The IBM-ification of Google?

somesortofthing

Not the article's main point but I've never liked the "google killing products" complaints. People always talk about how big companies fail because they're unwilling to take risks and just recommit to their areas of strength, but this is what risk-taking looks like - you blast out products, see what sticks, and kill what doesn't. People who think it's a quality product won't be wary of whether it'll get killed - the quality itself is insurance against that. How many DAUs would stadia or hangouts or even reader have today?

devjam

While Apple does make nice hardware and appear to be listening to their users in that respect, don't forget that Tahoe has not been particularly well-received.

fumar

Is this AI authored rhetoric?

amazingamazing

I remember these types of posts saying Google is done because they shut down Google Reader. Google's stock was about $60 at the time. I look forward to reading this post and chuckling a few years from now. Doomers really do get more engagement, though. I have some friends in real life who complained about reader, and none of them even use RSS feeds anymore. I mean seriously? The one point I will make though is: these people complaining about Google shutting things down is really just funny. It's like complaining about people having abandoned side projects. A healthy organization tries things. Not everything works out or is cashflow positive. That's life. For reference Google has more employees than all Y Combinator companies combined . Keep in mind there are thousands of dead Y Combinator companies. A better complaint about Google would be the lack of polish on many products. Take Gmail. Google made haste in adding the "AI Inbox", and yet you can't even read threaded emails in reverse chronological order. People have been complaining about this for nearly its entire existence. With the talent, and now AI - there's no reason such a thing couldn't be fixed tomorrow. It's just CSS and there are tons of chrome extensions that implement this. C'mon...

hintymad

> YouTube is eating itself from the inside out too One thing that I really really hate Youtube for is that they don't allow users to turn off their shorts. You can choose to "reduce" Shorts for a given session, but they come back right next time. That said, Youtube is tremendously valuable for its high-quality content. It's kinda like a restaurant. The service can be horrible. They decor can be hideous. But! I'm going back as long as the food is delicious.

jeffbee

"Everyone hates YouTube" is an argument that has a lot to overcome. All objective indicators suggest it is incredibly popular, and growing in popularity, pretty much across the demographic board.

coderenegade

Google is in an incredibly strong position. They're a top tier AI vendor, and in a world where content creation is largely commoditized and outsourced to AI, advertising companies will determine what gets seen, and what gets buried in the noise. They control both generation and visibility of what gets generated. Facebook could be in the same position, but they aren't as strong in AI. OpenAI wants to be Google, but they don't have the advertising reach. Yeah, they aren't perfect or always necessarily the best in a given area, but to compare them to IBM is probably missing the forest for the trees.

KnuthIsGod

All empires eventually decay and die. Wang, Bull, Unisys, IBM, DEC, the Mongolian Empire, the Hungarian Empire, Dutch Empire, the Portugese Empire.... they all exist in some form, but are shadows of their former selves. IBM died because it was forced to hire second raters to fill the ranks. Over time, the company became synonymous with failure and mediocrity.

ismepornnahi

Why's this poorly written piece on top of HN?

raggi

> Look at the Railway GCP account ban situation. A literally billion dollar startup running on Google Cloud and Google just randomly snaps their fingers and deletes their account. Zero warning. No phone number to call. No account rep. Poof. Gone. It is actual insanity to me. A billion dollar customer gets the exact same automated middle finger as a low effort spam bot. Your B2B business is completely cooked if that is how you treat people. The enterprise cloud gravy train is right there and Google is standing on the tracks begging to get hit by the train. If you've been around a while you know that at any business critical scale at all you establish a relationship with your cloud provider and get an account manager. When you do this, you have a number to call. A billion dollar startup not doing this is a keen lesson for the CTO. Yes, Google likely screwed up here, but being unprepared for account problems, having no established relationship with your provider is a critical mistake. The article goes on to talk about Hetzner as an example: their pricing is great for individuals but they literally don't even offer account management relationships - even at scale they actively refuse them. There are equivalent stories of account terminations with Hetzner, which is also a key point: this isn't just a big business problem, at all.

illusive4080

IBM is reinventing itself, no? From mainframe maximalists to purchasing HashiCorp, Red Hat, Confluent. All to capture enterprise for years to come. It seems as if IBM is making a comeback.

sebstefan

>YouTube is eating itself from the inside out too. Everyone hates the demonetization stuff but the low effort AI slop content is what really kills it for me. YouTube got massive because it had real creators. Supply and demand. A real marketplace. But if you keep kicking off the actual suppliers and replacing them with low effort garbage, literally anyone can host that garbage. I don't see slop on youtube and nobody I know is complaining about it. My current problem is private equity buying all the channels I love! Veritasium, Fern!

CSMastermind

If anything I think Microsoft is IBM

light_hue_1

> Eric Schmidt got booed on stage recently. Eric Schmidt! The guy who basically was Google for a decade. When your own alumni get heckled by the crowd your brand isn't just damaged. It's toxic. I was at an MIT event 8 years ago where Eric Schmidt was booed. It was his first summer at MIT. Basically everything he said about Google and his world view left the students feeling horrified. It was so bad people walked out in a daze. So if this is the bar, we passed it long ago.

Eighth

The technological world is rapidly changing and Google is changing with it. They are in a very strong position, owning the full stack in an industry that is very early and rapidly growing. They won't win all their bets but they have enough coverage for it not to matter. I disagree with the Apple comparison. Apple haven't done anything successfully innovative for what seems like decades. I do admire their stance on AI though. Not going all in makes them unique.

siliconc0w

Google has amazing potential but has consistently squandered it. Gemini CLI being killed/rebranded is yet another example of their complete lack of follow through and persistence. It wasn't a good product - it was slow, buggy, and unreliable but you have to fix it to demonstrate you can do more than launch and then kill products. They have everything going for them - amazing technology and technologists, huge distribution and lock-in, and a giant compute advantage and the can pay for more out of cash flow rather than debt or equity. And yet it's still hard to see them not fumbling the ball.

p1dda

Google is officially the most evil company in the world

throw5

I am sure I am not alone in observing that starting around 2020... may be even a few years earlier... Google seemed to hire a lot of middle managers. I personally knew several managers who did not seem to contribute much beyond "organizing" meetings, and I saw them all join Google one by one. It made me think... what happened to Google's famous hiring standards? What happened to Google's engineering-heavy structure? Google is now filled with middle managers whose only previous experience has been "being scrum masters". Right then I knew that these ineffective managers I saw joining Google were not only the symptoms of Google's decline but would also become one of the causes of speeding up the decline. How could they let this happen? What happened to all their gatekeeping... "we are okay with false negatives in hiring but we'll NOT have false positives"? Current Google hiring is all about hiring loads of true negatives. I think I saw a similar fall in hiring standards for engineering roles too but I will leave it to someone with more data to confirm me or refute me.

0xbadcafebee

Google is the opposite of IBM. IBM would send 10 consultants to coddle you while extracting all your money. Google sends you 10 automated notifications about how your service is about to be changed or terminated and then asks for more money. IBM also made its money off of fat enterprise contracts and vertically integrated products. Google makes its money off of being the monopoly owning most of the advertising industry, which ridiculously is still a thing despite advertising not really working.

linkregister

This article is nothing more than hyperbole and opinion. Its only worth is to provide confirmation bias. I agree with many points in the article, but there is no informative aspect to the post.