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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

I have a suggestion for Google: make an interactive graphical mind map representation of your products and shows relationships between them. Have that be the response to google.com/products. Add layers, like for a map, that show old and new names, and proposed names. Make an attempt to identity the product-neutral set of "degrees of freedom" that each product gives the user. This would be a fun, stand-alone project for an intern. Maybe use D3 or processing.js for the front-end.

Such an artifact would be useful to users and Google leadership alike.

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For an intern? You mean it would be a PhD thesis in and of itself. Google has had more than 18 chat apps, some of which had the same name... At the same time, but couldn't talk to each other .

Some companies are so profitable, they can hide layers and layers of managerial ineptitude. Think how great Google could be if they had cohesion and oversight.

That‘s what economic cycles are for. Too bad, we had to suppress them with free money during the last decade.

I'd argue it semi-intentional in the sense there's liitle error to fit it. Why? Because when the DOJ comes knocking with charges of monopoly Google can say, "Does this history and dumpster fire look like a monopoly to you?"

Their dysfunction is a form of self-defense (while search + ads keeps printing money).

> “Does this history and dumpster fire look like a monopoly to you?"

The obvious answer is “yes. Because that’s what happens when a company has no external pressure and can throw its monopoly weight around into unrelated markets.

Is this satire or super-insightful? I feel some sort of Poe's Law of Reality has been creeping in in the last ten-ish years [0]. Like this post is silly and funny, but I find it somewhat plausible too (at least as far as a reductive explanation of the behaviour of a huge corporation can be).

[0] see e.g. Curtis's Hypernormalisation

We all know what Google's bread & butter is. They are going to defend that. Full stop. To think it can't take some form outside typical expectations is simply naive given the numbers involved.

We're not taking about your child's lemonade stand. We're talking about a corporation that is by all accounts intentional. Why is this seen as "no way"? Doesn't that make it all the more possible?

Also, many of which were essentially the same, despite the different names. Theoretically a message made in Google Talk in 2005 would have been visible in chat history through migrations/rebrandings to Hangouts and Chat. You'd need a fair bit of research and a flowchart to explain them all.

Where more than one product has the same name then both should be renamed. From that point onwards, they should never re-use an old name. Things would be so much less confusing.

Confusion was probably the point; they wanted the good will associated with the old name (and if possible, migrate the users over to bootstrap the new thing), even if doing so would destroy that.

I remember Buzz and Reader both doing very well at this, oddly. Then they killed it for plus, of course. Still the dumbest thing they have done, to my mind.

Future archaeologists will would consider this a Rosetta Stone

A really smart intern.

Can't help but think it would look like that Charlie Kelly scene https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1430367-pepe-silvia

They must no doubt have this internally

Wasn't it like 10 years ago that they had a 3B line monorepo for the entire org? Does g3 still have a stranglehold on the org?

Google still famously uses a monorepo. With lots of heavy set-built tooling, their own variant of Bazel for builds, it works well. I imagine a lot of engineering effort goes into making it work.

Yes, it hasn't been released because they are still trying to figure it out

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