Looks like a duck, acts like a duck. Google lives and dies by their advertising revenue, they made have decided that engineering is a core component that creates all that advertising revenue but it's still just a means to and end
It's like saying Lebron James' DNA is basketball because that's how he makes all his money. In reality, his DNA is his natural athletic abilities. Basketball is something he does well because of it.
I mean fuck, the projects you're describing used to just be called R&D at companies. Xerox invented the PC, the mouse, the GUI and others in their R&D but that didn't change them into a computer company, they were still focused on printers
The projects I'm describing aren't all R&D. For example the GCP products aren't dependent upon or strongly connected the their ads businesses.
There are many "technically focused projects" that have users but don't relate to ads, as a byproduct of their bottom-up culture (a very real thing there which is sometimes great and other times a massive PITA, especially when trying to accomplish anything cross-PA), or as a response to innovation at other companies. In my experience Google is, for better and worse, not the manifestation of the vision of one or a small number of people, so when I hear intentions ascribed to Google writ large (such as OP's "let's not pretend that they are driven by..."), I laugh.
Does that make sense? I don't think we completely disagree.
Additionally google is not flat management. As much as it might feel at the moment that it's driven from the ground up, if someone higher up the chain can put the kibosh on something below them on the chain, then it is manager driven
>> if someone higher up the chain can ... then it is manager driven
Again, it's not this simple. Things have gradations in the real world.
I've seen the "business case" be ignored because a VP doesn't think they could get their engineering team excited about it because (a) it's uninteresting or uncomplicated to implement and their perf-focused workers will transfer to other, shinier teams or (b) it's counter to the project's culture or philosophy and they will similarly lose people. Google is "management driven" in some scenarios and "engineering driven" in others. It's part of the gallows humor in Google that some mucky muck or PM is unable get their team to do something we think makes business sense.
edit #2: This is what is really meant by "bottom-up" in the case of Google. The specific incentives from their performance review system, the size of and breadth of projects at the company, and the degree of mobility of its engineers combine to give engineers concrete leverage over their management. I've worked at 4 very large companies and Google is an outlier in this regard. A number of success stories at Google can be traced to that structure, and at other times it's criticized as leading to inefficiency or redundancy, lack of focus or long term commitment, etc.
I'm not even sure what we're arguing about. Of course ads dominate the company, it's what drives the most revenue. If you're trying to have an informed view of the place that would allow you to predict or interpret some specific thing they do with some level of certainty, you can't just look at the mean statistic.
While Xerox invented the GUI and other technologies, Douglass Englebart at SRI invented the mouse and Henry Edward Roberts designed the first PC, the Altair 8800
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_mouse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_(computer_engineer)
My point still stands that they developed technologies outside of their core business focus but it didn't mean that their core business focus changed
Wherever you make your money, that's your business. Google's customers are advertisers rather than users, a fact that becomes readily apparent if you ever need customer support. The PR department can spin it however they like, but the accounts department see the truth in red and black.
The incentives are well aligned here because it’s proven that if you improve the product people will use it more in the long term!
Facebook just announced such thing a couple days ago...they are taking a huge hit in time spend (and therefore ad revenue) to increase meaningful interactions between friends and family’s.
What you have stated is that none of that is true and that everyone else is incorrect about corporate culture
I personally think there is a huge difference between the old economy and how the new players play the game...it’s really what gives the later a competitive edge in the first place, being more people focused instead of money. It just happens to be that when you do that as an outcome you end up building the most valuable companies in the world!
Only because they are sitting on a mountain of cash. Let’s see if a downturn has them losing a ton of money. The safe bet is on them doing what almost big company does: fight for their core market and avoid risks.
What could be reduced is the quality, and that could lead to gradually losing of revenue over time. So you have a trade-off between increase of quality here and decrease of quality there. So it really boils down to the ratio of these two quality changes.
Pretty sure Larry and Sergei don't give a rat's ass about advertisement, they just want to do cool tech (cf investment in AI and self driving cars, among many many other things).
Advertisement revenue is a mean to do all this stuff.
The ONLY incentive for Google is amount of revenue, and that means ads.
They are very good to market themselves as a friendly company that cares about engineering more than advertising, but that's Branding and Marketing! And you fell for it.
You both could very well be right. It's (almost always) in a company's best interest to focus on profit. That profit, however, is very often used as a means for the people in charge of that company to march towards their personal motivations, which may not always align 100% with the company (but often overlap enough for a mutual benefit).
I see pretty much total shit knowledge of history, ethics, and philosophy in the tech industry. It intentionally has blinders on, zero imagination for anything other than the good intentions rails it's wants to believe it's on. Oh no one could have known, no one could have predicted, you had no evidence that these bad outcomes were possible. It'll be the same excuses we've seen before, because no one wanted to confront the possibility and how to mitigate complex interactions, they just want the ends because that alone justifies everything.
That of course will be convenient when claiming a lack of responsibility for the outcome, shifting the blame, because only good was intended. Now trust us.
And the reason why I increasingly don't trust tech, is because the language the industry uses is consistently dismissive of basic concepts in ethics, merely accepting assertions of "good intentions" as sufficient evidence of ethical behavior.
"CFO Ruth Porat is pushing Google “creatives” to bring their costs under control."
http://fortune.com/google-cfo-ruth-porat-most-powerful-women...