Hacker News Reader

Comment by kyrra | Hacker News Reader

Googler opinions are my own.

I agree that it seems like we haven't had any huge launches in a long while, just lots of incremental improvements.

Google has lots of people with lots of ideas, but launching anything under the Google name is treacherous. If it fails to gather adoption and it dies (like many startups do) we get blamed for killing products.

It's a problem of an internet company. If we just released software like people mostly did 20 years ago, we could just stop providing updates. But keeping an internet service up takes compute and human resources.

As for what we work on, every active product has small changes going on. In payments (my team), we continue to launch support for new forms of payment. We continue to stay up on the latest regulations around the globe. (ex: Apple stopped accepting credit cards in India for their App Store, but Google Play still supports it.)

View on HN

I feel like payments was a great example. Why is there wallet, pay, the new pay, the Android pay, the Google pay, the web payment service, the play store, none of which seem intercompatible? And yet in the meantime Stripe and Venmo took over?

It's got nothing to with desktop vs web software. All of Google's major past successes were online services too, as are your competitors. From the outside it just looks like you guys are resting on a giant warchest with feuding petty fiefdoms while the king is asleep at the throne. You know the problem spaces but come up with a bunch of half added solutions instead of some disciplined, visioned push. That just seems like a classic lack of competent leadership. Wish you guys could fire your execs and start over.

> From the outside it just looks like you guys are resting on a giant warchest with feuding petty fiefdoms while the king is asleep at the throne.

They're probably operating like a third world nation that finds a natural resource like Oil or diamonds or something.

That was google search / ads.

The company now is full of internal corruption which is just the petty fiefdoms all squabbling over the spoils, while the industry is being badly managed.

Lets see if I can find the economics book on that...

The Bottom Billion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bottom_Billion

Chapter 3 is on "the natural resources trap"

I haven't read it in over a decade and the analogy may fall apart, particularly when it comes to stuff like trade and currency -- but the problems of governance when a country is overflowing with natural resources is the narrow slice I'm talking about being analogous.

That's a great analogy!

Yeah I mean I haven't read that book in probably 15 years, so I may be making shit up about it at this point given how my memory is... but I definitely see corporations behave that way and internal governance goes completely to hell when they're flush with cash.

"If it fails to gather adoption and it dies (like many startups do) we get blamed for killing products."

That doesn't explain the mess of 8 different messaging apps each year. If Hangouts was still the de facto android messaging platform and google put some effort and marketing dollars, it would have billions of users, instead you have a mess and millions switching to iOS because android messaging is a joke. Same with payments. I get an email every 6 months for "the new google pay is now android pay and gPay is google pay". it's a joke. same with adnroid music play all access google play music plus.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com