[listmaking]

Well it's all gradual and diffuse; for that matter there are still pockets of the "old Google" around today. My point here was just about, in a big company, different teams having their own domains that you don't/can't interfere in, rather than a free-for-all where everyone feels part of the same whole and can just jump in. (Which was probably never going to work anyway, so maybe encouraging such a culture in the first place is what Google did wrong.)

This is actually ironic in light of popular HN sentiment in Google-related articles, where many seem to imagine Google acting as a single whole, rather than different teams working in their own interests and not thinking of the big picture. E.g. people in this thread imagining that "Google" thought about RSS support and made a decision based on advertising revenue (or whatever imaginative reason), when in fact the team working on the "DevSite" infrastructure probably barely thought about RSS at all. Maybe they should have, but the reality that RSS (unfortunately) doesn't matter much seems harder to swallow for many, than theories about maliciously breaking it.

[freedomben]

Yes, this tendency of people drives me absolutely insane. I don't know why people so strongly default to thinking of large organizations as a monolith, but it is one of the largest fallacies that I see repeated continuously here.

I kind of wonder if it is spill-over from Apple. Apple is notoriously tight, controlled from the center, or at least was during Steve Job's reign. I wonder if that brush doesn't get applied to every company, even if it is a very different type of company.

[deely3]

But this fallacy make sense. Even the smallest part of the large oranization can't go against organization course/directions.

[freedomben]

Yes definitely, if the top says "we're doing it this way" then the smallest parts will have to do it that way. But in a company like Google (and IME most large companies) the top doesn't get that specific. They give broad strategic objectives and let the departments figure out the best way to achieve them. It's possible of course, but seems unlikely to me that the top would say something like, "remove RSS feed support for the developer blog." And if they did, I would expect either complete silence on the issue, or some corporatey Newspeak about it. Since they said "Unfortunately, we don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're actively working on a solution" that to me seems like a top-down direction is extremely unlikely.

[joepie91_]

I don't think most of the criticisms towards Google literally assert that the top brass demanded specific technical decisions. Rather, "the top brass demanded it" or variations thereof is meant as shorthand for "the top brass set objectives and operational constraints that ultimately led to this choice being made, and this type of consequence was foreseen by said top brass but deemed an acceptable tradeoff".

The workings are much more indirect, the intentions slightly different, but the outcome is the same.

[tehlike]

Agree with this take.

People always assume some ulterior motive to every single decision google does, but things are often much simpler than that, and mostly all it comes to prioritization...

[brandensilva]

I hear ya but who sets the priorities? Management typically right? So if they don't see value in RSS and move their KPIs it will never be implemented.

And well profit motives push managements decisions so it's no wonder it never got prioritized. Nothing nefarious about it. RSS makes Google no money.

[tehlike]

At the team level? Eng lead, pm lead, someone who cares about a problem.

[jimmySixDOF]

Hanlon's Razor: Never ascribe to malice that which can easily be explained by stupidity.

[appplication]

Or the corporate corollary: never ascribe to malice that which can be easily explained by a more profitable allocation of resources.

[billbrown]

Or Brown's Corollary of Apathy: Never ascribe to stupidity what can be explained by DGAF.