Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

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Everyone at Google says this. It’s not true. Of course it contributes to the problem, but trust me a broken messaging strategy doesn’t naturally arise from Software Engineers trying to get incremental promotions.

It comes from two parts of google that are totally broken and don’t know it:

1) Product Management 2) Legal

The PMs are running from meeting to meeting trying to please execs and not doing anything that looks like sophisticated product development. Each team has their own broken process and crappy dashboards. I can’t even describe how irrational and broken the process for making product decisions is.

Then there are the lawyers. If you even think about doing something interesting or original they will say No and that’s the end of that. They’re shockingly risk averse. Even if every single competitor is doing a thing, you almost definitely can’t do that thing at Google. My team was BARELY allowed to know how many users we had! And we certainly couldn’t know anything about them. Because Legal.

There is a Village Global podcast episode where Eric Schmidt is asked this question [1]. He basically says that leadership did not "get" messaging platforms. I think of this as similar to how RIM/blackberry did not "get" the iphone. Nor did Steve Ballmer. It's equivalent in screwup magnitude to Microsoft not getting mobile. This requires massive leadership oversight.

Now, having worked at Google during these times (including the Allo launch where the team went around Google trying to rally the troops on why it was going to work), I can say that the PM structure at Google meant that a ground up led effort to build a competitive messaging platform just wouldn't happen. PMs basically rotate products every few years and nobody really has passion for the thing they are working on it. Its a very mechanical role oriented around features, roadmaps, growth bookkeeping etc. None of these things would yield a competitive messaging platform without a mandate from the top.

Now why was there no mandate from the top? Well, I think that leadership was confident that Google already had what it needed to build messaging into their dominant platforms. Between youtube and Android it felt like that if the competition in messaging were to grow in feature set, it would become more like these platforms (facebook turning into youtube with video, etc). Google could then add messaging and meet them at some point in the future. Schmidt also references youtube as a messaging/social platform in the podcast episode.

[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/village-globals-ventur...

> Schmidt also references youtube as a messaging/social platform in the podcast episode.

I've heard that from other people at Google as well. But the fact that YouTube isn't a messaging/social app in any significant way is part of why I stick with it. I wonder if I'm not the only one.

It's true but not because they haven't tried. I remember they had some feature to share a video with your direct contacts/friends and open up a chat to talk about it.

I think this just goes to show it isn't as easy as they thought it was. I am sure Microsoft leadership thought it would be easy to turn a dominant consumer computing platform (windows) into a dominant mobile platform. I mean it is true that we are seeing a convergence to some degree with ios/ipad/macos. The thing is it doesn't happen as fast as needed for the competition to captialize on it. Facebook might eventually look like youtube. However, by the time it happens there will nothing left for youtube to gain. The market will be cooked.

i am conflating social network and messaging platform here which are too distinct things. Just trying to make a point about how easy it is to have irrational confidence in using the thing your successful in to gain success somewhere adjacent.

If youtube did start growing the messaging/social features you like, how would you remove yourself from it? thats where the videos are.

If they were intrusive, I'd just stop using it. The internet is full to the brim of videos from other platforms. YouTube isn't the only game in town. I use it mostly because it's convenient. If it became much less convenient (and, honestly, they've made a number of "enhancements" lately that have made it a bit less convenient), the cost/benefit ratio would no longer be favorable.

Isn’t it? Vaguely I hear of Vimeo being used for art videos but I kind of got the sense that the network effect and technology at Youtube was very strong. Where else do people go to watch videos? Where else can you host a live stream?

You can host videos on demand or live streams at Mux.com as well.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a community engineer at Mux.)

A lot of the respectable creators are transitioning to other platforms like Nebula or Curiosity Channel. Or at least that's my impression, I'm seriously considering joining, as the only thing that is on youtube that I consume now is the equivalent of trash TV (livestream VODs, which can be consumed much more efficiently in their home platform).

Which current (or recently released) things have a mandate from the top at Google at the moment ?

Cloud. GCP must compete on the same level as AWS and Azure. You can reverse engineer this by looking at the knobs "the top" has to make something happen. Staffing, money, acquisitions, etc.

So, it's B2b? No B2C or things like Gmail anymore? All I can think of rn is stadia.

Google has won consumer. Adding another consumer app doesn't really change the equation. Google Cloud as a product needs to compete in the market and not die or get sold off. This is a massive growth vector for the company. The main reason it is a different class of product. Paying for usage vs. ads.

Isn’t the second point an argument against fragmentation? Google had an integrated messaging platform, they’ve now abandoned it for multiple platforms. Where was Legal saying no to these new endeavors?

I wish we could rewind most of the web at least ten years. Everything was better then — I enjoyed Gmail, Twitter, Foursquare, Flickr, etc.

This is interesting. As a non-Google PM, whenever I face legal or compliance-related pushback on what I think are fair uses of data and reasonable risks, I think to myself, There is no way I’d be facing this constraint at <big company>! But perhaps that’s been a bad assumption.

Bad assumption. I worked for Snap and anything that goes out has to be reviewed and signed off by legal. Don’t even get me started on looking at data. For some data requests, Directors had to be involved and I had to justify to them to give me access for couple hours to some piece of data.

I also worked for FB and it’s not as strict as Snap but similar.

If the big company has a cash cow, legal does everything to protect the cow.

If the big company is hurting, legal works to find ways to justify everything and anything.

Here are comments from a former Google VP about legal concerns during Hangouts engineering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2mD7_nGPA4&t=652s

this >> " trying to please execs"

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