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Great question Michael
(jlai.lu)
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this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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My understanding is that you didn't see your career advance in Google if you maintained an existing product, only if you launched new ones. So, there is an internal bias in development teams to create new products while not keeping them around.
In some cases, this would encourage Google developers to relaunch products rather than improve existing products.
All those closings and new launches also helps with reducing that pesky user base, get burnt a few times by Google and Microsoft looks much better.
Google is not an endpoint if you wanna be a money-laden tech bro. To get real cash you gotta create a startup and grift some money out of VCs. To do that, it helps if you "innovated something totally new" at someplace with name recognition like Google.
Everything except search and ads are simply practice grifts before the real grift. You cannot rely on any Google product to last for any length of time, even properties Google purchases will lose reliability as they fall into disrepair and neglect, see Nest.
I used to love Google everything, I was on the wave beta. I was one of the first with a cr-48. It is sad for those of us that want to contribute to something big, cool, and impactful, watch for fuschia to implode next, I think it already started when they "had" to layoff "over hires."
One or two person teams don't put a man on the moon. It takes a lot of really smart people working on very small specific things together to make world changing stuff happen, the culture of Big Tech is not conducive to "real" work anymore. It's big grifts run by little grifters.
The moment Google did the alphabet thing in order to preempt ftc breakups, it was over.
I degoogled in 2017 (I run my own Synology cloud now with off-site backup to AWS glacier) and while it wasn't cheap, it was absolutely the best decision.
I'm working on moving to local control as much as possible for my smart home stuff. Switched to zwave for my thermostat from nest, excellent move, I don't lose connection (and automations) randomly anymore.
Also ripping all my optical media for jellyfin to avoid relying on these assholes deleting stuff from their streaming catalogs for tax breaks.
It's not just google, it's all of these companies.
It isn't cheap, but it is very rewarding. Twice in the past couple of months have I been able to give family members out so that they don't lose or have to start paying exorbitant amounts.
I met someone at a party who works at Google. She told me that too many decisions are made by engineers instead of like a higher up product person.
That's not contradicting what you said. Others have also said there's a lot more rewards for making something "new" rather than maintaining something.
It's a failure of Google management
Microsoft does too. Every time I log in to Azure (or Intune, or Defender, or Microsoft 365 or whatever they're all called these days) for work something has changed names. The documentation usually isn't updated to reflect the changes.
Microsoft has been trying to be more proactive about this: they changed all their documentation to say Entra ID instead of Azure Active Directory...before actually changing Azure AD to be called Entra ID...
They do, but I think Google is worse about it because it’s all random back and forth. Most of Microsoft’s recent changes have been renaming Office something or Azure something to Microsoft something. Often the product name itself hasn’t changed, or when it does it’s usually grouping a bunch of products with separate names under one product line with related functionality (Defender didn’t rename, but it also absorbed a lot, Purview and Entra were new absorbed a lot of other product names). Teams was Lync and then Skype for Businesses, but I actually think the simplifying and getting away from the Skype branding was a good move.
Microsoft also seems to have a more thought out process for new products in the first place and doesn’t have the reputation for abandoning things all the time.
There is six different Copilots...
Yes, Copilot is their AI product line. The naming is awkward because the word itself sounds kind of weird, but in general it would be AI for Use Case. That’s how most of their products are named now.
They have something like a dozen Purview products and eight or more Defender products. They’re all grouped by function for use case/environment.