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Comment by Aqueous | Hacker News Reader

I would consider Maps, Gmail, and G+, CRUD applications. What does it take to not be a CRUD application? I'm not sure. I think every web-based application in which enormous amounts of data are stored and manipulated qualifies as a CRUD application, even if they involve lots of intelligence and batch processing on the backend. Many of them are CRUD with a Big "R," as they mostly involve consuming data. Maybe my definition of CRUD is too broad.

Knowledge graph and instant search are amazing feats, but with thousands of engineers working all day at Google, each of these products seem to be only incrementally improving, as you say, and I would almost expect quantum leaps forward in terms of new products. But Google probably has all sorts of things in their pipeline.

These products were already incredibly impressive, as well as huge hits, and I use them every day, so I'm not really dissing them so much as I'm noticing a lack of new, hit products.

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Your definition of CRUD is incredibly broad and covers just about any application that reads or writes anything to a datastore, regardless of whether the datastore is ACID or some custom storage system for something like a huge graph of geometric data. Do you consider Quake a CRUD application? How about GwtQuake, a web-based version that consumes big BSP files? What about Minecraft?

CRUD to mean has traditionally meant traditional database applications, CREATE, UPDATE, and DELETE, after all come from SQL keywords. These apps are primarily table oriented.

Google Maps isn't even close to being a CRUD application in the traditional sense. How many CRUD applications have you worked on that used Octrees? And why does "web based" make something CRUD? Is a native Android app that does SQL RPC calls and just manipulates a typical entity-relationship database quality as CRUD?

Anyway, back to hit products. Google Now was released only 1 year ago and is a new hit product. How many new hits per year do you want? ;-)

Also keep in mind that Google has moved from launching lots of tiny apps with separate branding, to unifying their various platforms and implementing things as features across app. For example, the neural network based image search is a really a service that appears inside of Drive, G+, etc, just like Hangouts appear in multiple apps, as well as Google Local data.

The general thrust is to get away from launching an array of dozens or hundreds of sites, and to make stuff just "work" within the apps you use already.

To clarify that, the general thrust is to unify everything onto G+, eventually. Should be fairly obvious and I inferred as much even before I joined Google.

Good luck with that. I fear the day when my Apps domain is forcefully migrated to Hangouts. Hopefully there will be an alternative to Apps by then that is actually worth using.

(One of the people present during my firing needed to summon his boss using internal Hangouts. He eventually gave up, went back to his desk and got his laptop because the experience is completely unusable while mobile. It was hugely amusing to watch, and drove home the dogfood drama for me -- you know what I'm talking about.)

That's not strictly true. Google Search itself has inherited the ability to run image search, mail search, drive search, and calendar search within the front page.

Sorry to hear about your firing BTW, hope everything works out. I believe in second chances and I don't think people should be blacklisted for all time for something far in their past, with certain exceptions (e.g. sex crimes and working with children, etc)

Thank you.

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