Google engineer quits; claims Google "can no longer innovate"

[Aurongel]

Cuss out your employer, that'll be a solid career move down the road.

 

[zou]

well he's right, other than search they never had any successful products that weren't bought or pushed by their dominant market position (mail, maps, chrome). hell, even their major (and only) revenue stream has either been stolen (adwords) or aquired (adsense).

Google Voice (Grand Central)
Mobile Ads (AdMob)
Display Advertising (DoubleClick)
Adwords (stolen from Overture, their original and shitty model was to sell keywords for a flat fee )
Adsense (Applied Semantics)
Google Analytics (Urchin)
reCAPTCHA (Carnegie Mellon)
Android
YouTube
Blogger
Waze

In fact, even in areas they should have been leading such as cloud computing, they lost to Microsoft and are stuck in 3rd place.

It's hilarious really.

 

[Deleted member 2595]

This is an amazing article. Hammering home a 'we practically live in a cyberpunk future' vibe for me.

Imagine reading something like this from the future say 20 years ago - heck, even 10. It would be like "what".

Haven't reached the end yet - interested to see why exactly Grab is so special.

 

[Famicom]

Had no idea what Grab was until it hit me; somebody in India had been using my email address for Grab purchases and I was getting like 20 of those receipts a day for weeks.

 

[gozu]

I want to take a moment to just enjoy Steve Yegge's beautiful turn of phrase:

"But regardless of how I envisioned the Grim Reaper catching up with me, I always assumed he'd be hauling me in surrounded by colorful furniture and slightly entitled geniuses."

He could have said "I always thought I'd die at Google" instead, but no. I could never have said it so prettily. I'm ok with writers like Ta Nehisi Coates wrecking me but an engineer? Damn you Steve!!!

Ok, back to reading.

 

[Doctor Shatner]

Damn, didn't think Steve Yegge would ever post something like that, kinda crazy

 

[spam musubi]

This guy's constant characterization of the entire SEA market as super homogeneous pretty borderline racist IMO. Also this comment killed me:

 

[Deleted member 2595]

This guy's constant characterization of the entire SEA market as super homogeneous pretty borderline racist IMO. Also this comment killed me:

Click to shrink...

Yeah that was great. Biggest stage? Not a bad case. Is it a huge battle? Absolutely. But "most important"? Lol.

 

[Lysistrata]

When many or most of these huge, corporate identities acquire enough economic clout to be classified as their own country, the need to push new boundaries and lead creative thinking, eventually ceases to be their main focus
To be fair they are all pragmatic about such things and good intentions never look as good as profits to shareholders.

 

[spam musubi]

He has a follow-up, btw:

https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/google-doesnt-necessarily-need-innovation-95cea96d0eeb

I found this bit uniquely relevant here:

Similarly, you may not remember, but Microsoft created the XBox as a response to the Playstation, which was looming as an existential threat to Microsoft's business. If every household had a Playstation, and it became their window into the online world, then the PC would be obsoleted, or so their thinking went at the time. It wasn't a guaranteed outcome, but it was dangerous enough to warrant a competitive response from Microsoft. They executed really well and achieved dominance for years, right up until that dumbass VP (what was his name?) ruined everything at E3 a couple years ago, by doing everything I accused Google of recently: Losing touch with their customers, being arrogant, and launching something nobody wanted. Now Microsoft is on the bottom again in that space, struggling to catch up.

Click to shrink...

This bit is typical "white dude goes to Asia once and comes back with life-changing revelations"

Some people have responded negatively to my post's tone, because we Westerners (especially in the tech industry) are pretty jaded. My post was a reflection of the experience I had last week in Jakarta, which is a world so different as to be almost something out of the movies. Unless you've been there yourself, it's hard to appreciate how big this disruptor is.

Click to shrink...

 

[gozu]

My take is that the dude is basically right, and you can nitpick his argument or roll your eyes at his enthusiasm for grab, but it really doesn't matter.

What he said didn't rely on special insider knowledge, we've all see Google's output decline. We were all here for Google + and them shutting down newsgroups and so on.

And he's also right about Bezos taking risks. We all knew that too.

Basically, this guy is just organizing a bunch of things we already knew, showing us the patterns, offering extremely reasonable analysis then going on a full on hard-on for Grab, trying to poach as many of his Googler coworkers. Fair enough. I'll allow it!

Both pieces were good reads.

 

[just_myles]

He made some salient points but I think it's going to get glossed over since it sounds somewhat hypocritical coming from someone joining, in his words, the Uber of Southeast Asia.

Click to shrink...

Seriously. At the end of the day....