[alephnan]

What I would like to see from Google's leaders:

First, put a halt to launching new products. Two, take a cold hard look at existing products and prune them in one fell swoop, rather than this distributed system where projects scale up and down independently, spread across time. It seems individuals are incentivized to launch irregardless if anyone actually cared about that product launching. It's really hard for the orchestration node to say No to projects where there are so many other projects launching that it would seem unfair.

Effectively, saying NO. Just my two cents.

[TheAceOfHearts]

Alphabet employed a total of 118,899 people in 2019 [0], out of which 114,096 were at Google [1]. I've never worked at such a large tech company, but I imagine there's tons of challenges with coordination at their scale. I'd conjecture that Google behaves like a distributed system because that's how it actually operates internally. There probably isn't a single orchestration node responsible for all project launches.

Heck, Google is so big that they're often in direct competition with their other services and products. For example, they're currently developing three different operating systems: Android, Chrome OS, and Fuschia.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

[flarg]

Totally. Accenture has more than 500k people and they have a mess of duplicated service offerings started by the strategy and consulting teams and the ones with most sales go on their website for as long as they survive.

[chrisco255]

That explains Hangouts, Duo and Allo.

[alephnan]

I guess my question would be: why have the orchestration problem to begin with

See, Apple is big and I’m sure they have a plethora of internal products too. At least on the consumer front, it’s not so confusing.

[tbodt]

*Fuchsia

[UncleMeat]

With a 100,000 person company, the CEO cannot direct all products.

Startups can launch a product off 5 engineers. Let's say, hypothetically, Google is way less efficient and can launch a product off 50 engineers. You are looking at thousands of products. If the CEO spent literally every working hour just reviewing and approving products they get roughly an hour per product per year.

This means that these decisions must be delegated and therefore there will be decisions that seem boneheaded in retrospect. Its just a fact of being a massive company.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

The problem seems more cultural than you're giving it credit to be - several ex-Googlers have stated or written articles pointing out that the way Google handles promotions heavily incentivizes people to launch new products over working to improve existing ones.

[UncleMeat]

I'm a Googler and have been on promo committees. I've seen this material. I don't think it is entirely without merit, but I feel that it is fairly overblown. My org, for example, is much more focused on debt reduction and efficiency rather than launching products and we have historically had a higher promo rate than the norm.

[plorkyeran]

Apple has more employees than Google and has very top-down direction of products. You're starting from the assumption that prioritizing launching as many products as possible is obviously the correct goal, but the whole criticism is that Google values product quantity over product quality too much.

[marto1]

And why would they do any of that ?

It doesn't pay to be creative or engineer driven when you're a monopoly. The ones that make the big bucks are sales and marketing.

The other factor is cash reserves[1]. They can make 1000s of mistakes like this without any significant damage to their cash flow. Also assuming they are mistakes which we don't know, because we don't know their strategy.

Finally, if you think the leaders don't know about this trend and/or killedbygoogle you're kind of naive. Actually with the amount of data they have there is a pretty high chance they can easily learn everything about you way before you can learn everything about them.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/1/20749831/alphabet-google-a...