[alexpotato]

A couple of things have struck me about Google as an outsider:

- Learning that they had 100K+ employees

- Seeing resumes from people who had spent 5+ years at Google and had a project list with what I would expect from <1 year at a hedge fund or <3 years at a bank

- Learning about the "I want to just serve 5 Terabytes" video/story [0]

- Hiring people away from Google who were, for example, network engineers who turned out to be great SREs with good programming skills

- They just kill off greats apps that people enjoy with little to no notice (granted, keeping stuff around forever ala AWS is its own issue)

In other words, they became a big corporate behemoth and lost a lot of their "spark". Which is sad b/c I remember the early days of using Google search, Google maps etc where it felt like we were all living in the future.

Sure, they are breaking ground in the AI space but 100% agree that it feels like they are on the downward trajectory.

(although other firms have been here and come back so let's see...)

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI

[zeroCalories]

All large and successful companies head in this direction. You get a few killer products, the stakes become really high, and now you spend more time making sure the cash keeps flowing instead of trying to do something radically new. People talk about startup mentality within a company, but I think that's nearly impossible since you need leadership's attention to get things moving, but there's only so much attention the CEO of a large company can give, and only so much they're willing to delegate. I bet Google spends more time worrying about how to avoid antitrust and complying with regulation than trying to build something radically different. The one exception is AI, but ultimately that's because it threatens their cash cow.

[summerlight]

If you have more than 10k employees and still keep the "spark" then you solved almost of all the modern days corporate problems. This is why big corps typically choose to spin off their innovative but not-yet-profitable business. Those C-level people are not stupid; they simply understand that those innovation cannot survive in the entrenched legacies.