effectively a part of the salary. The only difference is that most companies pay for the transportation of their workers in cash, instead of in kind.
Hardly. These are distant problems in my opinion and even if they were to become critical in addressing, their scope is not so large that they would affect Google as a company in any noticeable way (IMHO).
> their scope is not so large that they would affect Google as a company in any noticeable way.
To be fair, the author said `could hurt Google`, expressing reservations.
The two points he makes, however, are directly influencing Googles actual customers. We must not forget that Google is first and foremost an advertising agency., or ad-broker. All their "consumerproducts" are there to leverage their actual product: ad-space.
And the customers, the ones advertising, are rather directly hurt by both issues (for the sake of the argument, let's presume these statements are correct):
> Google’s disconnect from the outside world keeps growing.
The threat being that their customerbase moves on; either by moving to new platforms and systems to sell their goods and create attention. Or by offending their customers, probably unintentional. The case at point, offering in-site-search on third-party-sites could be that: hurting the companies that normally buy the ads to drive the follow-up traffic to their products now see Google taking that traffic to their own site.
> Google has a chronic communication problem.
Google's customers are also the ones who need to know the ins and outs of changes to their products. If you are buying ad-space on a somewhat professional base, you care deeply about the efficiency of these ads. This is not some "pay and forget" product, it is something you have to keep tuning, or else your ads effectiveness wear off. For that, you need data: information about the ins- and outs of Google's products and the changes therein. You have to keep on top of the changes and tune your portfolio of ads to make use of, or counteract the effects these changes.
Chrome itself has long offered in-site search. As much as people keep repeating the "google is an ad agency" claim, they're still wrong about how the company functions internally. The non-ads teams are focused on making the services better for the consumer. Things that Search, Apps, or Android does can hurt the ads business, but actually make the product better for the user.
When Google Instant was launched, people thought it could hurt the ads business. Google Now and Google direct-answers searches, which turn up knowledge graph boxes result in less ads shown. In the old days if you asked "how long is the golden gate bridge", you'd get ads on the side for San Francisco tourism, now you get a Knowledge Graph box.
The biggest threat to Google is that mobile erodes search ads faster that Play store revenue replaces it (if ever). The most of the Web moves to native apps or even mobile web sites, ad inventory and clicks will go down, and will have to be made up by other products (YouTube display ads? Play store revenue?)
I don't think Chrome's behavior of enabling 3rd party cookies by default, burying Do Not Track under "Advanced", and having no Reader Mode functionality make it "better for the consumer."
It's easy to guess that someone searching for "how long is the golden gate bridge" is more likely to be idly curious than in the market for hotels. This is a small loss. But when it comes to choices that affect their core business model, ads rule.
Of course this isn't surprising or even particularly damning. Apple still charges for iPhones, even though free ones are surely better for the consumer. Still, the settings and defaults for Chrome vs (say) Safari speak to the priorities of their authors.
I think you're right about the biggest threat to Google.
You're dead right on your last point, and I think Play Store revenues ever getting substantial is amazingly unlikely.
The thing is this is why the Chrome development strategy is backwards: by going on about "apps" all the time the Chrome team is encouraging data walled garden style web app development which if successful would be equally dangerous to Google as mobile native apps are. How they convinced the higher ups that this was strategically sound is beyond me, and anyone would be tempted to think it was just a corporate turf war.
Google has made many decisions in the past that have made the advertising product worse while making the search / adwords product better for actual users. They've made these decisions knowing that advertisers would be annoyed, and went ahead with them anyways -- because in their culture, all revenue originates at the user, not the advertiser.
Yeah, the advertisers are the ones paying the bills... but if there aren't any users, there won't be any advertisers either.
They don't have to launch a search engine, they just need to make DuckDuckGo (or Yahoo or Bing) the default.
If anything I think it would be the first. They are saying a lot about customer privacy lately, and DDG, as well as being an amazing search engine is all about user privacy.
I keep asking myself if the people who parrot the "nobody can beat Google in search" line have actually tried DDG.
I'm so old fart that I still remember days when Altavista was the king. Then came google. It wasn't that much better but the switch was easy - so I changed. And so did lots of other people.
This will happen with google at some point, someone will come up with something different and people will switch. Not because it's so much better but because it's so easy to switch. At that point Google becomes just one account place where people read their email, store their photos and so on.
>How can Google and its competitors consult the data source at the scale they deal with?
As insinuated by the author of this article, by overlooking the best and brightest at the country's top universities in favour of pulling in more non-white people and women into engineering roles.
Sure, it might be extremely unfair to those who've been into technology since a young age and worked their arse off to get into the best universities, the best internships, etc. and come out the otherside as the best candidates, but they're most likely white men, and in today's tech journalism narrative, being a white man is wrong.
When I put HomeDepot in the search bar, I'm searching for HomeDepot products so putting a targeted search bar for HomeDepot in there is a feature, not a problem. Thank you, Google!
