Comment by ChuckMcM
7 months ago
This response captures it perfectly. I started at Google in 2006 and the "mini kitchens" (essentially a convenience mart) were just getting "re-organized" The new CFO was out to "cut unnecessary costs."[1] While Google was banking billions of dollars in "Free Cash Flow" every QUARTER than were cutting the 'unnecessary' costs that were something like $12,000 per employee per YEAR. So with 20,000 employees, that is about 1/4 billion dollars a year, or roughly 3% of the free cash flow. I called Eric on it at a TGIF[2]. The gist was "We're going to lose all these great employees because you want to keep more of the free cash than you currently do?"
And people quit, lots of people, and the flow moved out. And people who joined had no idea it had been "better" than what it was, this was just the standard which was admittedly still better than other companies. Eventually everyone for whom this affront was to high left leaving an employee base reasonably happy with the status quo.
They continued to "downgrade" the 'lifestyle benefits' the entire time I was there and it continued to piss people off who left.
As margin pressure grew the need to monetize grew and Marissa Meyer who had been the 'brick wall' between the user experience and monetization left the company. Others who felt as she did also left for a variety of reasons. Leaving only those for whom monetization was just the cost of doing business and hey, "We're Google!" right?
This opens up the opportunity for disruption. There is a hysteresis effect though, everyone has a different tolerance for crap. More and more people I know are not "Google" users anymore, they are 'search' users and if their OS pre-loads Bing they use that, sometimes they switch to DDG or Kagi. Once that takes hold in the bulk of the addressable market, Google will go the way of every other tech company before them. I used to point out to people that the "GooglePlex" was the dead hulk of SGI. Like wasps Google was living inside the corpse of a formerly big player. Everyone would tell me, "We're different, we're always going to be around." And like the Zen quotes from "Charlie's War" I would say, "We'll see." :-)
[1] I believe that this statement is perhaps the single most destructive thing any CFO can do. In part because they don't define 'necessary.'
[2] He was not amused :-)
>This opens up the opportunity for disruption. There is a hysteresis effect though, everyone has a different tolerance for crap. More and more people I know are not "Google" users anymore,
On my mobile device, I have totally de-googled them so that no G apps are on my device. I only use gmail reluctantly from a laptop for accounts that are necessary for work. Haven't used G search in years. Me and the 12 other people on the planet that are the same don't make a fart in the wind of difference to G.
You're leading edge in this regard, the fall off is, in my experience, somewhat exponential. It never quite reaches zero though. Which is why we have people who still have AOL mail addresses.
we have people with AOL mail addresses still because it still works. if they pulled the plug on it, nobody would be using it any more. now i'm curious who actually is paying for those servers, and how they make money doing it. just not actually curious enough to look it up
This might be too deep for this thread, but... does it ever get better?
Of course when I was a child my parents told me how much better my childhood was than theirs...cue uphill both ways stories.
But I find myself telling my child the opposite. I'll tell her how Walmart used to answer the phone, JC Penney used to have associates that helped you in each department, Home Depot used to employ skilled workers to answer questions, stores didn't lock up items, etc. Not to even mention about how the internet wasn't an ad laden crap hole.
And without saying as much to her, I feel like my child's life is markedly worse than mine growing up.
So, what gets better these days? I find myself just thinking everything will get continually worse until I expire. But it wasn't always this way. Where was the peak? My mind wants to say late 90s. I'm just hoping that's a local peak, and things will get better again in some fashion.
> And without saying as much to her, I feel like my child's life is markedly worse than mine growing up.
Growing up as a kid, we didn't even have the internet. Gaming consoles were well off into the future (NES wasn't until my teens), so we did crazy things like play outside. Being able to survive without internet/devices wasn't crazy, it's just how things were. I can't imagine going through life with anxiety level panic at the mere thought of not having a device within arm's reach at all times. The thought of wasting my childhood/teens doomscrolling and trying to think I was so important to call myself an influencer or even caring about what some rando on the internet does that I think I have to follow them is insane. I definitely feel like this is a markedly worse situation than my childhood.
> This might be too deep for this thread, but... does it ever get better?
If I had to point to a single thing that is most indicative to the change-over from 'child' to 'adult' it would be the thought behind this question.
The answer is "it always gets different." Which is dissatisfying to the child who yearns for a parent to make things better, and engaging for an adult that realizes that nothing is forever and things change but they can be an agent for change.
That last bit, owning ones own agency, is where "it gets better" comes from. When you are a child it got better because your parents worked to make it better, their vision of what better was meant they were willing to invest their time, effort, and resources into changing things for the better. When you are the parent, then its on you.
They key difference between nostalgia and maturity is that the former works to recreate what had been before, where the latter works to change what is into something better. One of the services you can do for your child is to show them how "adults" make things better.
So it's interesting to look at "What gets better these days?"
Modern video games are way better than the video games of the 90's.
Putting together a complete computer you can learn to program on can be done for < $100 if you're willing to use used keyboards/monitors/mice.
Making things out of plastic is accessible to everyone either by owning a 3D printer or borrowing one at the library or social club.
On line resources for learning any topic including taking college courses are free and easy to find.
Keeping in touch with your friends in "real time" is both trivial and multi-media.
Shopping is different with much of it online rather than in person. Is that better? Is that worse? Kind of a bit of both, but definitely different. The Internet is full of crap ads, which is different, but its a lot faster than it used to be, is that better? Is that worse? A bit of both and definitely different.
I was joking at a conference I attended last week that I remember when grown-ass men could make a living wage developing database software written in BASIC on what was essentially a giant Arduino with an 8 bit processor. Definitely different, and it was fun for them, but it wasn't necessarily different then grown people getting paid to write code in Javascript to make web pages look nice.
Here is the bottom line: Things get better because you, as the adult, work to make them better. The more effective your efforts, the more people will join you in helping you make things better. Conversely, if you do nothing, then things getting worse is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Change is endemic, without effort and maintenance, change tends toward decay.