Comment by hot_gril
2 years ago
Engineer-driven company. Not enough top-down direction on the products. Too much self-perceived moral high ground. But lately they've been changing this.
2 years ago
Engineer-driven company. Not enough top-down direction on the products. Too much self-perceived moral high ground. But lately they've been changing this.
Uhh, no, not really; quite the opposite in fact.
Under Eric Schmidt they were engineer-driven, during the golden era of the 2000s. Nowadays they're MBA driven, which is why they had 4 different messaging apps from different product managers.
Lack of top-down direction is what allowed that situation. Microsoft is MBA-driven and usually has a coherent product lineup, including messaging.
Also, "had." Google cleaned things up. They still sometimes do stuff just cause, but it's a lot less now. I still feel like Meet using laggy VP9 (vs H.264 like everyone else) is entirely due to engineer stubbornness.
I would say that Microsoft's craziness around buying Kin and Nokia, and Windows 8, RT edition, etc etc, was far more fundamental product misdirection than anything Google has ever done.
3 replies →
20 versions of .net is wonderful. Changing the names of features over and over again is great too. I am also pleased that windows ten is the last version of windows.
The same Microsoft that squandered MSN messenger and Skype and then brought us the abomination that is MS teams?
6 replies →
The golden era of the 2000s produced no revenue stream other than ads on Google Search.
Exactly. I never cared for the "golden age" Google. Maybe the old days were fun, but it wasn't going to be tenable forever.
My engineer friend who work at Google would strongly disagree with this assertion. I keep hearing about all sorts of hijinks initiated by senior PMs and managers trying to build their fiefdoms.
Disagree with which part? The hijinks are there, no denying it. Kind of a thing at any company, but remedied by leaders above those PMs taking charge.