Caltrops - American McGee's Honda Civic





	[quote name="blackwater"][quote name="IPB"]<a href="https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery-happiest-company-tech/">Their words</a>[/quote] Thanks, that was a good read. It ties together a lot of the stuff that got posted here on Caltrops in bits and pieces in the last few years... about Dragonfly, Damore , Maven, etc. It's been sad to watch Google descend into a politically correct hellhole. Based on people I know personally, I think this article whitewashes a lot of what is going on. Google basically has periodic mandatory political training classes where you're indoctrinated about things like "implicit bias" and implicit association tests (IATs). These things have mostly been debunked as part of the replication crisis, but they're still gospel at Google and many other places. This is the new Google. The old Google was very different. It's actually kind of amazing that Larry and Sergey haven't gotten #MeTooed yet. Larry used to sleep with a lot of the employees and the HR department covered it up. Apparently he used to demand that all of his secretaries be young, female, and have PhDs. Sergey also had affairs with people at the company (this was what broke up his marriage). While I'm on the topic, let's not forget that Marissa Meyers got her start sleeping with the boss-- Larry. It's been scrubbed from her wikipedia profile (surprise, surprise) but a few places on the internet still remember. One of the old-time HR people at Google left recently. It transpired that he had fathered a child with some employee at the company, and then later broken up with her. I guess he didn't take any responsibility for the child. And then later she got fired. People were asking questions about the whole affair, which never quite got answered (they usually don't in cases like this). I can't find the link right now. No doubt our majestic overlords artisinally curating my information feed. [quote name="IPB"] The company gets yanked around by Ads the way Azure kicks around the rest of MS. Google's original company purpose was simple - index information and monetize this with ads. Their early projects were based around this, like Google Books. They were willing to to court over this. They won! Then they functionally if not officially killed off the project in the early 2010s and indexing information wasn't a priority. That's also when ICJ started his Google complaint thread and that is why this place is the best. [/quote] I actually think the exact opposite. Ads makes the money, but the company was always kind of ashamed of it, and rarely seemed to set direction based on Ads. Like if Ads had been in the driver's seat, why would they have cancelled Google Reader, or let Google Books stagnate, or made such a mess of chat? I guess maybe if you squint you could see Google+ as the baleful influence of advertising on the company. But in terms of what actually happened, it was totally different. Google+ came from the C-suite directly, not from anyone in the Ads department. Their big push into cloud recently is also totally unrelated to Ads. I think probably in the next few years, Ads really will set direction for the company, and it will be their Ballmer years. (During the Ballmer years at Microsoft, every project was evaluated by "how does this help Windows"?) [quote name="IPB"] The division of Alphabet and Google was an attempt to clean things up, but it didn't seem to do anything. The rest of FAANG have been investigated by the Feds too. You get the sense though that somebody is in charge and that there is a cohesive company objective. "Don't be evil" and "squeeze as much money from ads from snooping" are so weirdly at odds it's almost Marxist dialectic. No wonder so many commies work there. [/quote] My take on Alphabet is that Larry and Sergey wanted Sundar to be CEO of the "boring stuff" (that makes a lot of money) so that they could do the "cool stuff" (that loses a lot of money). So they created a corporate structure where he could be kind of the mini-boss of just the boring Google division, and they could be the real leaders managing the whole portfolio of companies, building hot-air balloons to deliver internet, developing AI, curing death, etc. Now, of course, Sundar has control of both Alphabet and Google, and the whole split looks kind of pointless. [quote name="IPB"] [quote name="blackwater"]Whatever else happens, the company will be paralyzed for a while. Kind of like Microsoft during the Ballmer years. Even if this investigation fizzles, they will be really cautious from now on.[/quote] You mean Google might stop killing projects? Stadia might make it after all! [/quote] Ballmer-style paralysis doesn't involve management literally doing nothing. It involves spinning up a lot of competing initiatives, but then never properly funding them. And/or putting weird constraints on them that end up making them unsuccessful (like "the experience has to be much better on Windows than the other platforms" or "this project can't compete with any of our current partners.") So, I'm still looking forward to writing Stadia's obituary. Of course, I've been wrong before. We will see.[/quote]