What is a PM? I am getting insight into how google works because this sounds like a bunch of idiotic internal wars between acronym teams instead of focusing on making actual useful products.
Google's main product is user attention, which they sell to advertisers in the form of advertising.
Right now, they farm this attention mostly through web search, but hone it through data they collect with other venues, such as e.g. location and other data collected from Android handsets, the vast tentacles of Google Analytics, Google DNS, G-Suite (GMail, G Docs, G Drive, ...) etc.
AFAIK, G-Suite for business is actually making money (a round-off error compared to advertising, but still, a profitable business), and the various cloud storage and compute offering are actually making money that is not a round-off error (though still dwarfed by advertising).
Also, they DO need to make better advertising (and farm better attention), because they are in many ways a "natural monopoly" - they're the monopoly because they are the best in many ways, mostly not because of network effects or anti-competitive behaviour (which they have practiced at times, especially with YouTube, but not nearly to the extent practiced by any other player of this size).
I would take that (as anything else) with a grain of salt. They might not today, but things change and they might tomorrow (you know, they used to "not be evil" and they aren't anymore).
Furthermore, rest assured that everyone who can, which includes - but is not limited to - three letter agencies, is monitoring traffic into 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
On the other hand, most of the big ISPs have been caught not just handing your DNS requests over to advertisers along with the info they have on you, but actually sending back false dns replies because of advertiser money.
And if you compare to what happens on hotels' or other such dns servers.
I'm saying, perhaps things will change at Google, but they'd have to change a whole lot before they'd be as bad as the normal alternative.
Not to nitpick a nitpick, but both 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 support dns-over-tls. If you are concerned about the Powers That Be, you should switch over-- and good luck doing that with your ISPs DNS.
> they're the monopoly because they are the best in many ways, mostly not because of network effects or anti-competitive behaviour
Not true. Their advertising business is absolutely built on network effects. Advertisers advertise where there is user data (anything else is a money losing proposition), and lots of user data collection only happens in services that have the money to host (and curate) a large search index, which in turn needs a healthy and growing ad business.
It's a self-serving cycle that eventually leads to one player becoming the monopoly.
(Same deal with social networks, though less pronounced.)
What you are describing is called "compounding" in Economics, but that's not a network effect. You might want to read [0]
Microsoft has the money to to host and curate a large search index, funded by their other businesses. And after more than a decade, they've gotten almost nowhere -- everyone I know who tried Bing (or DDG) goes back to Google for quality.
Whereas e.g. Facebook and WhatsApp do have a network effect - you have no use for them unless your friends use them too, so a new contender - no matter how well funded e.g. Google+ - is not useful until critical mass is achieved; and critical mass is not achieved until it is useful.
Google barely sells phones. They might have done with Nexus but they sell as many Pixels in a year as Apple do in 3 days. I know no-one with a Nest. They're still very much an ad company.
Weird, because I pay them monthly for google play music, and for google apps, and for youtube red, and for youtube TV.
I also have several android devices, and look forward to paying them every time I get into a waymo.
Google has LOTS of products. The "you aren't the customer you're the product!" redditism is just wrong. It's something that sounds really insightful if you don't know anything about the company, or are trying to stir up drama.
Aren’t most Google services there to capture eyeballs for the advertisers to service? That’s Google Search (sponsored results), YouTube, and—in some sense—Chrome.
PM is a super heavily overloaded term that you'll run across in pretty much any company larger than small, definitely not specific to Google (disclaimer: I work at Google and don't speak for the company, but I'm brand new so my conception of the categories comes from what I've seen elsewhere). Engineers tend to raise an eyebrow at the entire job category because they're thinking of bad experiences with one particular flavor of PM (and often a particularly poor specimen at that), but that can be unfair, a lot of what they do is absolutely critical to business.
The acronym simply means either product manager, project manager, or program manager, but the responsibilities can be any/all of the following, and probably more, depending on the company:
- Full product owner, "the buck stops here" person. Many different possible titles here other than PM (usually "project manager" if that's the title), like general manager (GM), different flavors of producer, product owner (PO), VP of X, etc.
