Google has a company strategy, not a product strategy

https://jackiebavaro.substack.com/p/hot-take-google-has-a-company-strategy

by andsoitis • 4 years ago

290 169 4 years ago

jackiebavaro.substack.com

rrdharan• 4 years ago

The author of this blog has been the head of PM at Asana for nearly 9 years, during which they've completely failed to come up with a sustainable product strategy and have been bleeding money for years.

"... the world would be a better place if people spend less time on failed projects and more time working on things that make a difference."

Asana was founded in 2008. It seems destined to fail, and will have largely wasted a large number of people's time, and seems very unlikely to be a "thing that ma[de] a difference".

https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-bubble-has-popped-for-unprofit...

"Asana lost an incredible $285m in 2021, $210m in 2020, and $118m in 2019. They're on track to losing even more with over $370m in losses booked for the trailing twelve months. That's closing in on a billion dollars in losses over the last four years. Madness."

dchuk3• 4 years ago

Not to mention asana just isn’t amazing either. It’s such an elementary pm tool given how long it’s been around and how much money they’ve spent, it really makes you wonder where it’s all gone.

white_dragon88• 4 years ago

What would you’d hugest instead? My org likes the flexibility it provides.

impulser_• 4 years ago

I wouldn't really bring up them losing money as a reason why they are going to fail.

You can count on your two hands how many small to mid size SaaS/tech companies actually make money. Almost all of them are money burning machines.

cj• 4 years ago

You can count on your two hands how many small to mid size SaaS/tech companies actually make money.

I think you’ll see this change slowly in the next 2-3 years.

I’ve been running a small/medium company for 7 years now, bootstrapped but with a small $1 million seed round in 2015.

During the 2020/2021 bubble, our seed investors were very angry at us for being profitable. (Angry isn’t an exaggeration)

After the bubble bursts, those same investors are now praising us for being so “cash efficient” and profitable.

Founders are heavily influenced by the recommendations of advisors around them. Now that the entire VC community is condoning/punishing high cash burn companies, you’ll start to see more conservative ways of operating a business become more common, since that’s now what VC, PE, etc all want to see right now (and for the foreseeable future, at least until interest rates go way down)

bushbaba• 4 years ago

You’re a profitable SaaS. Would you take out a loan for 100MM if you can use it to make n * 100MM?

That’s what SaaS shops are doing. many (not all) could show profit. But instead they e reinvested all profits and then some to get accelerated growth.

Terretta• 4 years ago

If you grow merely sustainably and profitable, many VC won't fund you, as track record doesn't show the curve they need to offset all the fails and/or market you to the underwriters for IPO.

// disclaimer: ymmv

joegahona• 4 years ago

I believe she left Asana a few years ago.

aikinai2• 4 years ago

There’s a joke in the first episode of Silicon Valley where some mundane startup oversells their mission as something about enabling humanity to thrive. I saw an interview with Mike Judge where he said it was just a copy of an actual experience he had where a founder was telling him all these grand visions about how he was going to lift up humanity and Mike thought it was some sort of charity. But when he asked again what the company was, it was a todo app! Mike didn’t name the company, but I Googled the mission statement he mentioned and it was clearly Asana.

gz5• 4 years ago

Reminds me of this terrific rant comparing Google and AWS:

https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

The great HN discussion on that rant linked at the bottom of that post.

qqtt2• 4 years ago

The rant was interesting in it's time but I'm not sure how relevant it is in 2022. 11 years ago Google had a nascent cloud computing business and Amazon might have been at a bit of a peak in terms of executing on it's dual track cloud/retail businesses.

In the time since, consumer trust in Amazon has eroded massively, as China-based sellers turned Amazon into a more expensive Ali Express. Amazon has had some very public missteps in investments such as losing 10 billion a year on Alexa. Amazon's market dominance of the cloud has been eroded by Microsoft & Google. And even now, 10 years later, Amazon still can't seem to figure out how to make its retail business profitable without resorting to littering their web site with ads.

Amazon recently set a record for losing over one trillion dollars in share holder value, while it's competitors like Microsoft and Google have weathered the economic storm better. Microsoft and Google have very promising trajectories for their cloud businesses while at the same time having a solid profitable cash cow in their core businesses. Alternatively, one gets the sense that if Amazon didn't stumble upon AWS as a business all those years ago, they might legitimately be in trouble as a business.

acdha2• 4 years ago

Amazon's market dominance of the cloud has been eroded by Microsoft & Google

By Microsoft. GCP appears to be under intense pressure to become profitable and they’re lagging on features. I hear about migrations from GCP to AWS or Azure more than the reverse, and that was before the price increases.

ClumsyPilot2• 4 years ago

Amazon recently set a record for losing over one trillion dollars in share holder value

I think is this case Amazon was massively overvalued, the market had unrealistic expectations

In the similar manner oil companies are overvalued - they seem to assume that every last drop of oil in discovered reserves can be burned, when in reality wars and social unrest will break out long before that.

makeitdouble• 4 years ago

Amazon into a more expensive Ali Express

Slightly beside the point, but for people who were already using Ali Express and wanting a faster, slightly smoother experience, this actually increased Amazon's value proposition many folds.

