[asmnzxklopqw]

I think that the biggest problem is that Google is ashamed of what it is: an advertising company. Until they start embracing their own brand and meaning, there will be a constant stream of toxicity flowing between middle managers who don’t clear see and align with the company goals.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Enormous cognitive dissonance. Employees believing they are "organising information" or some other lofty, idealistic goal, when they are actually preparing _bait_ to lure in ad targets. The end goal is not organised info or some other benign purpose, it's surveillance, data collection and sales of advertising services, exactly what people expressly dislike. People do not pay for the organised info; the info is public, it does not belong to Google. Maybe employees think, "I am not working on advertising so I'm not contributing to the problem". If an employee at the advertising company is told by their manager to support the surveillance, data collection or advertising effort in some way, directly or indrectly, the employee does not say, "Sorry, I cannot do that because I am opposed to advertising." Today, Google literally takes money from people in return for not harassing them with ads. They call these "subscriptions". Create the problem and then sell the solution. Incredible,

[loudmax]

Doubling down on advertising is one possible path forward, but I don't think it's the only option. Google really does has the engineering talent to pivot to something different. Or maybe split out non-advertising parts of the company into semi-independent entities like Waymo, and actually charge for services.

The Gemini fiasco shows that there's still some amazing engineering talent under Google, and that this talent is completely wasted under Pichai's leadership.

[jftuga]

It's not just a advertising company. I happily pay them for YT premium, YT TV, and Google Drive.

[toomanytabis]

Just because Google has a couple of decent services that you're willing to pay for doesn't detract from the fact that most of their products have a worse life expectancy than a victorian child in the 1800s. https://killedbygoogle.com

They ruined every single opportunity to be more than an advertising company since Orkut. With scrapped attempts, starts and lack of intention for most of the 2010s to even during the early half of the Pixel Era, they seemingly haven't learnt to stick to something and iterate on it well.

And the fact that over 50% of their revenues come from search and by extension, advertising.

The fact' that til this day, they still haven't evolved from the "throwing shit at the wall then at the fan" strat which explains how they have fumbled so much so quickly.