Comment by ot1138

Did I mention I was more pessimistic? :-) I expect that today they could layoff 150k, keep the 30K that are involved with search and enough ads that are making business and that husk would do okay for a long time. I don't suppose you watched SGI die, that happened to them, kind of spiraled into a core that has some money making business and then lived on that.

One of my observations between "early" Google and "late" Google (and like the grandparent post I see 2010 as a pretty key point in their evolution) was employee "efficiency." I don't know if you've ever been in that situation where someone leaves a company and the company ends up hiring two or three people to replace them because of all the things they were doing. Not 10x engineers but certainly 3 - 5x engineers. Google starting losing lots of those in that decade. They had gone through the "Great Repricing" in 2008 when Google lowered the strike price on thousands of share options. And having been there 5 to 10 years had enough wealth built up in Google stock that for a modest level of "this isn't fun any more" could just do that.

But aside from your observation that "they have plenty of people" it is similar to observing that a plane that has lost its engine at 36,000' has "plenty of altitude" both true and less helpful than "and here is the process we're going to use as we fall out of the sky to get the engines back on."

Google has lots of resources. If you have ever read about IBM reinventing itself in the 90's its quite interesting to note that had IBM not owned a ton of real estate it likely would not have had the resources to restructure itself. I worked with an executive at IBM who was part of that restructuring and it really impressed on me how important "facing reality" was at a corporation, and looking at the situation more realistically. I had started trying to get Google to do that but gave up when Alan Eustace explained that he understood my argument but they weren't going to do any of the things I had recommended. At that point its like "Okay then, have fun." Still, at some point, they could. They could figure out exactly what their "value add" is and the big E economics of their business and realign to focus on that. Their 'mission oriented' statement suggests that they are paying some attention to that idea now. But to really pull it off a lot of smart, self-interested, and low-EQ people are going to have to come to terms with being wrong about a lot of stuff. That is what I don't see happening and so I'm not really expecting them to transform. Both not enough star bits and the luma are just not hungry enough.

Piggybacking on this to also express my appreciation. If/when you write a memoir someday, it would be a valuable historical record. If not, your hn comments are a wonderful corpus too :)

Thank you for sharing your experiences, Chuck!

A) This is short-sighted. What you're suggesting is in fact a way to optimize short-term gain over long-term viability. It's pure MBA tactics.

Additionally, it's complete and total oversimplification. If you look at Google's earnings it's pretty damn clear that at least until 2020 they were not just going for maximum total spend, but for a steady, gradual raise in total spend. Not too slow, not too fast. They were NOT taking every opportunity they had, in fact they're famous for systematically refusing many opportunities (see the original founders' letter, but even after that). They were farming the ad market, the ad spend, growing it, nurturing it. Then COVID blew up the farm.

Maybe you're right now, but I do hope they're recovering their old tactics. Because if they maximize it you'd see nothing but scams ... wait a second.

B) Google was built by providing a vision, and getting out of the way of ground-up engineer efforts. "Scaring workers into compliance" IS killing the golden goose.

You can see this in AI. Every story from an AI engineer that ran away from Google is the same. They didn't run away for the money, they ran away because they were getting scared into compliance.

Now AI may make it, or not. I don't know. But this is happening EVERYWHERE in Google. Every effort. Every good idea, and every bad idea runs away, usually inside the mind of "a worker". Not to make them personally maximum money, but it's natural selection: if the idea doesn't run away, the engineer it's in is "scared into compliance", into killing the idea.

Whatever the next big thing turns out to be, it simply cannot come out of Google. And it will hit suddenly, just like it did for Yahoo.

> The latest layoffs are them cleaning house and scaring their workers into compliance, not the death throes of a company in trouble

Really? I have the impression Google’s other tools (I have lots of uses of Docs and Meet ) are degrading in quality quite quickly

That is a subjective judgement, but it seems Google no longer cares

Companies this size die several years before the body hits the floor.

They're dead when everyone starts to hate them and someone says "no, look how much money they're making, they're fine." That's the fatal blow, because they think they're fine, and keep doing the things that make everyone hate them.

At that point you're just waiting for someone else to offer an alternative. Then people prefer the alternative because the incumbent has been screwing them for so long, and even if they change at that point, it's too late because nobody likes or trusts them anymore, and ships that big can't turn on a dime anyway.

You have to address the rot when customers start complaining about it, not after they've already switched to a competitor.

You know how a chess player will say something like "mate in 6" because their experience of all the options left to their opponent are both easily countered and will not prevent them from losing? Companies, and tech companies in my experience, get into death spirals due to a combination of people, culture, and organization. Pulling out of one of those is possible but requires a unique combination of factors and a strong leadership team to pull off. Something that is very hard to put into place when the existing leadership has overriding voting power. You can look at GE, IBM, and to some extent AT&T as companies that have "re-invented" themselves or at least avoided dissolution into an over marketed brand.

I have a strong memory of watching a Jacques Cousteau documentary on sharks and learning that Sharks could become mortally wounded but not realize it because of how their nervous system was structured. As a kid I thought that was funny, as an engineer watching companies in the Bay Area die it was more sobering.

If you have read the article, I think Gomes was right and saw search as a product, whereas Raghavan saw it as a tool for shoveling ads. A good friend of mine who worked there until 2020 wouldn't tell me why they left, but acknowledged that it was this that finally "ruined" Google.

Their cash cow is dying, I know from running a search engine what sort of revenue you can get from being "just one of the search engine choices" versus the 800lb gorilla. Advertisers are disillusioned, and structurally their company requires growth to support the stock price which supports their salary offerings. There is a nice supportable business for about 5,000 - 8,000 people there, but getting there from where they are?

My best guess at the moment is that when they die, "for reals" as they say, their other bets will either be spun off or folded, their search team will get bought by Apple with enough infrastructure to run it, Amazon or someone else buys a bunch of data centers, and one of the media companies buys the youtube assets.

The majority of that revenue comes from violating data protection law and regulators and litigants are slowly racking up a series of wins which will gut ads margins.

There is no Plan B, they are just going to break the law until they can’t and there’s zero clue what happens after that.

They sat back and let OpenAI kick their ass precisely because ghouls like Prabakar call the shots and LLM are not a good display ads fit.

The best parallel for Google is Kodak.

Dead in the same sense that IBM was dead in the late 90s, but it is not quite there yet I would say.

Number of HN complaints per day posted.

People would add sites for a particular topic (aka slashtag) to their list. That would build a virtual custom search engine within the search engine. And topic specific searches thrown at it would consistently out perform Bing and Google in terms of search quality. The meta "spam" slash tag (everyone got their own) would let you tell the engine sites you never wanted to see in your search results so if you were tired of your medical queries being spammed by quacks, add them to your spam list and they wouldn't be in your results.