Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Guest9812398 2786 days ago
It seems like almost everything Google related is sluggish. The new Google AdSense, the new Google Analytics, the new Google DoubleClick for Publishers, and to a lesser extent, the new Google Maps. These are all products I use that perform worse now (on modern hardware) compared to a decade ago. I really don't understand how this happens. Does no one at Google notice some of these services literally taking 10 seconds to load simple pages?
1 comments
arkitaip 2786 days ago
They have invested so many billions in their pipeline and committed so much head space that it's incredibly difficult to change their tech stack to improve performance. Users suffer because of poor performance but at least management can brag about compliance, code reuse, being able to quickly push out production code, etc.
link
userbinator 2786 days ago
Users suffer because of poor performance but at least management can brag about compliance, code reuse, being able to quickly push out production code, etc.

I've seen this type of behaviour become more prevalent especially within the last 5 years or so, and it's just as irritating to me --- especially when resolving user-complaints take a backseat to improving whatever useless metric-of-the-week the management have thought of.

It doesn't have to be "the customer is always right", but I've found that companies are increasingly becoming more deliberately ignorant of user's concerns and instead focusing on furthering their own agenda.

link
dvfjsdhgfv 2785 days ago
> I've seen this type of behaviour become more prevalent especially within the last 5 years or so

It's much older, but previously you'd see it more in the desktop space.

As for the server, an interesting thing happened: the proprietary software used to follow similar trend (I'm talking to you, big fat database vendors), with some open-source projects behaving the same. But people are not stupid: you realize you win by serving your clients fast and that very often speed is more important than functionality. Hence the success of projects like Nginx or Redis.

link
alanaktion 2785 days ago
I would believe it's a tech stack limitation a bit more if every web app they've launched in the last 5 years wasn't built on a totally different JS/CSS stack. Several use Polymer, but all very different versions of it. And Polymer is objectively bad if you care about non-Chrome usability at all.
link