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Comment on Google workers complain bosses are 'inept' and 'glassy-eyed'

It’s unfair to discount Google’s early days. They DID have technical excellence. Search was leagues better than the competition. Gmail was an amazing leap from other providers. Android started as trash but improved rapidly. The Nexus line of phones was amazing. Google Maps was a huge improvement over what else existed. They did a lot right.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when the fall started. Was it when Pichai became CEO? When they removed “don’t be evil?” I remember a speech Pichai gave where he talked about “more wood behind fewer arrows” as why they were getting rid of employee child projects, so maybe it was that.

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baltakatei@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

I can’t pinpoint exactly when the fall started.

In my opinion, it was when anti-trust laws did not trigger upon Google acquiring YouTube because Google Video couldn’t compete. That meant it was open season on start-ups that otherwise might have grown to kill Google or other big tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.

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- TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Oh yeah, I even forgot Google Video used to be a thing.
  
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  - baltakatei@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    See List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet for the graveyard list. Sorting by Price helps. Some other notable companies that Google acquired rather than compete with:
    
    Nest Labs (home automation)
    
    DropCam (home automation)
    
    DoubleClick (advertisement)
    
    FitBit (wearables)
    
    Waze (GPS navigation)
    
    Skybox Imaging (satellite mapping)
    
    Like.com (shopping)
    
    Meebo (social network)
    
    GrandCentral (VOIP)
    
    Picasa (photographry)
    
    Tenor (GIF search)
    
    PhotoMath (LLM; became Bard)
    
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chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Android started as trash

It started off by beating the pants off of iOS in terms of features, but was not nearly as polished.

Definitely not trash. But also not polished for the masses.

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- BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  And they acquired it in the first place.
  
  To their credit (or at least the Android team), they quickly moved it from Linux-on-a-handheld to a real thing.
  
  Android still isn’t as polished as iOS, but it’s a far more capable system.
  
  And that’s good. iOS has it’s place, as does Android.
  
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merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Gmail was an amazing leap from other providers.

Gmail really wasn’t any better than Hotmail at first, it was just that they gave you a huge (at the time) amount of storage, when Hotmail users regularly had to delete old mail or attachments.

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