On the credibility part of AWS because of Amazon's overall image, I think the split comes at wether the focus is on renown brands and traditional items (image goes way down), or on items that simply don't exist or are incredibly cumbersome to find through traditional retailers (Amazon appears on the map as a viable Ali alternative).

I'm still playing the game of finding regular electric shavers that charge through usb-c only (no adapter, no charging stand). Traditional makers don't seem to give a damn about that segment and Ali / Amazon is the only game in town.

metadat• 4 years ago

Direct link to HN discussion (2011):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876

discordance• 4 years ago

I worked with several Azure product groups in the past. Although we had a top down roadmap, we were also heavily influenced and guided by customer needs. A big component in our backlog prioritization was whether we had customers who would use, test and provide feedback on private previews released to their subscriptions. With review, SWEs and Product Owners also had enough agency to add functionality/features to the backlog.

Perhaps the Office org is run differently to Azure.

SanjayMehta2• 4 years ago

In a nutshell they have no strategy except "hire great engineers."

MonkeyMalarky• 4 years ago

Just keep paying to roll the dice again and see if you land a business as profitable as search+ads. Again, and again.

defrost• 4 years ago

There was an arguably "better" rationale given for paying out engineers to play hard on the chance they land a success . . .

The denial of those engineering talents to competitors.

danielscrubs• 4 years ago

Tried many different search engines and none was as good as Googles until I tried Brave search, something I really didn’t expect. We will see what happens with Googles search business in the coming decade.

ClumsyPilot2• 4 years ago

inderd the entire post appears to be trying to rationalise and explain away objective failure of leadership

blondin3• 4 years ago

guys we need to stop supporting these obvious bots. nothing they say matter. they won't even let people read this piece without some kind of subscription that goes towards their online social status.

i am so, so, so tired.

vs2• 4 years ago

I wont click on any substack link!

lostsock• 4 years ago

I just click the "Let me read it first" button and the modal goes away.

b1zguy2• 4 years ago

What's wrong with Substack? I don't know much about it!

dchuk3• 4 years ago

There’s a “let me read it first” on every sub stack modal pop up to subscribe, you don’t have to pay

jbay808• 4 years ago

For what it's worth, it seems authors can disable that popup on their own substack. I did, and it doesn't seem to have reduced subscription sign-ups, but even if it does, not annoying people is always a good principle.

It defaults to 'on' though, and maybe not everyone has explored their settings. It took a while for me to find it.

keepquestioning• 4 years ago

Something.substack. yeah, not going to click.

b1zguy2• 4 years ago

What's wrong with Substack? I don't know much about it.

flappyeagle2• 4 years ago

The example the author gave seems flawed. Why not geofence that optimization to Norway? Or to Norwegian google? It’s a micro optimization but the search engine is full of those and google has 100k employees

daydream• 4 years ago

Because “Their change didn’t make the search results better, and it unfairly promoted some sites over others.“

llampx• 4 years ago

So they stepped on the Google Ads team's toes.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 4 years ago

With regard to Microsoft vs Google planning, I wonder if a lot of that difference comes down to their rolling release of the web vs the previous boxed version releases.

I remember in the 1990’s a release of Windows or Office was a big deal. There would be a ton of press. The boxed version would be at all the computer stores (and even at stores like Walmart). There would be tons of reviews talking about if it was worth upgrading, etc. With all those things, you want your release to go off perfectly. You would like to avoid half-baked/buggy features, and also have enough features to wow the reviewers. A bad release would be a decent hit on revenue and market position.

Now compare that with web releases. You can slowly roll out features when they are ready. You can fairly easily A/B test then with a small percentage of queries to make sure everything works ok. Most people likely don’t even think about versions of Google web apps. In those circumstance me, allowing more freedom for people to work on new ideas with a minimum of overhead is likely a win.

fbdab1033• 4 years ago

It is difficult for me to ascribe any strategy to Microsoft when I suffer through Teams on a daily basis.

roncesvalles• 4 years ago

I've come to realize that the damage due to Teams to the Microsoft brand name is enormous and in no way recompensed by the market share that it captured during COVID.

TheCoelacanth• 4 years ago

Obviously some part of their strategy is working considering how much usage they get of such a poor product. Building a good product just doesn't seem to be part of the strategy.

jasmer2• 4 years ago

After trying Android on Samsung for the first time in a few years ... I feel it's a bit of a disaster. I could almost not find the 'settings' with the help of 5 other people. I was at a loss to know what I could delete and not. After 20 minutes of trying to delete an 'Amazon' app I realize that Samsung probably forced it to be pre-installed and not removable. Along with 10 other garbage Samsung and carrier icons. Paradoxically most of that does not even benefit Samsung.

This individual also had almost 10 terrible spyware apps installed without remembering that they had installed them.