- Feature designer/owner/manager (product manager): writing specs (junior), pitching specs (mid-level), setting and selling product vision (senior), driving strategy (staff/exec, though at that level all roles start to get blurry). Decent business school grad representation here, you have to be good at strategy, negotiation, communication, and Powerpoint; having good product ideas helps a lot, too, but not if you can't sell them. A persuasive PM of this type is a force to be reckoned with and will get a lot of executive attention, which can be very good or very bad depending on whether the strategy they're into pans out or not. This is probably the type of PM the parent was talking about "armies of".
- Development director (project manager or program manager): a whip-cracker at worst or an impenetrable shitshield at best, they manage the practicalities of running a project, like project scoping, meeting and managing hard/soft deadlines, handling support, cross-team communications, processes, compliance, etc., often stepping in as an all-purpose guard against randomization so that others can focus on producing the product. Many PMs of this type ended up being the go-to folks for GDPR compliance over the past couple years, so it's not just internal process stuff that they deal with.
- Task checker: can blend into to the development director mentioned above, but at some companies this sort of PM will mainly focus on tracking tasks that are in-progress, getting estimates, watching velocity, and sending reports up the chain. Some devs find this role pointless and annoying, but it really depends on how good they are - if they're solid, they'll find a lot of ways to improve things instead of just tracking them.
- Scrum Master (project manager): Big-S Scrum is falling out of favor so it's not as fashionable to have this title anymore, but within some processes a similar role still exists as a type of project manager. In a nutshell, Scrum is a simple yet effective "People Over Process" process that consists of a bi-weekly no-laptops-allowed retrospective meeting where you get the team together to have a free-ranging discussion where everyone feels heard, so that you can all decide together whether the team should estimate engineering tasks in terms of hours or hats. You need a trained and certified Master because otherwise people new to Scrum might not know to pick hats. A more seasoned Scrum Master will also schedule a quarterly retrospective-retrospective where the team discusses a strategy for what guidelines to put in place for the next retrospective so that the team can decide on hats faster and leave more time for the less settled question about whether or not the Fibonacci sequence is the right way to count hats or if a size-based approach will make people feel better supported in their work.
- Monetization designer (product manager): mainly at game companies, PM is often a super different role, probably best described as the profitability-focused counterpart to a game designer. They focus on setting prices, managing game economies, speccing and evaluating A/B tests, inventing loot boxes, etc. Ideally PM and designer would be one and the same, and the game design would be holistic with the monetization, with a designer that has serious Excel/analytics chops and deep inspiration and sensitivity about gameplay, but that's a more rare combination than you'd think, so a lot of companies split them out.
I'm probably missing some other ways this acronym is overloaded, but I think this covers most of it.
> You need a trained and certified Master because otherwise people new to Scrum might not know to pick hats
You certainly don't need a certified scrum master. Ideally, the scrum master should be somebody who is already in the team. A scrum master who does just that is really a project manager, and having a project manager is, IMHO, antithetical to doing scrum.
According to scrum, the scrum master is not the product owner and not a member of the dev team, but rather an objective person who does just the scrum master duties, e.g. facilitating when needed, e.g. making sure people are following scrum instead of getting distracted, not stalled by roadblocks, not taking marching orders from more than one product owner, etc. In scrum, the dev team organizes its time after priorities are set. Scrum does not want a scrum master to be a project manager - if you’ve seen that they’re just mixing unnecessary stuff into scrum and scrum is getting a bad rap for that. I don’t see a scrum master as being a full-time job unless they’re working with multiple teams, so it could easily be anyone knowledgeable outside the team who will objectively play the role.
In my experience, and from what I remember from my own training, the scrum master can very well be part of the team. Having somebody external, objective, well trained, and available exactly when the team needs him looks very good... but pretty difficult to do in practice.
It can be Product Manager too. Product Manager has more of a focus on customer/marketing, whereas Project Manager oversees the technical teams implementing Product Manager's ideas.
A Product Manager doesn't need to have a technical background, but a Project Manager should.