"scores of young people, mostly male (70%) mostly white (61%)," Is this article about age-ism, sexism and race, too? Having 61% white employees is far above most companies and hardly "mostly white". If you say "mostly", I'm assuming 90% or more.
But what's the problem with that? are These authors saying white employees are bad? Or that a 60% white force is bad? I'm sick and tired of the "white people" bashing for no good reason.
"...the same set of top universities (in that order: Stanford, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, UCLA…). They are pampered in the best possible way, with free food, on location dental care, etc. "
Again, he's bashing this as if it's a bad thing. They don't mention the reason for the so-called "pampering" which isn't at all for what they're trying to give the impression it really is for.
"In practical terms, they fire first and reflect afterwards. "
This is an absolutely, thoughtless comment. In the restaurant parlance, it's called a "soft opening", where you open the doors and let people discover your place while you learn what works and what doesn't and what breaks. It's a smart thing to do when you can afford it or have the time but these authors think it's a problem that will ruin the company and an example of bad communication.
I'm not reading the rest of it. There are more important things for me to do.
>These authors saying white employees are bad? Or that a 60% white force is bad? I'm sick and tired of the "white people" bashing for no good reason.
They're saying that hiring based on merit, from the top universities in the US, which happens to result in a lot of white male employees, is bad and that Google et al. should be essentially watering down their talent pool in favour of diversity.
It's a narrative that has polluted the tech industry over the last few years - mainly pushed by people not even in the industry and who are just writing about it - and I'm really growing weary of it.
Yes, we get it, tech is cool and has status now and everyone wants a part of it. Well sorry, to get into the best tech companies you've to be the best, and unfortunately for a lot of people that will be the generation of young white guys who were at home tinkering with their computers from a very young age and who pursued it through third level, over people who saw the salaries in technology when they were graduating HS and decided that CS was for them.
This disparity can be addressed, but its not by the Soviet solution of fixing prices or quotas. Its by doing diligent hiring, looking hard for the good candidates of minority descent. And since there won't be enough to go around (that's the premise after all) then agitating at the secondary school level to get Everybody included in the tech revolution.
>This disparity can be addressed, but its not by the Soviet solution of fixing prices or quotas
I agree.
> Its by doing diligent hiring, looking hard for the good candidates of minority descent
This contradicts your first point in a way. If we essentially overlook say white or Asian candidates in favour of recruiting from potentially worse schools with a lower quality of student, simply for the sake of introducing diversity in our workplace, then not only are we consciously trying to fill a quota (i.e. there are not enough X minority here, instead of going to MIT and looking for candidates, we'll overlook them and go to X community college or whatever) but we're being racist in doing so.
>And since there won't be enough to go around (that's the premise after all) then agitating at the secondary school level to get Everybody included in the tech revolution.
Absolutely.
I mean it's an interesting and complex issue. Much of the disparities in the tech industry come from a place of somewhat fortunate circumstances - many of us are from middle class or higher backgrounds, with fathers who were engineers or similar, and so had access to better schools who provided their students with access to computers, along with having computers in the home at a time where many wouldn't have.
But it also comes from luck and being in the right place at the right time. Being into technology not so long ago was relegated to a status of being for nerds, geeks and other supposedly anti-social labels. The people who were into it pursued it, despite its stigma, and as luck would have it the skills they developed in doing so turned out to be very valuable today.
As such, I absolutely do not support overlooking these people when hiring simply to fill a perceived void pushed by the mainstream media these days.
We now live in a different era, where even lower social or economic classes have widespread access to technology. To address the perceived disparity, the focus should be on getting these people to pursue technology from a young age, as you said. It should not be addressed by attempting to shame companies into overlooking what are the best candidates in favour of others simply because they've a different skin colour, a different set of genitals, etc.
Diligent hiring just means, considering culture and upbringing before rejecting a candidate. Also, interviewing at colleges that you would not normally associate with upper-middle-class-white-kid. Excluding these schools is biased; including them can no more be considered 'racist' than including Yale.
Yeah. Retailers were trying to capture leverage from google by implementing good local search, google tested the waters to see if it could push back and found that the answer was "no," not necessarily because their customers started whining, but because they had somebody use the new data to do a calculation that demonstrated that their customers actually were willing to talk back with their wallets.
This experiment wasn't a mistake and no amount of diversity or cultural sensitivity training would have been sufficient to let them jump from question to conclusion without the experiment. But when all you have is a hammer...
Google is a mature service now that many rely on and then as a result feel as though they should have a say in how it's changed (or not). Combine this with the fact that almost any extension of Google's service can encroach on established business models and you get a veritable sh*tstorm anytime Google rolls out anything new and different.
This search feature actually serves Google's core purpose well: To help people find what they want .. quickly. Google's mission is not to protect existing business models (Amazon) or boost web traffic to your site.