Such poor design. Like an ugly, dirty esplanade off the main strip in some gambling resort. I'm awaiting the gambling and girls preloads.

I loathe so many of Apple's policies but I wonder if it's better to have a monopolistic overlord that is 'mostly benevolent' over the Android bad design and chaos.

The sad thing is a Trillion dollar company should have a better product.

I suggest Microsoft in many ways is not that that much better as can be seen with the abysmal degradation of Skype, and MS Teams which is a poor copy of Slack. This could be a function of the nature of those divisions, or of the company losing it's touch.

beaned• 4 years ago

Just get a Pixel instead, there's none of that. Android the OS is great.

shrimp_emoji• 4 years ago

Yep, Pixel's the best game in town until a usable Linux phone comes along.

(Pixels also get security updates the longest, last I checked.)

JadeNB2• 4 years ago

I loathe so many of Apple's policies but I wonder if it's better to have a monopolistic overlord that is 'mostly benevolent' over the Android bad design and chaos.

The problem is benevolent dictators don't stay benevolent. Or, to put it differently, things are great while you're on the same side as the dictator, but, once you get on their wrong side, things get bad suddenly, and it's hard to find allies since your erstwhile community is probably still on the right side of the dictator.

(I am not a software developer, much less an iOS developer, and have no experience with being on the wrong side of Apple—but I do have experience, as a long-time OS X user who now finds macOS becoming "iOS, but less important!", with what happens when the dictator controls your working environment but doesn't care about it any more.)

BLKNSLVR• 4 years ago

Google itself is an example.

scarface742• 4 years ago

You’re right. Apple is taking the Mac less seriously. It’s not like they just designed an entire line of processors just for the Mac and created laptops that are the fastest in the industry with three times the battery life.

helen___keller• 4 years ago

I suggest Microsoft in many ways is not that that much better

I accidentally opened Edge today and it had this awful sidebar with buttons like “Shopping” and “Games”

bryanlarsen• 4 years ago

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

- Voltaire

MikusR3• 4 years ago

After trying Android on Samsung for the first time in a few years ... I feel it's a bit of a disaster. I could almost not find the 'settings' with the help of 5 other people.

Is this some kind of AI generated comment? It's in the app list under settings, also in notification shade next to search button, and first result in search.

SkyPuncher2• 4 years ago

Some apps can only be disabled, but not deleted.

It's basically forced marketing.

m00x• 4 years ago

And Samsung lets you easily search for settings, just like IOS does. It's extremely easy to find them unless it's an odd feature with an ambiguous name.

jasmer2• 4 years ago

Five medical nurses in a 'good' Hospital could not find the setting.

So tell me where the 'joke' is?

(and frankly it doesn't matter what 'phone' background they have.)

The 'joke' are those (especially designers) that completely lack the self awareness to grasp their specific and narrow perspectives are not normative and therefore do not necessarily represent a 'Good UI'.

In particular, UI elements that change over time, with every prouct iteration, putting new feature in new locations. Etc..

After having to deal with that and struggling to remove several spyware apps - and unable to remove bloatware apps - it's clear that Android is a second class OS. And FYI it does not matter that Samsung gets it for free - it's Android.

It's the tip of the iceberg, and aside from side-loading and price, I don't see how this thing is in any way competitive with iPhone.

People defending 'Shop At Amazon' planted on their home screen have lost perspective.

chaosbolt• 4 years ago

How is that Google's problem? Android is open, so Samsung can modify it anyway they want, and they do put bloatware you can't delete there.

If you're going to compare with apple then at least use a pixel phone.

fbdab1033• 4 years ago

Like it or not, Samsung is the premium phone in the Android ecosystem. That is cheapens the experience with bloatware is a real blight on the ecosystem. Your options are either Pixel or Android One. Last I looked, few models are still utilizing the Android One program.

Recent, begrudging convert to iPhone, because Google refused to fix 911 calling.

scarface742• 4 years ago

There is nothing “open” about Android in a practical sense. Most of what makes “Android” Android outside of China is closed sourced Google Play Services and related apps and Google has requirements as far as when a manufacturer is allowed to use the closed proprietary parts.

Mikeb853• 4 years ago

After trying Android on Samsung for the first time in a few years ... I feel it's a bit of a disaster. I could almost not find the 'settings' with the help of 5 other people.

Is this a joke? It's in the app drawer, it's called "Settings". Not even hidden in a folder, it's right there. And if you're that blind, the app drawer also has a search box... Settings also has an icon prominently placed in the notification tray. And the settings app itself also has search so you can search for whatever setting you need. You can also search "Settings" in the Google app/search bar widget, it brings up the app as well.

blondin3• 4 years ago

we need to stop supporting these bots. i said it one more time.

go ahead :)

pradn4• 4 years ago

It's hard to take this post seriously when basic facts are off.

To support this company strategy, Google makes it really, really easy for anyone to start up a new project. The culture of “20% time” gives people permission to work on ideas outside of their primary role. There’s only the lightest of reviews needed to launch a “1% experiment.”

