[rglullis]

> Projects like Brotli aren't built to maximize personal profit;

In the case of Google, they very much are driven by profit. For a small company, reducing your payload size or decompression time by 0.01% may be senseless, but at their scale the benefit will greatly outweigh the costs.

[raphlinus]

In this case, GP has it very much right. Brotli was developed by people, not just faceless Googlers. Jyrki, who led the project, is as passionate an engineer as you're likely to meet. In this case, being able to pursue that passion happened to align well with Google's business interests, as it is indeed the case that improvements to compression have obvious benefits at scale when bandwidth and storage cost real money. But someone still has to push the initiative, and it's not as easy as you might think.

Disclosure: have collaborated with Jyrki and the compression team, including WOFF2 font compression, an early application of Brotli.

[rglullis]

> Brotli was developed by people

And this type of work was only possible because someone provided resources because they were expecting some type of payoff.

Let's stop romanticizing the past. Brotli's first release is from 2015. More than 10 years after Google's IPO. To claim that this type of project used to indicate that companies were more geeky and nerdy is completely asinine.