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Comment by josh33 | Hacker News Reader

What I really want to know is what "tbray" sees as the next google. Now that he is inside he surely must have a different perspective on what could be dislodging/game changing for the mammoth company.

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I think you are ascribing powers of omniscience to him that he, perhaps, does not have.

No, unfortunately that's not going to happen. Instead, he's going to become incapable of seeing any future of the internet other than "more Google".

This seems to happen to all their employees, with the exception of Brad Fitzpatrick.

There's a good contingent internally that haven't drunk the kool-aid, Brad's just the most visible externally. It's a reasonably huge effort just to keep the hubris in check internally, and it doesn't always work out.

"Brad's just the most visible externally"

Which is the other problem... People enter Google and disappear from external sight. I don't think Google has a "don't blog" policy, maybe it is that they just see "google = internet" and decide there is no value in having a public facing side.

I wonder whether this will happen to Tim

Many OSS contributors disappear because they're encountering satisfyingly challenging engineering problems as their day job for the first time. It takes a special discipline to actually _use_ 20% time at all (not because of team pressure, just from the ease with which one can focus on the large problems at Google). I've had that problem myself, and am considering putting said discipline in my own written goals.

I wonder why Tim has gone to Google - he doesn't seem to elaborate why he chose Google post-Sun/Oracle.

In previous posts, he has indicated that google has tried to get him before, but he did not want to relocate. The offer this time was that he could work without relocating--he still gets to work from home in Vancouver.

OTOH, that makes the parts of this post about the Google campus even sillier.

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