No, it is not super easy to start a new project. I'm in Google Cloud and we're pretty focused on executing team priorities. I can suggest new work-streams and write arguments in their favor, sure. But I can't just randomly add a feature or go away to work on a new product for a while. Every public thing in Cloud, at least, is carefully reviewed with a large checklist covering privacy, security, accessibility, API style, integration with existing systems like metrics, legal, etc. The simplest cloud service can take an extra six months or a year to get past these blocks. These requirements also apply to features. What we get for this is quality and consistency between products/features.

And 20% time isn't really a thing any more. You can get permission from your manager to work on something else, perhaps. But more likely this sort of thing is more like 120%. It's not at all as lackadaisical as it's presented to be. The most I see around my team is people volunteering for large-scale clean-ups. But these are more slack-time projects like 5% projects. It's not totally gone however. I think the person who made Google Maps zoom out to a globe did it as 20% project, and I believe adding CitiBike support was similar as well.

We are also super careful about experiments. Every Google Search experiment has to go through a senior management review. In my team, every flag rollout is discussed and approved before rollout.

Insofar as these tidbits are presented as evidence for loose leadership, they don't make sense. The ship is fairly tight, at least in Cloud.

bitL2• 4 years ago

Google Cloud is not the real Google. Culture-wise, you are closer to Oracle.

sneak• 4 years ago

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

johnasmith• 4 years ago

I mean, I've worked in search, android, and c&c, and the above is pretty close to my experience in all three.

romwell4• 4 years ago

Google Cloud is not the real Google. Culture-wise, you are closer to Oracle.

Incorrect. Google's culture has shifted. Culture-wise, Google is closer to Oracle than what people think is Google.

20% hasn't been a thing in Google for a long time. Exists only on paper.

Source: I worked at Google when we all got the memo that all information access within the company is now on a need-to-know basis, and that accessing information that you don't need to know for your job is a fireable offense.

Default level of sharing technical documentaiton is fully private, so tech docs are not searchable in company search engine (read this again).

Good luck re-using the code without design docs. Also good luck starting a project if your team doesn't own the data.

Hot take: Google doesn't have a strategy, period. Neither copmany, nor product.

edmundsauto• 4 years ago

Wow, hot take. Care to qualify why your perspective is more relevant than an actual Googler?

doktorhladnjak• 4 years ago

Whatever Google is, is the “real” Google

pradn4• 4 years ago

It's a substantial part of the company. There are as many employees in Google Cloud as there were in all of Google a few years ago.

verdagon• 4 years ago

Even when I was there a couple years ago, 20% time was already basically dead. They had to be approved by those above one's direct managers, needed compelling justification, and getting the go-ahead was pretty rare. This was even for things not in the main products. In other words, 20% projects are the opposite of what they started out as.

I also saw Google shutting down or downsizing a lot of small projects that weren't related to the core business (ads, search, cloud), though that might vary per PA so my read might be off.

birken2• 4 years ago

When I worked at Google in 2007, it was a known fact among employees that 20% was not a real thing. It was 120% time even then. You could in theory work on your own thing, but you basically had to do it on your own time.

And I did actually do the 120% time thing for a few months because there was a specific project I really wanted to do, and it would have been nice fit for Google, but my attempts to stir up interest within the company and get any sort of resources were basically dead ends. One of the reasons I eventually left to join a startup.

justinwp• 4 years ago

Same experience in two non-cloud orgs over the last 4 years.

andreygrehov• 4 years ago

Out of curiosity, what's your level and position at Google?

etchalon• 4 years ago

It seems like the author's experience at Google and Microsoft was a fairly long time ago. I'm sure a lot has changed.

mji2• 4 years ago

Having worked at both, 20% time is the only part of the article that is somewhat off-base.

In particular the following string of paragraphs match exactly what I’ve seen at both:

With all that up-front planning, the actual product decisions and working code were reviewed much less. Only the other PMs on my team reviewed my specs, and only me and the tester (also new grads usually) reviewed the working changes before they were added to the branch. For what it’s worth, I think this is why the quality of the details on Microsoft products is often lacking—a random PM made a decision and no one bothered to push back on it.
Contrast that with Google.
At Google, I never saw a strategy document. I went to every Friday all-hands, but I didn’t hear the leaders talk about a broad vision of what we needed to build. The people above me didn’t set direction and ask me to follow it.
Instead, leaders encouraged teams to generate their own ideas. The founders had ideas of their top priorities and worked with the relevant teams on those, but the list of the top company OKRs was a subset of all the OKRs, not a roll-up. Some people were not working on anything the company cared about strategically!

pradn4• 4 years ago

Again, I can only speak for Cloud. I find product changes are reviewed by a dozen people at least and take months to finalize. It can be slow, but usually we're sure why we're making the decisions, and where risks lie. A large weight is given to customers asking for features, so they're in the loop.

