[thwy12321]

Google's main problem is that they only promote people for releasing new products. So all the engineers and product people are highly incentive to only work on new launches. Doesn't even matter what it is. So now they end up with all these garbage products laying around, none of which make them any money.

[baroffoos]

They also only care about stupid metrics. One google dev said they got given an old project and they found it was full of bugs and reporting loads of bad info so the dev added a bunch of tests that picked up on the bugs and bad data and then they were denied the promotion because the errors logged from the program they were working on went up since they started working on it.

[billylindeman]

this kind of nonsense will be the death of google

[baroffoos]

I'm not so sure. Googles core product is search and that has been fairly rock solid as long as it has existed. A lot of the fuckery has been around their other products and I think the company could probably afford to shut down most of them and continue to run fine.

[thwy12321]

I always wonder if the other projects are just retainer projects. They dont really care as much what happens, they just dont want those engineers on the open market.

[erik_seaberg]

I think they saw Microsoft miss the Next Big Thing™, and they're afraid it could happen to them, so they're investing in everything while the AdSense/AdWords cash cows last.