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by nostrademons 3183 days ago
Like with a lot of projects Google dogfoods, it's well-adapted to their values and has a lot of blind spots on things that are unimportant to Google.

Google executives don't care about formatting; the vast majority of them are technical, and culturally Google basically has a "don't care about superficial stuff, you have bigger problems to worry about" attitude. And the idea that you might want to print something out is a terrible anachronism; the whole reason we have multi-exabyte datacenters is so you never have to deal with paper again.

It's not naivete, it's arrogance. Basically Google wants to see you move into the 21st century, and if you don't, that's your problem, you'll eventually be forced to because the rest of Google's feature set is so good. Same reason IE support is pretty shitty on a lot of their products.

The only two real gaffes I can think of that really were naivete were the sound on the PacMan doodle, and the lack of privacy controls on Google Buzz. It basically never occurred to Googlers that you might get in trouble for having sound blaring out of your work computer (this, BTW, is my fault, I did the code review for the sound on the Pacman doodle), or that you might get in trouble because your boss knows about stuff you do on your personal time.
1 comments
maaark 3183 days ago
Forgotten last year's Gmail Minion Mic Drop incident already? People lost their jobs.
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nostrademons 3183 days ago
I haven't worked at Google for 3 years now, so anything recent I probably haven't heard about.

...but yeah, it would never have occurred to me that people would get in trouble for the mic drop April Fools joke. It's a different culture in tech, in Silicon Valley, and particularly at Google. I remember being told by a senior engineer that as long as I continued to do my work, there was basically nothing I could say to a senior executive that would get me fired.

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ScottBurson 3183 days ago
I wasn't aware of it either, but looking it up now I see that someone outside Google lost their job because of it. That might be what the parent is referring to.
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