It's absurd that there's no Google strategy documents. There's company-wide and division-wide OKRs that get major events to publicize them, with large Q&As and all. It's easy to learn what the priorities are and why. But, usually you just pay attention to what your local group is working on. At a smaller level, every feature has a business rationale backed by customers requesting them or hard dollar figures.

I really don't know what's going on here. Do people think Google runs the same way as it did in its early years? It's a fairly mature company with a good track record of revenue growth, especially for such a massive company. These things don't happen haphazardly.

bruce5113• 4 years ago

> its hard to take this post seriously when basic facts are off.

For context I don't work and have never worked at Google. So I can't speak to whether 20% time is a thing or not, or whether managers manage or not.

The article does however reinforce a fact which is obvious to pretty much everyone outside Google - which is that Google has a perception problem - in my perception "everything gets cancelled" [everything except the super successful money machines that are Search and YouTube. Gmail has enough benefit to search, maps as well, but outside that what has survived?

GCP suffers from this perception (and the perception of lack of phone support.) given the lackluster performance of GCP its hard to be _sure_ it'll survive and that's a problem.

Annecdotally i'll never use GCP - you can thank Reader et al for that. To be fair I also would never use it because AWS and Azure have better support.

I understand why you want to correct the record, and that's fair enough, but the details in the article are irrelevant. Regardless of the "how", the "what" remains the same,which is that I have zero trust in Google to act in _my_ best interest, and that means never using them for anything important.

pradn4• 4 years ago

Google suffers from a perception problem for consumer-oriented products, agreed. I don't think anyone faults Google for haphazardly closing down enterprise products. The enterprise world runs differently - deprecations have long timelines, are well-telegraphed ahead of time, and sudden deprecations may come with contractual penalties. Which Cloud products are analogous to Google Reader?

Stadia, I think, is the biggest example of a Google product failing bc of this perception. But it had other, big problems as well.

techdragon• 4 years ago

Google would have to be more than 25% cheaper than Azure or AWS, and I don't mean "at least", I mean more than, as in closer to 33% or ideally 50% cheaper... before I would even contemplate them over the competition.

To be fair I also would never use it because AWS and Azure have better support.

This is the salted earth that GCP have to till... Google sucks miserably at customer support and anyone that has interacted with them knows it, from the millions of android users who would flinch at the mere sight of a terminal prompt to the developers that have wrestled with GRPC services and who keep giving their code a chance. We all go through life see the facets glinting in the sunlight, weird error messages, a bad two factor interaction, terrible search results, business destroying story #12 this month from GCP + <some other service at google> ... little reminders of "oh yeah thats just Google, sucking as usual" and continue to remember how bad they are at customer support.

The very earth itself has been salted with the tears of the millions who have had sad interactions with Google...

And this is the ground GCP is trying to grow a business in...

Good luck to them.

They need it.

somrand0• 4 years ago

so google still does that 20% thing? I thought that went away when google's unofficial company motto stopped being "do no evil"... in the time before Schmidt CEO.

Arainach2• 4 years ago

[Bias disclaimer: I have worked at both Microsoft and Google]

Google Cloud is different from Google. Cloud is where Google is learning the hard way that being Googley doesn't work when your customers are businesses. This whole article struck a deep chord from me - in fact, I've given the exact same answer to countless interview candidates when asked about companies I've worked at that Google gives ICs far more leeway to decide what they build compared to other companies who are very top-down.

Google culture, in my personal opinion, struggles with enterprise sales and the customer support, long-term stability, and overall business plans it takes to attract enterprise users, convince them to use your product, and convince them that you're serious about supporting the things they care about. This is quite obvious when you compare them to a Microsoft or an Oracle. Cloud is the first major business group that has had to come to terms with this, and they've taken several steps to address this. Some people have complained that the culture in Google cloud isn't the same as in Google at large and that it feels more like certain other companies, but what they miss is that this is absolutely essential, and if you tried to run a cloud compute product with the traditional Google model it would (in my opinion) fail miserably.

choppaface• 4 years ago

"being Googley doesn't work when your customers are businesses"

Cannot upvote hard enough. I have had to work with several Google PMs and SWEs on large contracts for different companies. They all talk down to you, think you're confused, and if you ask for a feature to reduce costs it's always: "that'll take 6 months, but here's the solution we like and you should try it and it's really cheap (and no we definitely don't want to lock you in of course)".

Being Googley is a lot about Googlers satisfying their own curiosities and performing well against their own metrics that they define. Sometimes that's correlated with what the customers actually need and want. Other times, it's really not, and as a customer you should fire your Googler. Don't worry they'll still find a way to keep themselves entertained.

jxramos• 4 years ago

That’s an interesting angle, how ones B2B dedication and competencies align with business customers who have a lot on the line vs flippant and irritated end consumers playing with free products. The stakes are definitely not equal there.

VirusNewbie• 4 years ago

I recently did interview loops at both Azure and GCP and the difference between the people were astounding.

