"because with monopoly services they can hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate of other firms and shackle them with tools and processes that make them 1/3x as productive and survive"
So, this i'd take issue with. I agree on the overall attitude for sure.
But some of the data here is just very wrong.
Google can't hire 3x the number of developers at 3x the rate. It hasn't been able to in probably a decade. At least in established markets. It's true that in new markets it can come in and often hire very quickly, but so can lots of others. I say this all as someone who has:
1. Established multiple mid/large developer sites for Google a number of times over ~2 decades, so saw how it changed.
2. Watched my counterparts at other companies try to do it as well.
...
So i have a bunch of direct experience in knowing how fast it can hire and how many it can hire :)
It's also no longer willing to pay what it would take to get 3x developers 3x as fast but that's orthogonal to whether it could - i've watched it try and fail at getting 2x developers 2x as fast in many markets. It used to be able to, but now the only trick up its sleeve is money, sometimes freedom. That doesn't go as far as one would think.
As for 1/3rd productive due to tools and processes - most companies have near zero telemetry on their developer productivity, or very basic telemetry (build times, bug times, etc), while google has an amazing amount.
I don't even think most companies have enough telemetry to be able to quantify their productivity for real to even say it's 3x google's.
For example, most companies could not tell me how long it takes to get a feature from idea to production, what parts of the process take up what time, and how all that has changed over time and breaks down among their various developer populations. Let alone provide real insight into it.
(Feel free to pick your alternative measure, I would still bet most of the time the telemetry isn't captured)
Most seem to drive productivity based on very small parts of their chain (build times, etc) and the rest on sentiment.
That may actually be the right level of telemetry for them, and the right thing to do, depending on what they are trying to do, but it makes it very hard to say they are actually more productive or not.
There are many complaints you could make about Google, but the productivity of tools is not one of them. Sure, some people love them, some people hate them, like anything, but that is orthogonal. I've certainly seen the "i like x better" or "i am much more productive in x" complaints. But by any objective measure, the tools make Google's developers wildly productive, and are one of the reasons they are able to overcome so much more process.
The process part i agree with, like any other large company, google is smothered in process these days.
I remember having the following discussion with a 5000 person org about their launch bits:
Them: We've done some data and tracking and discovered we think only the following kinds of launches are actually really risky for us, so we want to make them blocking on the following launch bits.
Me: Great, does that mean the other launches aren't risky and you don't really care about the launch bits you have to approve for them?
Them: Yes
Me: Are you going to remove the launch bits from them so it stops slowing them down and you don't think they are risky at all?
Them: No.
> But by any objective measure, the tools make Google's developers wildly productive,
That’s the thing, they might be winning all the productivity battles there are (and I genuinely believe that they do, on top of great tools Google employs good-enough programmers to make use of those tools), but at the same time they’re losing the general war. Because, with rare exceptions, the last war Google the company won when it came to launching something of lasting value happened in the late 2000s, give or take a few years.
The botched Google+ launch broke them in that department, or maybe that was just a symptom of how badly-broken things already were inside the company. They’re still making lots and lots of money, though, so that’s still a good thing for them.
> Because, with rare exceptions, the last war Google the company won when it came to launching something of lasting value happened in the late 2000s, give or take a few years.
People repeat this a lot, but it's obviously not true. Google Photos is recent, really good, and had more than a billion users really quickly. Waymo is like a decade away from eating the entire urban taxi market. Gemini is the best LLM for writing code right now. I guess you could call these "rare exceptions" but I don't think that's a useful way to describe them.
Hell, even YouTube improves every year by leaps and bounds from both a revenue/profit standpoint, AND from a creator support standpoint.
Google deserves to be heckled mercilessly for how easy engineers have it there and how eager it is to kill off products, but suggesting that it's a dying company coasting on ad money is just totally wrong.
If Photos is recent then Google search was recent when Photos was released!
It’s a decade old and that’s only if we don’t count what it was before it was spun into its own product, google’s more recent integrations spun as “releases” non withstanding.
YouTube INCREASING creator support? That’s news to me and every other YouTube creator. Creator support peaked around the time Photos released, nearly a decade ago and has only gotten worse since (although if we were to graph it, it would certainly have peaks and valleys).
Photos was brand new in 2015. Search is from 1998. I'm not a mathematician but that means that search is about three times older than it...
