Comment by postalcoder
3 days ago
Google made its lack of interest in Antigravity IDE obvious from very early. Updates were few and far between and app-breaking bugs stuck around, despite tons of reports.
Google's lack of focus is astounding. They sprinkle random products here and there and seem to then tepidly pick the product surface that is doing least bad and then tepidly focus on that. Compare that to every other AI lab, large and small that knows its identity and shaped its products around that.
Perhaps it's a sort of resource curse. Google doesn't need any one of these products to succeed, and it shows.
> Google's lack of focus is astounding.
As the sayinig goes, companies' products reflect their org charts.
Google is too top heavy. Each leader wants to expand his/her fiefdom, aka empire building. They'll ship random shit and if it doesn't stick, just drop it and move on.
Google needs someone senior internally who represents users; whose sole job is to look at things from their users' viewpoint and call out BS when they see any. Anybody else remember Matt Cutts from back in the day?
It’s not just that it’s top heavy, it’s also that all its incentives with respect to promo packages are oriented away from maintaining stuff unless that’s a pet project of a higher up.
That role doesn't exist and never will you basically just make nothing but enemies calling out bullshit and when a 6-7figure job is on the line you don't want enemies.
Whisk is a good example. They put out a pretty slick image manipulation tool that had infinite potential, and decided to just dump it and work on Flow instead, which while similar in features has a much more cumbersome interface. They really dont learn what works well about something when shuttering it. Poor post mortem anaylsis. Whisk very much could have lived on as a parallel evolution of interface over their image gen stack. I know it was labs software, and should have been expected but man they love throwing away what works for what doesnt.
For a company so lost, their people talk a lot about being obsessed with feedback/data in meetups (at least 2-3 years ago.)
I guess the point is, with enough money they can afford to operate like this.
can someone shed some light on the internal politics here, I thought anti-gravity was what the acqui-hired windsurf leadership team shipped?
All I know is internally they were recommending people use Gemini CLI until they switched to recommending Jetski/Windsurf CLI. Even before that, I could tell Jetski was way ahead, but still people from Gemini CLI were trying to convince me to use it.
Jetski/Antigravity is a better piece of software. The Gemini CLI codebase looks like someone tried to vibe-code a Claude code clone in nodeJS, as it's simply not maintainable.
That being said, until recently Gemini CLI was better. It had support for persistent policies on what code could run without asking and had good extension hooks to allow you write extensions that influence policy (to perform complex logic like rewriting tool calls before they are executed).
Antimatter/Jetski only recently added support for remembering what commands are "always allowed" between sessions, the extension framework (excuse me, "plugins") has fewer features, and hooks have much less power than with Gemini CLI (and can't come bundled with extensions).
6 replies →
I think it was started in the Cursor time and by the time the turd shipped, momentum had very obviously shifted to Claude code style agentic products.
The announcement of Google Allo really hammered that point home to me back in the day.
I'm sure Google Pics has a long, fulfilling life ahead of it.
I’ve also heard on the engineering side performance is judged by heavily favoring launching products over keeping existing ones healthy and growing. You get what you incentivize…
Disclosure: I am a member of an advisory board to Google and have some insights into internal aspects as well as decisions.
I really appreciate and acknowledge Google's innovations since their inception.
However I am also puzzled and stunned by their bogus product decisions. As far as I can say, and this is my personal opinion, Google has a lack of what I call portfolio management. Really. At the highest level there is no clear decision about product development as well as marketing.
Or, in other words: There is an overarching strategy, but under this there are many principalities that autonomously decide about their product portfolio.
This is by design. These principalities work independently of each other. They have partly conflicting products, no real corporate design so every product looks totally different, from old school and minimalistic Google Search look till AI and crypto bro inspired designs.
I don't want to go into details, but I was stunned the last time I got told by a high ranking Google exec, that they now do portfolio management and also consolidate the icons of the mobile apps, which means that they share the same look and feel and color scheme.
This gave us the red, blue, white buttons roughly 1-2 years ago, which didn't make any sense if you consider the individual app icon tied to its app, which partly didn't allow for the meaning of the app behind it.
That's why suddenly to us users a product gets killed, because of budget constraints or local decision making processes. An exec is running an experiment, so to say.
Paradoxically it isn't necessarily about earning money with these products, since Google is still extremely profitable which allows for all these "expensive" experiments.
My take is, that the exec responsible for the product doesn't hit the boss's KPIs with the new product, which of course aren't disclosed to the public, but amount to partly a very significantly high incentive aka pay check. We talk about millions, not a couple of bucks. Incentive works. Extremely well.
So yes, there is only Google, but if you consider the mental model of having several independently operating business units working together like independent companies in a holding and the holding usually doesn't care about your product as long as some boundaries aren't crossed and it hits the target KPIs, Google is fine with all its products.
I talked to many folks about this, and why are they not joining forces or aligning certain products to improve these significantly - it won't fly.
A senior developer from one of the US top banks once told me: "Why align or reuse code? We earn so much money, there is no need to minimize costs or even think about it, because that would only be waste of time. Instead we create product after product."
Don't judge different companies by the sorry state we are used to. ;)
The way people keep describing Google, at least from the outside, sounds like a jobs program for developers funded by ad revenue.
So many of their products oscillate around the bar of profitability but so few reach the level of materially affecting Google’s bottom line that they can continually pop in and out of existence like subatomic particles.
Meanwhile the developers on these projects work towards their products brief moment in the sun so they can leverage it to move up and out, leaving it to die on the vine.
It’s a chaotic way to run a company, a decent way to make a living as a developer, and a shit way to build any kind of legacy, either as a company or as an individual.