Very interesting article, learn nothing new but it's great to put things in perspective and try to understand why Google fcked up so badly.
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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What can you expect from a company that in 2024 does not yet have a Linux client for Google Drive?
https://abevoelker.github.io/how-long-since-google-said-a-google-drive-linux-client-is-coming/
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MS the new IBM
If you've ever interviewed at Google, you know why this is happening. They hire people who are as much like the people they already employ as possible, to the point that employees don't know who they're interviewing or even for what. The person getting hired is pre-screened for all sorts of "desirable traits" before being matched with a team. The people who succeeded there all think the same, and so they all end up having the same ideas, and the number of novel ideas nose dives.
IBM has an internal motto that they really push when you get hired there: "Treasure wild ducks". Beyond the regular buzz word bingo of 'think different ' and 'move fast break things' it means "when someone else has a crazy idea that might just work, fucking listen to them", and it's what's kept them in business for literally a century. I don't think Google has that fundamental non-self-centered DNA. Every product they've ever put out was a result of their intellectual monoculture and the hyper competitive mire of sameness it breeds.
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I blame Sundar... Wayyy too many duplicated projects (e.g. Allo) and projects terminated too early (e.g., Stadia) under him.
Stadia's shutdown reallly pissed me off. The problem it had was the monitisation, not the actual thing it did. Stadia worked in places with crappy wifi, like the 2.4ghz only I had at my Mam's house, when GeForce Now, XBox Cloud and Amazon's Luna, all shit the bed. Really well optimised, it also worked at higher quality than everything else when you actually had a good connection.
If they'd actually built out the infrastructure properly, had all the features, like being able to play a game via youtube after watching a video on it, and the quasi split screen thing, it would've done a lot better. It also needed a bit of time, which Google seems hesitant to actually give any of it's projects.
All true. The monetization wasn't even that bad, it was more so the marketing. Lots of people didn't know about Stadia or were against it because of the bad launch they had.
I think the service would've done far better had Google made some guarantees like "all your purchases will be refunded if we shutdown in the next 10 years" and then ran a new ad campaign for it.
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Uh ibm's not gone...
Nope, that would make it a very stupid analogy.
But IBM is just a tiny shadow of their former glory, of almost complete dominance of business computers of any size.
According to the article Google/Alphabet is losing their leadership position too, in much the same way.
Might as well be, it's not really IBM anymore.
As someone who runs a fleet of series i machines running as400, they’re doing just as well today as they were 40 years ago
They have a stranglehold on enterprise computing after they ate redhat, and they still make insane mainframes, they've just left the consumer world (which makes sense given their name i guess)
Mainframes are still the shit in the world of financial transactions.
I wouldn't go that far, there's been a mass exodus from Redhat and they're hardly the only game in town when it comes to mainframes. You do have a point though.
The mass exodus from RH has been massively overstated. It's mostly a bunch of Redditors and Lemmings saying "omg I'll never use RHEL now, even though I never have", but in reality, they've not seen an exodus.
I do think their actions have a good chance of causing damage in the long term, though.
Maybe, but our data center people decided to switched to SUSE so some places definitely ditched RHEL.
How did that work out? We used sles in the past (moved to rhel6). Management of larger environments has been easier with rhel, but we've slowly been decoupling from redhat-isms. Satellite is just doing drm -the only thing that gives us grief- and repos now.
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I mean, excepting that google isn't even really the main offering when it comes to institutional compute (that's Microsoft/ azure).
Like IBM had mainframes and legacy infrastructure on lock.
The only thing google really has on lock still is gmail, but honestly, take it or leave it.
They had search, but I get better answers asking a space heater to hallucinate a couple hundred characters for me these days.
i left it, tyvm
youtube is the only product of theirs i use regularly.
and android if you count lineageos as "theirs"
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🤦
The new who?
Yeah, his name is Ncuti Gatwa
Does that make OpenAI the new Google?
And does that make Mistral the new OpenAI?
Mistral are the new M$.
Didn't their exhaust fans used to catch fire?
No, that was Sabre and their printers.
I was partly wrong. It was a pedestal fan not an exhaust fan.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
But the past few years have introduced new troubles: lower tolerance for risk, crackdowns on innovation, layoffs, and a narrative that its famed products like search and Gmail are getting worse.
In 2012, Business Insider listed 10 reasons Google was "the greatest company in the world," including that it "made sick perks standard for startups" and created "a little something we call 'Google Glass.'"
"In the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant," Page wrote in a memo to employees at the time.
A Google spokesperson noted that employees were still encouraged to pursue other projects, and pointed to work like AlphaFold and quantum computing and products like Magic Eraser as examples of innovation.
Still, X — a moonshot lab that birthed Google's self-driving-car unit and explored exoskeletons and space elevators — has also curtailed its ambitions as it faces increased pressure to reduce losses.
Rivals like Meta and Microsoft have turned their fortunes around in recent years with more-decisive, top-down leadership, forging a cultural compromise between unconstrained innovation and corporate efficiency.
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