How the engineer driven culture at Google damaged Wave

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2010/08/27/LessonsFromGoogleWaveAndRESTVsSOAPFightingComplexityOfOurOwnChoosing.aspx

by fogus • 16 years ago

72 67 16 years ago

api• 16 years ago

I remember reading a paper a long time ago about traffic engineering. It turns out that when there's a traffic problem you have three choices more or less:

1) Add something

2) Change something

3) Remove something

The paper talked about how most civil engineers have a strong bias toward 1, followed by 2, and then rarely 3. The first thought is almost always to add something. Something is wrong? That means we need something more to solve it, right?

Complexity is not a virtue. It's actually a vice and a liability. It is better to solve a problem by removing something than by adding something. This (along with losing sight of what customers want) is the problem with engineer-driven design. Engineers like to add stuff, not remove stuff.

Wave always looked horridly over-complex to me. The protocol was a tower of babel. It was "open," but it was so complex that nobody would bother climbing its learning curve. It tried to solve too many problems at once, it was slow, and it was cumbersome to use. Those are all signs of over-engineering.

smakz2• 16 years ago

Very good points. Reminds me of this quote:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

It does seem to be a major problem with a lot of Google's latest inventions - they try to do too many things at once, and solve too many problems for too many people. Wave as a technology proved to be extremely useful in some certain circles, including corporate collaboration. I would wager if they marketed as a sharepoint competitor and increased the integration with google docs, it could potentially have been a money maker while giving more credibility to Google Docs.

Similar situations are going on right now with Google Buzz and even Google Mail, the execution of the "make phone calls from your mail box" seems to leave a lot to be desired. It's a feature that tries to jump out at you and grab your attention as if saying "Hey look at this, we invented something new" when really it should be almost invisible until you need to use it.

kenjackson8• 16 years ago

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Doesn't this imply that _nothing_ is always perfection. The quote just seems to be flat out wrong.

While maybe not as elegant, but wouldn't it be better said as "Perfection is achieved, not where is nothing more to add, but when there is neither more to add nor anything to take away".

Maybe the quote has a proceeding sentence that makes it clear.

sz• 16 years ago

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler" [Einstein] is my favorite quote of all time.

enjo• 16 years ago

Is that true? In my experience (software) engineers love to rewrite things:)

georgecmu• 16 years ago

Google is like grad-school. People value working on hard problems, and doing them right. Things are pretty polished, the code is usually solid[...]

Wow, that sounds nothing like grad school. Or any research environment, for that matter.

angstrom• 16 years ago

Yeah really. Does that mean the code is littered with "Left as an exercise for the reader."?

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

In this case, the "reader" being the compiler?

arethuza• 16 years ago

I'd agree with that - I remember a control engineer telling me that the "clever" bit of systems was actually implemented in about 1% of the code. All the rest of the stuff was boring as he was concerned, but was the bit that was actually necessary to make stuff work in messy industrial environments.

In an academic research environment you only worry about that 1% - the rest is irrelevant to getting something published.

[NB I worked in academic research for six years - mostly on engineering related topics]

houseabsolute• 16 years ago

Does anyone actually know Dare Abasanjo as "Carnage4Life" or is that just his years-long ploy to annoy me and undermine his credibility in any forum of consequence?

ibagrak• 16 years ago

I went to Georgia Tech undergrad at about the same time as Dare (I graduated in 2004). If my memory serves, he was using carnage4life handle even back in 2002.

Experimentalist2• 16 years ago

I'm glad to see a post highlighted here which shows the limits of bright engineers and hacking in a business. Google Wave is just one high profile example..

Being full of engineering-minded people, Hacker News has a strong bias favoring the idea that if you hack away and create an interesting piece of technology, then that is what is required for a successful startup business.

That idea is wrong. That idea is more of a love of inventing and obsession over technology rather than successful business.

A successful business doesn;t need neat technology or having brilliant engineers.

