Google doesn’t necessarily need innovation

And I don't know for sure that these new delivery services will result in cheaper and/or healthier foods. I'm guessing (and hoping) that, as per the article, relying on these new delivery "layers" will provide more options, and more options will translate to lower prices.

But either way, that doesn't matter. My disagreement with parent was only whether it's valuable to improve things like food delivery, and I pointed out that the food industry, in general, is incredibly important to most people's lives, so trying to improve it is a huge value to society.

Someone who is working oddjobs from 9am-9pm and still barely making next month's rent payment would benefit both from having extra time, and hopefully their health would not suffer if they were eating decent food.

The whole point of technology is to enable and lower the cost of things people want. It's hard to top food on the list of things people want.

Edit: by "their own companies" I mean all of their subsidiaries.

Clearly size has benefits that compensate for some of the undeniable downsides. It's almost a tautology.

Also, look at the great organisational and cultural variety among big companies. Size is not the only thing that defines organisational complexity and effectiveness.

What you describe kind of suggests upholding strict divisions per team like that is one of the main causes of the problem.

Wouldn't being more flexible of temporarily joining another team as a guest work? I imagine that for a number of situations this could work:

- I want to do x, my team needs it

- But we're responsible for X, and x falls under that

- When can you do it?

- We're understaffed, so years from now

- Fine I'll do it for you, I need it now

- Didn't you hear we are responsible for X? If x is not done right we are the ones who get in trouble for that.

- So make me a temporary guest member of your group, vet my work to make sure it's ok, and share the credit for x.

- Ok, that actually sounds like a good return on investment for us, welcome to the team!

If X is big, say, "build a new data mart (over the next 6 months)," then your considerations are very relevant. That should have a plan and buy-in from all of the relevant stakeholders; it's a legitimate project and needs the organizational ceremony involved in such.

If X is small, say, "make this internal API return an additional integer field from a datastore it's already using," then that sounds like bureaucracy and politics needlessly impeding development. This is a minor enhancement.

I guess the trouble is that even a small change like my example could be substantial in a large enough organization. Maybe adding the integer field means a new version of the API has to be published, or maybe adding the integer field means DB indexes or caching strategies have to be updated. Even so, the API team should have established processes for solving these issues. So instead of a simple change taking a few hours, it takes a few days, still not a huge divergence of resources.

From the parent using the example "Fine I'll do it for you, I need it now," I'm assuming they're talking about very small scope problems, which would not substantially affect the schedule for Y.

And remember, Y is already being affected, because it requires X to get completed.

So it's not really a matter of working on X when you should be working on Y; it's that progress on Y has halted due to a missing X dependency. What can we do to get Y moving forward again?

At the ground level engineers are frustrated because if they could just get "those idiots" to do the one thing they needed they could make progress. Without ever realizing that they were the "those idiots" in someone else's dependency tree.

If you are a senior technical leader (or want to be one) it is always worthwhile to follow these threads to figure out what is going on, even though it might seem like a distraction. The larger the organization the more challenging this can be but most people will tell you what they are working on and why its important (which is to say what will be fixed/improved/made possible by its delivery)

"Alexa, how old was Ronald Reagan when he became President?"

It seems to know about movies and people.

I hear that Google Home is a lot smarter. I'll get one when it goes on sale again.

Siri is the assistant with the problem. It can't answer those questions:

"Hey Siri, who won best actor last year?"

"Hey Siri, how old was Ronald Reagan when he became President?"

For example I really don’t find their designs to be particularly no-nonsense.

I would actually prefer a more no-nonsense, absolutely minimally styled html. Like under 10 lines of css.

Because I really like contrast, really really don’t care for a position sticky element right where my eyes naturally scan on mobile obscuring stuff, am fine with Open Sans, don’t need the extra page load time spent on who knows what. If there is a dial between form and function I would like to jam that dial to 100% function. Other people with vision issues really need large text formatted as white in black. Others still much prefer the aethestics of font other than Open Sans.

It would be nice if somehow we could define precisely how we wanted our reading material formatted across all our devices and across all the varied ways we receive textual information. (Eg it would work with kindle, or in the growing number of electron apps, as well as in all the other software we use).

And then sites just had to provide a minimal use of semantic html elements to make it work.

So while medium does cleanup the box of chocolates mess of going to random blogs it turns all those chocolates into the one with the same minty flavor and some folks really don’t care for mint chocolates.

So when they see a random blog post to them it’s a box of chocolates where they have a shot of winning, with medium it guaranteed to be something they don’t care for.

Case in point I read another recent post don Stevie’s in my rss reader and that was pretty nice. Not sure if that will still be option (or for how long) now that he’s moving to medium.

EDIT: There is some dystopian movie (whose title I forgot) where only one restaurant chain exists -- same thing.

Waymo appears to be on track to a business?

Are you suggesting that, with tensorflow, innovation doesn't count if its infrastructural and not consumer-facing?

Both you and Yegge label things you like as "innovative" and dismiss others as "not innovative" while never clearly articulating what this means.

"cool but not R&D businesses"

Yegge complains that Android was not an innovation but then says "Jeff Bezos is an exception. He innovates all the time, and he doesn’t fear failure. Many of his innovation attempts fall flat, but he almost never throws the idea away."

So somehow Android isn't innovation but Fire tablets are. Seems inconsistent.

Who manages the hardware and infra in this situation? Do all of these systems continue using the Google account you have with their tools running in Google's datacenters? Or do you now have 10 datacenters with 10 identity management tools and 10 different backend storage solutions that all need to be globally distributed and managed by teams of 5 or 10x as many total SREs to maintain the same level up uptime guarantee?