If the point you're trying to make is that Google needs to bring every service they offer up to a billion users within five years of launching it, I don't know if there's much of a point to me trying to convince you
> If the point you're trying to make is that Google needs to bring every service they offer up to a billion users within five years of launching it
Well I didn’t say anything like this or anything that implied anything close to this so I suppose you’d have to engage with what I actually said.
Photos existed and was available to the public before it was “released” in 2015. Even then, 10 years is certainly not recent for a company of Google’s age. I don’t think even IBM would consider a 10 year old product a recent release.
> Photos existed and was available to the public before it was “released” in 2015.
Google has had several previous photos apps! The actually useful one is the most recent.
> Even then, 10 years is certainly not recent for a company of Google’s age.
So you swear you aren't demanding proof that services released in the past five years are successes, but you're complaining that pretty much anything older is too old.
Dude, I am engaging with what you said. Almost no product is wildly successful in less than 10 years by Google's standards, because Google measures users in billions.
If you still wanna ignore Photos, then talk about Gemini, Cloud, and Waymo. The Pixel phones are also doing pretty well, considering how dominant Apple has been.
My point here is that you're ignoring numbers that would be INSANE for any startup because the product is from Google. It really seems to me like you're looking for reasons to discredit the company instead of the truth, which is that non-ad revenue is 25% of the total and growing.
That's pretty significant and in absolute terms makes Google a giant even without search.
I am SO confused and have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you think you’re talking to someone else?
My post was Thesis: Photos is not new
Supporting evidence: everything else.
I am not OP, I am not saying anything you’re responding to (and when I look at the OP you responded to they didn’t say what you’re responding to either).
I’m not ignoring any numbers they just don’t have anything to do with my post.
Additionally, Photos was a relaunched app that’s why I’m saying the 2015 is a little misleading, I am aware Google had other photo apps before Photos and I’m not talking about that.
I can say “your examples are bad” without espousing “Google doesn’t do anything”
> My post was Thesis: Photos is not new
> Supporting evidence: everything else.
I am getting my number from Wikipedia, because that's when the actual "good" version of Photos launched. I don't know what the status quo was before the relaunch, because the app wasn't useful to me before it got the ML features that caused it to blow up and become a wild success.
The point I am trying to make is that Photos, on its own, would be a multibillion dollar startup. In the context of billion-user apps, even being 10 years old is still pretty recent.
My complaint with your take is that if you exclude anything younger than that, OBVIOUSLY there will not be as many (or any) wild successes. It takes time for a product to become successful.
That's not what they said.
They said, if Photos is currently recent (aka 2025-2015 = 10 years = recent) then Search was recent when Photos came out (aka 2015-1998 = 12 years = recent).
Which given the overall timeframes, I'd say that's close enough to say 10 years ~= 12 years. And they said they'd actually count the non-Photos time of Photos as Photos, so add some to the 10 years.
2015-1998 = 17, not 12.
Yeah this is what drove me a little crazy about his reply. That's almost a factor of 2.
ROFL, HN needs Cap'n Picard face palm. You are of course correct. slowly walks out backwards while trying to turn less than lobster red
And if you believe that, @DannyBee's productivity isn't real.
Or maybe it's a business problem that Google shares with Microsoft, Facebook and Apple.
Microsoft has struggled to find any new products that will really move the needle in terms of revenue but they support their old customers with enduring loyalty while making the occasional absurd-but-bold move like Windows 8 and sticking to businesses that seem to make no sense like XBOX.
Facebook is the captain of cringe, not cool, but at least they're investing big in VR as a platform. They subsidize great rigs for Beat Saber because Zuckerberg will never forgive himself if he gives up and somebody else succeeds. [1]
Apple will never find a product as big as the iPhone. To do so they've have to make an iCar or iHouse or skip Starship and go straight to O'Neill Colonies. At least they are indisputably the best at what they do and they can occasionally take a hopeless shot at someone else's turf (Vision Pro) feeling justified that the only rival platform has a trashcan for a logo.
Google has trained us all that anything new from Google has a shelf life less than day old bread. They go at new projects as if they a startup that didn't get into Y Combinator or like the kind of company that Marissa Mayer starts these days [2] -- they don't realize part of the special opportunity of being a huge company like that with an absurd valuation is you can do really big, audacious, and irrational things.
[1] I learned for myself how dangerous this attitude is but all I could do was max out my HELOC.
[2] see https://sunshine.com/ not to put it down, I might be involved in something like that if I wasn't doing what I am doing