It requires a product/service meeting consumer demand at the right time in a sustainable way at a cost that enables a profit for the business.

That's where Google Wave failed. Despite a huge financial backing in engineering and promotion, people didn't want it.

The core for a successful business is not innovative technology-- it's Business Operations.

If the business operations are wrong -- ie a product isn't fulfilling a consumer demand or has an sunsustainable cost-- then the startup is going to tank. (unless angel investors keep throwing money at it, but eventually they won't anymore)

On the other hand... if the business operations are right, ie. there is strong sustainable consumer demand for the product/service and a cost enabling a profit, then the the company will prosper regardless if the engineers are decent, great or so-so.

There are plenty of companies making good profits year after year, growing there business and equity sustainably, which have just ok engineers and average non-innovative software.

It would be nice to see more startup-related articles here on Hacker News showing technology failures, not wasting money on too much engineering and the importance of the business operations side of things.

jacquesm• 16 years ago

You are 100% right but that's not a popular view around here. All it takes is two guys and two laptops.

I think in part that is because with YCs backing the two guys with laptops actually stand a chance of success. If the two guys with laptops had to make it 'on their own' it would turn out to be a lot harder.

DannoHung• 16 years ago

So you want to read about companies with no competitive advantages anywhere in the organization? Maybe some big firm that uses its marketshare to enforce a significant amount of revenue as opposed to better handling of operations, marketing, R&D, customer support, sales, etc?

Experimentalist2• 16 years ago

Technology isn't the only comparative advantage.

Nor, is it necessarily the best option when maximizing comparative advantage over another firm.

Nor, is implementing new technology necessarily a comparative advantage, it could be a disadvantage (ie. if the technology fails either technically or on the business side)

It's often the most difficult or worst option because of the costs and risks involved.

snom3703• 16 years ago

Absolutely true, execution is what matters. You can make a good business from a pretty standard idea. And the history is littered with examples of great technology that never succeeded, or only saw limited success.

On the other hand, you can have brilliant business operations and virtually no innovation for decades, until a better technology comes along and tanks your business. Although investing in technology is risky, failing to invest in new technology can be far riskier.

I'm pretty sure Nokia has great business operations, but considering how they're scrambling to release a new (wait, two new) mobile operating systems in response to the iPhone, they apparently failed to invest (or invest in the right) technology.

dgudkov• 16 years ago

A.A successful business doesn;t need neat technology or having brilliant engineers. B.It requires a product/service meeting consumer demand at the right time in a sustainable way at a cost that enables a profit for the business.

Sometimes B isn't possible without A. Agree with the rest.

ryanlchan• 16 years ago

This attitude was precisely what turned me away from Google. I interviewed for what they call the Rotational Assistant Manager Program (RAMP), which in reality is rotational and management related only in that you go through several different marketing positions.

I'm reasonably well versed in technology; I know my way around a rails or python app, have a good understanding of massively parallel computing, and can explain how PageRank works. Yet as a nonengineer at Google, you get zero input on new products. Development is almost entirely handled by engineers, with very little input from the outside.

Coming from a highly integrated startup perspective, I thought it was crazy. After years of indoctrination in A/B testing and user feedback loops and agile development, a tight integration between development and marketing/customer facing teams is almost an expectation.

But when I raised the idea of bringing in marketing to the start of development, the Googlers gave me funny looks. Engineers run the show, then hand it off to the marketers to sell; there's no real mingling between the two. At the onsite weekend, where we interviewed side by side, the engineers and the marketers weren't even allowed to sit at the same table for meals. Clinging to its technical heritage is hamstringing Google today.

tlammens• 16 years ago

Wave as is may be dead, the technology will live on in other google products. Introducing it as a big bang was maybe not the best way, too much change at a time. But gradually it will emerge in another form.

motters• 16 years ago

This seems pretty much like a straw man argument. The notion that Facebook concentrates upon user experience, given all the privacy wrangling and complaints about the user interface being needlessly changed or being too convoluted, seems to be not very well founded.

