> I bet they could have 2 interns porting the thing to Google App Engine and then migrate the database
How can you possibly have this assessment without looking at the code/infra?
There are many things that affect cost beyond the visible features. The project isn't in a vacuum. It's interlocked with their other services infrastructure.
You can judge Google however you want, but they're not stupid or amateurs. These types of announcements immensely damages their image and affect their customers, if they could avoid it easily as you imagine, why would they not?
They've built the service and run it for many years for billions of people. A more realistic guess would be that for whatever reason, the price is higher than what's visible on the surface and they're not willing to pay it.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying they can port everything to it, but only the basic functionality to not let the links die (then progress with it)
> These types of announcements immensely damages their image and affect their customers, if they could avoid it easily as you imagine, why would they not?
You're assuming they care. And the answer of how much they care is: can this be used to further my (that is, an engineer or manager) promotion? If not then no
you are assuming hidden costs, I am assuming hidden incentives. It’s not that they are stupid or incompetent, but bad incentives within the org can and do produce stupid outcomes.
If they used AWS, this would have no code and no maintenance: host the bucket out of S3 and enable redirects.
GCP doesn’t support that, but they could get pretty close using a cloud function - stick with the Python stdlib & SQLite or DBM for the mappings or use an Apache redirect map, and you’d have many years before you need to touch it again.
> These types of announcements immensely damages their image and affect their customers, if they could avoid it easily as you imagine, why would they not?
I believe they don't care. What are you gonna do, boycott them?
>These types of announcements immensely damages their image and affect their customers, if they could avoid it easily as you imagine, why would they not?
What's happened here is that you've erroneously assumed there's a good reason. It's fun to hold nonsense like this up against testimony from the ministers and officials at the Horizon enquiry, all of whom can be relied upon to say that "with the benefit of hindsight" obviously what they did was wrong but insist that they were too stupid to realise there was a problem and thought they were powerless to do anything.
Remember on average the other humans are just as stupid and lazy as you are. Most often there aren't "good reasons" for what happened, if there are even reasons at all.
I think you're on the same page here. They might not have expressed it clearly but it's about pivoting and adapting to the market.
I'm also reminded of Mike Tyson's quote: "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face".
Things rarely go as planned, so you should favor following leads and taking advantage of opportunities, instead of sticking rigorously to some plan you put together when you were less experienced.
Unless there's evidence the original plan is still viable, oftentimes, being attached to it and ignoring what's the market is telling you is just your ego speaking.
What does revenue got to do with producing/shipping products? maybe you quoted the wrong sentence?
You can have millions of dollars in revenue without producing anything, on the other hand, you can also provide a lot of services and products for free
If anything that goes against the parent comment, how Apple has more revenue per engineer while not being a feature factory by any stretch
In any case, taking both of the comments combined kinda prove my point, that higher revenue can be attributed to many things completely outside how many products/features was shipped:
- Pricing strategy
- You can have a monopoly with a single shitty product
- You can be middle man/broker with no product to begin with
- You can be running a Ponzi scheme or committing fraud
So it doesn't make sense to use revenue (or revenue per team member) as a way to compare teams between different companies and furthermore possibly across completely separate markets and industry
This is like saying your evaluation of my property, back when it was in bad shape was wrong... because after renovating the entire thing and fixing its issues, I got a different price.
From the linked article:
> Is there some way Microsoft could come back? In principle, yes
So, of course if you manage to change the input, you'll get a different output.
Today's Microsoft (WSL, Edge, Bing, Azure, VSCode, copilot, etc) is so different from 2007 you wouldn't even recognize it as the same company. Just like what Paul Graham has said they needed to change if they were to survive.
PG wasn't wrong, it's just that Microsoft was resurrected later in 2014 by Satya Nadella.
When Paul wrote this, the industry was witnessing a technological revolution across the board (smartphones, AWS, Google docs, etc) while Microsoft was drugged and lacking behind on all fronts. At the time, their latest product launch was probably Windows Vista.
It was a different company back then and it's such an amazing feat of Satya to manage to steer a ship of Microsoft's size.
> Google X is a failure. Waymo is the only worthwhile thing they ever did and it predates X (as Chauffeur).
A failure in what sense? It's their research arm.
It feels crazy to bash down what they're doing even if it led nowhere. I'd prefer the money goes toward funding "failed research" than sit in their bank accounts.
Do you feel the same way about NASA, CERN, scientific research in general? There are many areas that receive significant funding for decades and lead nowhere by the looks of it.
I don't feel that way about the part of NASA that awarded contracts to SpaceX, but I do feel that way about the part of NASA that wastes billions on SLS (I know it's Congress's fault).
It's about efficiency. Even for research that doesn't make revenue, you can do it efficiently or inefficiently. SLS and Google X are way down on the inefficient end of the spectrum.
What are you expectations of Google X based on? in other words, what are you measuring against? Are there similar research ventures pursuing moonshots that are doing better?
Your comment was pretty harsh. Google X has been around for what? only 14 years? The number of projects they funded and the researchers they employed during that time frame is great initiative and admirable on its own.
The criticism of SLS is beat to death. The reason it exists is to ensure a viable alternative launch vehicle to space and beyond. It’s good to have redundancy in certain things. The USG has determined space access is one of them.
Yeah it costs more. But it costs less than if you ever needed it suddenly and it didn’t exist.
The question is whether or not Google, either in its bank accounts or as X, is the best steward for funding innovation. One could argue that it isn’t, and they should’ve paid that cash out in dividends and leave their shareholders to do such work.
Right, which is why I said “pay out their cash in dividends”, which go to any shareholder proportionally.
Tech stocks are weird compared to most company stocks because many of them have never issued dividends to shareholders, which is what companies traditionally do with excess cash.
I mean, NASA and CERN have consistently delivered results over the past few decades. Research fund granting involves significant amount of evaluating the prospect of the project and how successful the PI did historically. It doesn't mean "pour money into something and never expect to get anything out of it" which is what Google X is doing.
> Seems strange that people were damning algorithmic social media walls but are now welcoming preprocessed reality.
Are they the same people? The vast majority of users are consumers, they don't even think about these stuff, they only complain when the product degrade.
I don't see the privacy crowd who were conscious about their data and algorithmic feeds, are treating commercial LLMs products differently.
What's on the approved stack? I imagine .Net and Java/spring are the standard, right? anything else like php, python, go etc?