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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35417 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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It is true that for an established company, not destroying it is the first order of business. That said, even if you ignore how lousy Google is on product side (recent story of Stadia being probably the best example of the fundamental problem it has), if you assume that it could come up with a great and compelling product, the ability to effectively execute on this is simply not there. Chrome was originally built by a team of 10 people or so. A team I was on for a whole, which is responsible for the project that is absolutely fundamental to GCP’s existence, was 15 people when the software was 95% feature complete (and the remaining features, including the ones I worked on, are mostly useless crap), is apparently above 60 people today, I have no idea what they all even do. This means that even if the promo driven culture was not a thing, projects like Stadia couldn’t survive anyway, because Google is not efficient enough to run projects that don’t have insanely good margins and quick growth. Their current cash cow of AdWords is going to slowly but steadily lose value, as general search slowly loses relevance on modern web.

I’m just rambling here, but I find it sad to compare how cool Google was in mid-to-late 2000s, vs the sad thing it is now. And that is even before you consider loss of open company culture, DEI etc.

If I am running Flagship Product with a team of 15, and I am successful at making Flagship Product work, I am going to be rewarded with a higher headcount.

I've been playing with a theory for awhile: Google became Saudi Arabia. After it solidified its ads product, it had an infinite money spigot. It could throw lots of money around internally, and it was unlikely for what would otherwise be successful products to significantly improve its bottom line. Internal politics became the main driver of who got resources for vanity projects, and the general transformation of its culture (including the Wahhabist DEI initiatives) followed from that.

Do you happen to have any particular insights into the birth, life, and death of Stadia?

Nothing more than this HN comment from 2019 very concisely puts. Stadia’s failure mode is extremely typical to Google. I actually sat very close to people who worked on what became Stadia back in 2015 (which is also instructive as to how long it takes to develop products at Google: Stadia was in development before the launch for longer than it was in GA), and I could reach to them, but I doubt I’d learn anything I cannot guess from the outside: indeed, I doubt that these particular people who I knew that worked on Stadia in 2015 have still worked on Stadia in 2022! Many such cases.

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