Fundamentally the concept of Wave seemed good, and I think there is (or will be in future) a demand for something better than email which consolidates email, instant messaging, microblogging and some project/time management features into a single interface. I think what happened with Wave was not that they concentrated too much upon the engineering but precisely the opposite. If they had spent more time engineering a slick, fast system which scales to large multi-user conversations without crashing or grinding to a halt and integrated easily with legacy email systems from the beginning to allow a seamless transition then there would have been a much bigger chance of Wave becoming a success.

docgnome• 16 years ago

"...integrated easily with legacy email systems from the beginning to allow a seamless transition..." Nail on the head. That is exactly why I didn't use wave more than a handful of times even though I rather like it. If I'm the only person who uses the email when everyone else uses snail mail, it's not really very useful.

dmitri1981• 16 years ago

I've read similar arguments here being leveled at Microsoft. Given their strong culture and hiring practices they ended up hiring people who were strong engineers. At the same time that resulted in the company developing blind spots in areas where a different approach would have been more beneficial.

I guess the risk is that when you end up phenomenally successful using a particular method, it becomes very difficult to go against that ingrained culture and try doing things a different way. Best example of a company combating that issue, in my opinion, is the IBM PC, where they gave Don Estridge free reign to carry out the project outside the normal operating procedures of the company which the management realised would have destroyed any chances of the project becoming a success.

waqf• 16 years ago

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/free-rein-or-free-reign/

It's not a metaphor about monarchs, but about horses ... but I guess nobody knows what those are anymore.

moultano2• 16 years ago

This post is pretty much information-free.

This seems to be his only criticism of the product, and it isn't even correct:

>It is interesting to think about all the internal discussions and time spent implementing features like character-by-character typing without anyone bothering to ask whether that feature actually makes sense for a product that is billed as a replacement to email.

This was explicitly thought about. The reason this feature was included was to fix the latency of chatting. The perceived problem is that most of the time people spend chatting is waiting for the other person to finish typing. No one quite knew what sort of social effects this would have, but by taking a poll they would have just built a "faster horse."

Elepsis• 16 years ago

Really? ICQ built character by character typing all the way back in the late 90s, and users back then stumbled across basically all of the same landmines Google Wave exposed.

The issue is that the problem Google's engineers perceived simply did not exist. The latency of waiting 30 seconds for a person to finish forming their thought into something coherent just isn't something worth overcoming.

elblanco• 16 years ago

Every single person I know who used Wave thought the character-by-character thing was terrible and wanted it turned off. A few of them actually stopped using it as soon as they realized it did this since they didn't want to broadcast half-formed thoughts to the world.

moultano2• 16 years ago

I'm not saying it was the right decision, but the thesis that they didn't think about it because they're engineers just isn't true.

benno• 16 years ago

Broadcasting half-formed thoughts can be desirable; we do it everyday when talking face-to-face.

blhack• 16 years ago

>The reason this feature was included was to fix the latency of chatting.

Gnu talk does this.

10ren• 16 years ago

The second section discusses SOAP/REST and XML/JSON, saying that XML Schema attempted to solve two problems (document formats + object wire format), but it predictably became too complex. He claims that we now use REST (not SOAP) and JSON (not XML), so the "impedance mismatch" problem is now solved.

Is this true?

JSON is used mainly where there is Javascript (ie. client side webpages - though that is becoming more and more inclusive these days... almost everything is a webapp (exceptions?)) - but it's schemaless (or typeless). While this is popular (eg key-value NoSQL stores, and dynamic typing in Ruby, Python, Perl), it's not right for everything. If you did want typed data, you'd probably just use XML Schema, since everything is already there.

I ask because of a startup idea based on XML Schema. It could survive XML Schema going away, but I'm not so sure about the apparent long-term trend away from schemas/types altogether. With fast-enough computers to nullify the speed advantage of static types, will the remaining advantage of type-safety be valuable enough on its own - What is the evidence for and against? Even databases are going schemaless (it seems).

arebop• 16 years ago

If I wanted typed data, I would be more inclined to use RelaxNG than XML Schema. In some situations, XML might not be so advantageous. JSON is quite convenient for JavaScript applications. Protocol Buffers have an efficient wire representation.