While Google takes way too long to make a hiring decision, all of the people I talked to seemed intelligent and very thoughtful. I did a Microsoft 'hiring event' and holy hell it was a clusterfuck. I got ghosted by one manager, another was extremely disinterested and seemed like they were interviewing me to check a box.

Another asked an algorithmic coding question they themselves did not understand, I had to very politely argue with them, I ended up having to show them step by step how my solution was correct (much to their surprised amazement). The system design interview was done by someone who clearly doesn't understand system design.

I cannot emphasize enough how much their engineering leads came across like a joke compared to other companies. Maybe I just got really unlucky and there are good people who work there, but I'm a bit frightened by what I saw.

devjab• 4 years ago

Cloud is where Google is learning the hard way that being Googley doesn't work when your customers are businesses.

I can't speak for Google, or about what Googley is. But I have worked a decade in the Danish public sector, and now for around a year in European Green Energy, and I think there is just a massive difference between Google and Amazon in this regard.

Denmark is one of the most digitized countries in the world, and I was there for the transition from self-hosted iron in the basement, to renting space for your iron in dedicated server farms, to going full Azure. Azure was/is the logical way to go for a lot of European Enterprise organisations because it hooks so nicely into the Microsoft infrastructure you undoubtedly already have. There is no real alternative to Microsoft Office in Denmark, Google Docs could (maybe should) have been, but I'll get to that later, and once you're buying the Office365 package as well as Windows licenses, you're going to have massive savings by going with Azure rather than AWS. This is partly because we don't buy licenses directly from Microsoft, but through partners and because Microsoft has some of the best B2B support in the world. I know Microsoft gets a lot of hate here on HN, and maybe rightly so, but it's by far the best tech company I've ever dealt with from a non-tech enterprise perspective. When team was rolled out, it was turned on for users automatically, which is a big no-no in Enterprise IT, but within an hour of it happening Microsoft had given us a custom hack to turn it off in our setup. Not long after, probably because the entire world of Enterprise was on the phone with Microsoft, it was off by default. But compare that sort of support level to Google, where you can talk with an automated form... Google will lose so hard that it's not even considered an option.

Amazon and Google were interesting in this regard. Because the where Google didn't really do anything, Amazon quickly realized that they couldn't sell AWS to Enterprise organisations if they didn't compete with Microsoft on support. Because that's sort of what you sell to the IT department in Enterprise Organisations. One thing is the product, the other thing is the ability for the CTO to tell the organisation that they are on the phone with Microsoft/Amazon headquarters and getting hourly updates when something goes wrong. That's of massive value, and Google doesn't do this. Amazon similarly didn't comply with the GDPR as fast as Microsoft. At first it seemed like Amazon didn't really think it mattered to them, and that we would still pick their cloud products, but it didn't last very long, and within a year, they became more compliant than Microsoft. I remember it well, because we had a few things in AWS at the time, and we needed to help filling out some "red-tape" and Amazons reply was basically "kindly fuck off", and then out of the blue 3 months later, we suddenly had a Danish AWS representative and free legal counseling from one of our major EU focused lawfirms contact us to help us get it done right.

Google didn't do anything like that. They sort of try in Education, but we're currently well into a big chromebook + Google Education and school start "scandal" of sorts here in Denmark. Because one of our cities failed to pass the national GDPR requirements and were basically forbidden from using Google Education at the start of the school year back in july (the school year starts in august). This didn't exactly happen, because it turned out they couldn't start the school year and that parents care more about education than whether or not Google snoop on the schoolwork or not. It was also sort of silly because it was just one municipality out of 98 that were forbidden from using Google Education and chromebooks and there are a lot of other municipalities that also use it. Anyway, that is sort of unrelated to what I want to use the example for, because the interesting part to me is how Google hasn't really solved the issue.

Google Education and Chromebooks are a massive business by Danish standards. The Public Sector is the biggest spender on IT, and if you can secure just half of the schools in the country for Google Education, that's one of the biggest opportunities for IT sales you can get here in Denmark. And Google hasn't bothered solved this issue? I think the very likely outcome is that all the schools are going to switch to Microsoft and Office365 and run Linux on their Chromebooks in the coming years because of this. I think this because Google isn't the first company to fumble the ball on Education. Apple did it first, and where almost every school used Apple products a decade ago, now they use none. Apple's problems weren't GDPR problems, the GDPR didn't exist back then but we did have national privacy laws and they were in perfect compliance with those. Apples issue was instead that their products didn't integrate into Enterprise IT policies, and since they didn't want to offer support or change ways, they were slowly rolled out and replaced by companies that did.

I think this may have been fine for Apple. They don't seem to be big on B2B sales, but for Google it's just so strange.

ignoramous• 4 years ago

...if you tried to run a cloud compute product with the traditional Google model it would (in my opinion) fail miserably.

Google does sell G Workspace to enterprises? YouTube also seems to do well with enterprise-y stuff involving the Movie and Music industry, as another example.

