Google is the new IBM::Years of being one-upped on AI and cracking down on innovation turned the poster child for Silicon Valley cool into a dinosaur.
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If you’ve ever interviewed at Google, you know why this is happening. They hire people who are as much like the people they already employ as possible, to the point that employees don’t know who they’re interviewing or even for what. The person getting hired is pre-screened for all sorts of “desirable traits” before being matched with a team. The people who succeeded there all think the same, and so they all end up having the same ideas, and the number of novel ideas nose dives.
IBM has an internal motto that they really push when you get hired there: “Treasure wild ducks”. Beyond the regular buzz word bingo of 'think different ’ and ‘move fast break things’ it means “when someone else has a crazy idea that might just work, fucking listen to them”, and it’s what’s kept them in business for literally a century. I don’t think Google has that fundamental non-self-centered DNA. Every product they’ve ever put out was a result of their intellectual monoculture and the hyper competitive mire of sameness it breeds.
Just to add, since this seems to have resonated: Google, like all the dinosaurs before it, has to change or die. IBM used to tell meat slicers. The second T in AT&T stands for Telegraph. Edison, the Google+Apple of the mid 1800’s, went bust chasing a bubble and got bought out by GE.
I doubt we’ll see a world where Google gets bought by anyone, but they shrink in size and importance until their culture changes enough to embrace the idea that innovation can happen in non-Google ways. Apple learned this lesson under Jobs, so they’ve probably got a decade or so before that starts to wear off. IBM is essentially a finance company with in-house startups, and to the article’s credit, that’s exactly what Alphabet is all about.
This is a great overview of the problem, I never even really thought about. It kind of really explains why they’ve binned and remade almost the identical apps multiple times. Maybe if they’d made more QOL and supported their apps with new novel ideas they wouldnt have slowly died out.
Or even maybe if they’d make privacy respecting software instead of spreading their legs and whoring out all the data they collected on you they’d be doing much better too. Google has become a bloated beast that needs to be put down. Anti competitive and monopolistic behaviour with no innovation, it’s a wonder anyone uses their shit apps and services anymore
Google targets ads they deliver based on the data they collect. They don’t “whore out” the data. That’s just a lie that’s been repeated so often people take it as gospel. I’ve never seen a shred of evidence to support it, and when I worked there, the employee training everyone took annually was very, very clear on respecting user privacy and getting everything reviewed by privacy experts before it could be released.
I blame Sundar… Wayyy too many duplicated projects (e.g. Allo) and projects terminated too early (e.g., Stadia) under him.
Google was like that before Sundar.
