Comment by jimbokun
2 months ago
Now imagine how much they would make if their software was good.
Google, Facebook, Apple clearly care deeply about the quality of their code. They have to because bugs, bad performance, outages, vulnerabilities have very direct and immediate costs for them. I know Amazon and Microsoft have their critics but I bet they are also better than we give them credit for.
There are factors besides software quality that affect their success. But running bad software certainly isn’t going to help.
>Google, Facebook, Apple clearly care deeply about the quality of their code. Yea, idk about that one. They definitely did care in the past. They had to if they wanted to get users. But they've stopped caring a good while ago. Especially Microsoft. The costs that bad code would bring them is lower than the cost of developping good code, because they can mostly rely on monopolies and anti-competitive practices for user retention. Their users are more like hostages than anything else.
Is Google much better? I don't see, for example, the care that used to go into the quality of organic search results.
They seem fine with the output of the current hodge-podge of the original algorithm results plus massaging by many downstream ML pipelines that run one after the other without context of how each stop might affect the next.
> Google, Facebook, Apple clearly care deeply about the quality of their code
Not the impression I get these days.