GCP is all-enterprise zero-consumer, sure. But: GCP's got execs from SAP and Oracle at helm, and I believe, it is a problem that, over the shorter-term, they can throw money at (by hiring execs from Dell / Oracle / Cisco / HP / IBM / Qualcomm, as at that scale of spend, enterprise sales is mostly a game of who knows who).

Spooky23• 4 years ago

They’ve improved alot in the last 4-5 years.

Back the day Google salesman would drop in like and say “hey, we’re from Google, perhaps you’ve heard of us”. Seemed like their primary gig was apologizing for the death of the Google Search Appliance. They weren’t very empowered - on one project that I worked on, the sales-dude had so little juice that the SE put stuff on his credit card to do a demo.

Now, they seem to have a solid enterprise sales team. The only weak point is they rely a lot on the channel partners. Usually that’s fine, but I prefer one throat to choke.

jedc• 4 years ago

+1 to basic facts being off. The line that stuck out to me was:

"Some APMs had convinced company leadership that we needed a Facebook competitor."

Ummmm... no. This was very much a top-down strategy choice from Larry on down. There's no way the product goals COMPANY-WIDE is driven by anything but an executive edict.

kouohhashi• 4 years ago

Let employees to start new projects and shut it down later if it does not seem to be profitable. This strategy just make sense. But I just want google to make the works open sourced when abandoned. I hope google opensource Duplex for web...

romwell4• 4 years ago

Let employees to start new projects and shut it down later if it does not seem to be profitable.

That's not the strategy though.

The strategy is "I'll get promotion for launching, not maintaining" for employees, and "we're still making a shit ton of money, so why bother" from the top brass.

nowherebeen• 4 years ago

No one gets a promotion from fixing bugs mentality.

bruce5113• 4 years ago

Strategy leads to winning the big picture. And Google is not doing that. They are the King's of advertising, but move outside that stream and it becomes "when" not "if" it'll get the chop.

This leads to a lack of trust, so things like GCP suffer. Regardless of the technical merits, or price, I can never use GCP because I don't trust Google. This is largely due to their willingness to kill things, coupled with a lack of phone support.

Incidentally lots of the things shut down were successful, and profitable, by most company standards. Just not by google-scale standards.

rippercushions• 4 years ago

By and large Google can't open source anything internal even if they wanted to, because it's so closely tied into Google's own ecosystem (Borg etc) that it's useless outside it.

hn_throwaway_992• 4 years ago

While I feel like this article is a good assessment of Google's culture, I think it's a bit weird that it ignores the prime reason Google shuts down so many products: if it ain't tied to search/ads, it's hard to argue it will make any significant difference in Google's revenue.

That is, Ad Words and their other search/ad products are so phenomenally successful, basically any other product that is even slightly "niche" will be in the .00...001% impact on revenue. That's why if you look at Google's most successful products besides straight-up search (like GMail, Chrome, Android, YouTube, Maps, etc.) they are somehow tied to viewing more ads that Google serves up. So many of their other products, probably Stadia being the best most recent example, may have great technical execution, but they are just afterthoughts and would probably always be afterthoughts, revenue-wise, compared to Google's ad revenue.

I think the one area that is interesting is Google's enterprise products, particularly GCP and Google Workspace. As others have commented, Google has great technology in these areas but they often just don't understand how to work with businesses in a way that businesses expect.

soheil• 4 years ago

Google has a company strategy, rather than a product strategy, because its business is focused on providing a wide range of products and services, rather than a single product or product line. As a technology company, Google offers a diverse range of products and services, including search, advertising, cloud computing, hardware, software, and many others.

Because of this diversity, it is not feasible for Google to develop and implement a separate product strategy for each of its products and services. Instead, its company strategy is likely to focus on broader goals and objectives that apply across the entire business, such as growth, innovation, and customer satisfaction. This allows Google to manage its business in a more comprehensive and cohesive manner, and to ensure that its products and services are aligned with its overall goals and direction.

Mikeb853• 4 years ago

Google has cancelled a lot of things. And they do kind of suck at product strategy. The worst part is, they don't even realise when they have something great that's on the verge of gaining traction (Hangouts and Stadia IMO could have both become enormous with just a little more persistence and marketing).

That being said, on the technology front, they're still better than anyone else. Chromecast just works in a way nothing else does to get media onto your TV. Google is better at syncing things in the cloud (Google Drive/Docs) than anyone else. Office365 always has weird issues with synchronising documents in the cloud and is a huge pain in the ass whereas Docs works perfectly in real time. Google search is obviously the best. Google Maps is the best. Gmail. YouTube. Android is an amazing OS even if some OEMs add crap to it that detracts. Chrome is by far the best browser. And so on. I put up with Google's subpar product 'strategy' because it still makes life easier than dealing with MS or Apple's nonsense.

riwsky• 4 years ago

If by “technology”, you mean just “web services and browsers thereof”—then yes, sure.

shepherdjerred2• 4 years ago

Chrome is by far the best browser.

