I would bet that the reason for the drop in quality is the focus on delivering features in order to secure promotions and ongoing positive performance reviews.
Yep. A lot of software companies are suffering from this short-term-ism that results in incentive structures that value things that move the stock price rather than make for a strong long term company.
It may eventually blow up in faces, but a lot of the people making money on it today won't be around to see it.
Indeed. It's a Tragedy of the Commons type of issue with the way most corps are run nowadays. When you're just starting out it's understandable to be very short-term focused as next year doesn't really matter much if you go belly up next week. But once companies have some establishment, it's insane to me how little thought goes into long-term planning. That is, until you realize the incentive structure they've built essentially penalizes executives/management for sacrificing short-term opps for long-term health. For example, but slicing R&D to the bare minimum (and often below that level) and driving revenue high up and to the right by pumping up sales/marketing efforts, you can look like a business genius, and just as it starts to really hurt the company you're moving on to the next gig, and often with an exit bonus of some kind.
Apple seems like the kind of company that would greatly benefit from having someone opinionated at the helm to keep the different teams oriented towards a unified vision and to intervene when a team produces something crappy
I mean, it's not always like that, at Google it always depended on the business unit.
To be honest, I think it's sort of simplistic to try to characterize a 185k person company and its culture with this sort of lack of nuance, whether it's Google, Apple, or anywhere else.
I got promoted 7 times (from SWE 3 all the way to VP of Engineering, so I ended up in the top 0.01% or something crazy by level) during my time there, and pretty much only made things better, did migrations, etc.
I did build some new stuff, but I don't believe they were ever a meaningful part of a promo packet. All my promo packets were about fixing things or making existing things better, and the impact of doing so on developer productivity, efficiency, etc.
> and pretty much only made things better, did migrations, etc.
Maybe you are right.
From the outside however, the situation looks very different:
- reader? destroyed
- Google+? Forced upon us and then destroyed as soon as communities started to form.
- Search? Hasn't been working correctly since around the time Google+ launched. At some point it became so bad I used DDG and Bing out if spite. The difference was that small.
(and before anyone says "it is impossible to create or run a working search engine in 2025": Marginalia and Kagi both work very much better than Google these days, although Marginalia admittedly only in certain niches.)
Sure, but they've also had tons of products that have run for decades.
After 18 years of living, i'll give you the best view I got:
While I do think Google kills products it shouldn't, my view there tends more towards when things are killed that cost basically nothing to support (IE have 1-2 people working on them, have not large prod costs, and not significant privacy/etc issues over time that require serious engineering rewrites/cost), have lots of happy users, don't meaningfully conflict with some other product strategy, and don't need lots of new features.
When those are killed, I think it's dumb.
Reader falls into this category.
Picasa would not.
lots of things on killedbygoogle do not - i think they were fine to kill, whether the process by which they were killed was a good one or not.
Google+ - eh, there's a lot to hate there but it was also Google experimenting with a more top-down approach to product building. I tend to be a fan of cultural and process experimentation - you have to be able to adapt your culture and processes as a company grows, or you will end up in a really bad place. You will never get this right 100% of the time, and it is worth doing it on important things sometimes, so that the results actually matter.
In this case, G+ also got caught up in the existential crises of the day (social) in a way that was unhelpful overall, and had leadership (Vic) that I think were just not good. He had good folks working for him (Bradley, et al) but I think it would have gone a lot better with someone else in his seat.
I say this as someone who was working on a small product at the time that was slated to become the backend/etc for youtube comments, and got crushed by G+-in-youtube mandates. The Youtube folks were wonderful - happy to figure out what the best thing was, decided to ditch their own thing for ours even though we were a little team (3 people) in a different org, and they were a big team who had spent a bunch of work on comments. They didn't like the top-down G+ mandate anymore than we did. In the end, it wasn't the fact that there was a top-down mandate that was bad. It's that it was not a well thought out strategic mandate.
I do also think Google often doesn't know how to start small and grow a user base over time.
But the rest, i think there is tons of hyperbole around. I think it was fine to kill Picasa - just because some percent doesn't like the replacement doesn't mean it wasn't okay to kill. Part of development and product life cycles is that you are not going to get it right all the time for all people. That's normal.
In the end, they've created products lots of people loved, and have enough users of roughly any product that you can't kill anything without have a large group of unhappy people. The answer to that is not to avoid killing anything. At most, it's "be thoughtful in how you support its death". Sometimes Google learned from its mistakes here, and sometimes it didn't. I had a hand in a number of divestitures and such because of my background and sometimes weird roles, and tried to make sure we did the right thing when I could - previous mistakes were helpful in pushing things for the better.
For example:
Sketchup was divested rather than killed, which went really well.
Niantic was also spun off rather than killed, and I think that turned out really well as well.
Picasa could have had the same promising future as Sketchup.
For Google+ I cannot say, but what I know is that even if the launch, the initial iterations and the leadership was bad, destroying the thing just as people starting to settle in might make sense in a short sighted way but it destroyed any chance google had to be trusted in the next decade. Just watch how people openly discussed here and elsewhere from time to time if GCP will continue to exist.
It also probably destroyed any chance google had to capture a significant chunk of social media and as time passes I think this is a good thing.
Same goes for search. People have complained for years, but the quality keeps declining. And I am starting to think this is a great thing since we now see more promising search engines that wouldn't have had a chance against 2012 Google Search.
"Picasa could have had the same promising future as Sketchup."
Depends what you mean. if you mean should have been spun out - it was a day and age that Google was still too young and immature to do that sort of thing, so yeah, no idea what would have happened.
If you mean it would have won or stayed viable - I dunno. Personally - i doubt it. Desktop apps were dying, and things like photo features were being moved into the basic OS distribution. Maybe it would have survived long enough to be killed by Apple Photos, or some halfway-lightroom product Adobe would have launched if Picasa stayed popular, but I doubt it - i think it would have died before then. But the vast majority of photos aren't on desktop anymore, and it's hard to see how picasa would have survived, even with picasa web.
But right or wrong, I also think killing it was within the range of reasonable product decisions to make.
As for G+, I don't actually disagree with that view. Google, like lots of tech companies, had (and still has, though they are better than they used to be!) a lot of trouble understanding the social aspects of products and trust. They want things to win becuase they are technically good, or because they are cool, or ...
Even when Larry spent time pushing on trying to improve user trust, by being careful about what and how things were shut down, it was pretty clear they overall didn't get how humans work.
The bad news, though, is i think this is pretty common in tech companies - while some do in fact get it, i think they are pretty few and far between :(