I think his point of JSON vs. XML is that JSON is simpler because it is designed specifically for representing structured data exchanged among JavaScript programs. Sure, it can be used from other languages and read by humans, but the design goal was much more narrowly circumscribed than the design goals of SGML, XML, and XML-Schema.

The argument about SOAP vs. REST is not as well-developed, but I think he's saying that SOAP was doomed by its attempt to stretch XML to serve one too many masters.

Personally though I see REST as a set of principles more than an RPC standard. It seems to me that REST's success is due both to the evolutionary manner in which it developed, and the relatively simple architectural form it takes compared to the SOAP/WS-* protocol specifications.

sandipagr2• 16 years ago

the reason wave failed was cause it was not integrated with gmail! It's that simple. All the rest of the arguments are just killing the dead animal

thisorthat• 16 years ago

Google Wave could have been great if it was not designed by engineers.It amazes me that such a giant company does not put more effort into design and usability.

ewanmcteagle• 16 years ago

Google Wave... whatever. What annoys me is that we lost etherpad for this. That was a really effective product.

drawkbox2• 16 years ago

Because a marketing/business driven product has never failed before...

Also wasn't this part of the newer Google that looked better and was primarily more product/marketing/suits driven like Buzz?

If it was engineering culture that killed Wave, engineers are ok with failing to make something better or to analyze it. Later perfecting it for a solid product/system.

I believe the product failed in the way they released it and that Google may have found the limit for how connected people want to be. Cool as it was, Wave seemed exhausting and we don't need to see people type each letter.

Waves happen naturally on the web, twitter, facebook etc. Google hurried the response to that. I do believe many components will be reused on Google.me. Also I wonder if they have any issue with GWT now that they are being sued for Java licensing on Android.

aufreak3• 16 years ago

Frankly, this is just punditry. Nothing wrong with trying something and failing at it and moving on cutting your losses short. I give google the credit for choosing to fail this way instead of failing with, say, marketing efforts.

ddelony3• 16 years ago

Google's non-search products are really just research projects.

nanairo2• 16 years ago

Why? You offered a non-obvious assessment without any evidence or argumentation.

Personally I think you are completely wrong. Google is in the business of targeted ads. For that they need infos about the user. Everything else is just a trap to get you to tell them a bit about yourself. Helping you in your searches, is as important as knowing what and who you email.

Facebook, who is also entering the same market, is giving them food for thought exactly because of that. Facebook offers almost no search, but they get your infos from other means. From Google's perspective the end result is similar.

ddelony3• 16 years ago

I'm not knocking Google in any way. It's just that, as the article says, Google seems to be developing their new products because thee engineers think they're cool, regardless of whether they're actually commercial. In this way, Google is the Bell Labs of the 21st century.

resdirector• 16 years ago

When I read that they'd made their Google Wave API before they had user-adoption, I thought gee, they've got their priorities wrong.

tybris• 16 years ago

Did Google Wave fail? I thought it just started?

Google mainly suffers from people (including those at Google) thinking that everything they do will be big from day 1. Even though that never happened to any of their other products.

nanairo2• 16 years ago

You think? I thought exactly the opposite.

The problem of Google to me seems to be that they release something they think it's good enough and then just leave it there hoping that time will prove them right. Then one day they wake up and see there has not been any adoption, and kill it.

When Google releases something they are hardly all behind it, and seem to forget about it in a week.

stcredzero2• 16 years ago

In that case, they are suffering from the same internal-politics fratricide that Microsoft has been long suffering from. I'm wondering if Google is at the peak of their innovation curve?

stcredzero2• 16 years ago

It's not only Wave!

How the engineer driven culture at Google damaged Wave

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