The reason this is true is simply because it's dominant, so every site builds for compatibility for Chrome. This is similar to how Windows is the best OS for gaming. Not because Windows has any technical advantage, but it's simply what developers build for. Firefox would "be the best browser" if it were dominant.

uejfiweun• 4 years ago

Eh, I think there are other benefits too: excellent extension ecosystem, simple and clean interface, default search engine is Google, generally fast and stable.

Mikeb853• 4 years ago

The reason this is true is simply because it's dominant

And I remember a time where it wasn't dominant, where people went out of their way to install it, even when their OS would shove other browsers in their face...

It didn't become dominant by being a bad browser...

Veliladon• 4 years ago

The biggest problem is their reputation precedes them. Nobody thought Stadia would last so nobody joined the ecosystem. To be fair it was a ridiculous ecosystem where you couldn't port in any of the games one already owned but how many people took one look at it and said "why do I want to buy games on a service that'll probably be dead in 18 months?"

stevage2• 4 years ago

Gmail is not the best anymore. It barely seems to be worked on. Google Search is constantly the subject of complaints about terrible quality these days.

Chromecast is pretty great, but it's literally not possible to build a competitor.

askvictor• 4 years ago

Why is it not possible to build a competitor to Chromecast? Sure, you'd need to manufacture and sell a hardware dongle*, but that's not impossible. On the screencasting front, it's possible to screen-grab from Android and send that so you could mimic built-in functionality (not sure about iOS, but if Chromecast can do it then other apps can do it). Casting from media apps would require tie-ins with media companies, which again is tricky, but they're generally a bit pissed with Google so would likely welcome a competitor to the space. You'd have no chance of getting Youtube on board, but then you've got a decent case for anti-competitive behaviour, which EU and US systems are circling Google for anyway.

I'm not saying it would be easy, but it's certainly not impossible, with the right business model and business and political environment.

* It might be possible as a smart-TV app, though smart TVs tend to suck which is why Chromecast still sells units

chaostheory• 4 years ago

A lot of other companies cancel things, but until Stadia was killed Google did cancelations that would shock and anger consumers. Why?

1. They don’t tell people that it’s an experiment like Amazon.

2. The experiments feel short. This makes people anxious and hesitant about buying into a Google experiment

3. For paid products, they don’t offer refunds like Amazon. This makes people feel annoyed.

4. In some cases like with Nest Secure, Google had a fire sale BEFORE they made a cancellation announcement. This makes people angry.

The end result is that consumers now feel that it is a risk to buy products from Google. It’s great that Google is finally acknowledging this problem with the Stadia cancellation. Many people were pleasantly surprised that they were getting refunds on the hardware, though I’m sure anyone who bought a game outright instead of just subscribing isn’t too happy right now

Going on a tangent, Chromecast is one of the worse streamer boxes because for whatever strange reason, Google does not realize that multiple people will use the same streaming box and each of these people will want personalized recommendations. Does it have an “add another account” feature? Sure, but unlike every other streaming box it doesn’t just work. You have to make multiple attempts just to add another Google account.

jsnell• 4 years ago

Many people were pleasantly surprised that they were getting refunds on the hardware, though I’m sure anyone who bought a game outright instead of just subscribing isn’t too happy right now

I believe they refunded software purchases and in-app purchases too. The only thing that didn't get refunded is Stadia Pro.

hackernewds• 4 years ago

I absolutely love Google Photos. Hope they keep it alive

Gareth3214• 4 years ago

I love the service but it has a fatal flaw (by design): no ability to synchronise my photos to my computer. Given the horror stories of Google accounts being locked for any and no reason at all, with no recourse, I've become extremely distrustful of cloud storage. I use it only with regular or synchronised backup. Google used to offer the ability to synchronise pictures to one's PC, but they removed that functionality. Presumably because more friction in this area keeps customers stickier. They're less likely to leave.

The only option is a full download of all pictures, and they do their damnedest to ensure it's uncomfortable. Albums aren't properly labelled and linked. Labels are a mess. Picture naming is broken. Exif data randomly stripped or altered. Duplicates galore. This process ensures that, even if one is diligent and ensures they regularly download the entire database, they'll end up with a completely unmanageable picture library with dozens of duplicates. And most people aren't that studious.

osigurdson2• 4 years ago

> I loved it as much as I love Microsoft Excel

I've never hear of anyone who loves Microsoft Excel. It isn't that it is a bad product (it is of course very good at what it does). It's just that spreadsheets are no fun.

stevage2• 4 years ago

I know lots of people who love spreadsheets. Generally they prefer Google Sheets though.

osigurdson2• 4 years ago

In what problem domains are they fun?

giancarlostoro• 4 years ago

This headline made me think of Google as one of those money laundering apparatuses you watch mob / cartel movies about briefly, they overspend on “projects” and make it just functional enough to look legit. Course if I were a true evil money launderer I almost want to say Amazon as a “shipping company” of sorts fits the bill too.

tzury• 4 years ago

Not a single word about Google Cloud Platform?

Google has a company strategy, not a product strategy

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