Makes one wonder if you really need to pay CEOs astronomical comp packages to attract the "best talent".
- Gmail Inbox
- Directing company’s resources towards messaging apps. (Remember Allo, Duo. Exactly)
- Virtual assistants
- Now LLMs
I have no problem with using preferred pronouns or saying "chestfeeding" instead of "breastfeeding." I don't understand it, but if it's making you uncomfortable, I'm totally fine with changing that part of my vocabulary.
But "ask" and "learn" are verbs. You "ask questions" or "make requests" and you "learn lessons." You do not "have asks," you "have questions." And you sure as daisies don't "learn learnings."
It's sad that this is what I'm taking away from this discussion, but it's Saturday night and I'm posting a comment on HN instead of dating a hot European super-model, so I'm sort of used to sad.
>And you sure as daisies don't "learn learnings."
You might be shocked to learn that such expressions are extraordinarily common in say ancient Greek (which uses participles in a very similar way to English--they are related after all!) People "look a looking," an expression used to mean someone holds a particular countenance. If someone can teach teachings, why can't someone learn learnings? I don't think there is anything wrong with using intransative verbs in this way.
Most writings that feel fresh or novel have an active voice that asserts something. In journalism, you’re taught to write in an active voice. If you can’t assert someone did something, then you shouldn’t be saying anything at all.
In any case, I think this is why I like noir writing so much. It doesn’t fiddle faddle with getting something across. It either happens or it doesn’t.
I honestly don’t know. Search, Gmail, Maps, GCP, and Android is all before 2010.
There was a time when I could remember two uncommon words in the same reddit post from 5 years prior, and searching those would bring it up as result #1.
The scary thing is, I suspect that search is still their most recent successful product. Just that it's not meant to help any of us.
The same thing will happen with the internet and LLMs. The next 5 years will probably be the golden age of LLMs followed by a flood of copyright protectionism and regulation.
Sundar's "failures" must be considered relative to the risk - he has the power to destroy Google completely in a matter of weeks with a bold and headstrong call. There are idiots out there who would do that for whatever reason (obvious threat in Silicon Valley - maybe the search results don't promote enough Diversity, Equity and Inclusion when someone searches for "buy an [thing]"). Sundar being a known quantity who won't do anything bold is quite possibly worth $200 million.
Bud Light has been in the headlines for the wrong reasons - it happens. Mobs of angry consumers get triggered for the weirdest things.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxdqu/what_i...
Discussing the minutiae of decision making and compensation of individuals who's primary job is to keep that stale show running is not particularly interesting from the perspective of tech development and any positive impact on peoples lives. (BTW What is the last time Google surprised you positively?)
It may be interesting to discuss this though in the context of broader corporate governance and market structure / competition and incentives. Is that extra × 100 factor in compensation that accrues only to oversized entities really necessary to incentivise individuals to work in private for-profit enterprize?
I give it to you that if you had 10 mini-Googles competing and 10 mini-Sundars receiving 1/10 in compensation at least one of them would be worth the money.
Could Sundar be more ruthless? Yes; Does this and other articles have valid criticisms? 100%;
These articles going after Zuck, Sundar, etc are needed. But we do not see the other side.
Sundar can't execute because he doesn't know how to do programming and doesn't understand the details.
He would never pass an engineering interview at Google, or any other software company (especially not OpenAI).
Google often has 2 of same ideas competing internally, which might sound like it encourages a healthy competition but most of their competitions have failed. Gmail can use dozens of new features which would be useful but they launched Inbox instead, an app with a confusion interface and nothing more. Duo has great video compression but that's it. They never used that in Meet or Hangouts.
Seems like they have gold but would rather use bronze.
Whatever problems Google has, Sundar's technical background has nothing to do with it. Which either way with an engineering and science background and 20 years at the company is in itself more than decent.
it's the difference between technical, engineering leadership and bean-counters or MBAs.
It used to be that we expected the leaders of tech companies to be technical (old time HP or even Microsoft. At some point that transitioned into non-technical people running software companies and I agree that does not sit well with me either.
That said, Google is not a software company or a tech company. It's an advertising company.
Duo was two person video calls optimized for mobile phones, and allowing calling via phone number. Basically Facetime and Whatsapp. Again, a hugely popular product category that they did not have a product in, and with a paradigm that was not compatible with their existing video call app.
That's not to say these were good ideas, or that the projects were well executed. They were me-too copies of other companies' products, and possibly without enough understanding of what made those products popular. But the "duplicates" criticism is just lazy, and makes it seem that you're just parroting memes and did not know anything about the apps other than their names.
What you saw was not the original project that the engineers were trying to launch.