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Updating Google's Corporate Philosophy  (View post)

Pip [PersonRank 8]

Thursday, June 15, 2006
18 years ago5,614 views

“Democracy on the web works in several countries. ... For other countries, Google ranks every web page using a breakthrough technique called Censorship™" – GOOD ONE!

alek [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Some excellent point – while I think there is a bit of satire in these, you once again nailed it – some good stuff for the Google'ers that read this forum to consider and send up their management chain IMHO.

MarkM [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

Sure, it's important to have views from the opposing or unhappy camp, but it's getting so frequent now that i feel it's drowning out any support – I *like* a lot new products and services they're rolling out, and I have never expected perfection from every single thing Google touches. I'm excited to try out all these new (and free!!) services, and I think it's awesome they're coming out almost on a daily basis. But I really think this frustration people are expressing is misdirected. It's due to the few 'missing elements' that users need that keep the services from being perfect and people are mad google isn't putting more energy into rolling out those features – instead of focusing on, say, no pda syncing in Gcal or endless waiting for aim integration in GTalk, it's coming out as a unfairly overgeneralized "google is releasing way too many crappy services." Even if they are, it's not a bad thing in my book – it's just their choice. Invest your moolah elsewhere if you don't like it – that's how you prevent a Google monopoly from forming, right?

Pete [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Agree with most of them to one degree or another.

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

MarkM, the problem is that other alternatives are not necessarily rare, but less reliable and harder to find (in general). And Google used to be a company whose products and services worked well the first time and worked fast.

As they've expanded, it's hard not to notice that they're often losing site of that as the overall quality of products has declined. I think Philipp's post does a good job of summarizing that point, as well as others.

The reason the unhappy views have become more frequent is there have been more frequent reasons to be unhappy. Obviously it's still nice everytime a new product appears, but it's been mentioned before: the recent products are more disparate and not necessarily functional once you get past their "cool new service" factor.

What can Google do about it? Unify service interfaces, give us more groundbreaking services like some of the first ones, and manage the scalablity issue better.

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Of course, for that last part, all of that is easier said than done.

Sohil [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

LOL, This really is true.

Hashim [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

excellent post! I wonder how sobering it is for older Googlers to read this.

Mambo [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Classic read!! =)

milivella [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Thanks for the post, Philipp!

It's insightful, but here it's the standard...

My little opinion is that the differences from the beginning (or from the time each of ten points was written) is that Google:
- is no more only a search engine (2), even if the Pagerank algorithm remains their only groundbreaking innovation from a conceptual point of view.
- wants to be everybody's service for everything related to information (and the internet is all about information...), trying to do everything in every sector (giving all the space you can imagine for e-mails, scanning all the books, etc., and I don't tell about Google Base) (7, 10).
- keeps, in all these services, the objective to give the user the simplest interface. Strangely enough, simplicity is not among the ten points: in my view, it's the most peculiar and effective of their characters, beginning with that onebox page... And the lack of features of the new services maybe is the effect not only of a quick release, but also of a desire of simplicity. Maybe the "focus on the user" (1) means simplicity, if you consider among the users not only the geeks...
- in this enlargement, got to be part of the "serious and evil" world of big companies (4, 6, 8, 9).

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

milvella:
> Maybe the "focus on the user" means simplicity, if you
> consider among the users not only the geeks...

The amazing thing about Google's applications is that the simplicity is done in a way that most geeks like too!

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

It's about time Google updates their number 6. Can you believe it still says this:

"you may have never seen an ad on Google. That's because Google does not allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they're relevant to the results page on which they're shown"

That was true once. But now Google pushes ads onto as many pages as possible. There can't be any Google users who "have never seen an ad on Google".

Andrew Hitchcock [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

To be fair, I think 1 and 3 have peaked and are now getting better. Sure, my searches usually take over half a second now, versus less than 1/10 originally, but initially I was getting only 10 results while now I'm getting 100 results that are often personalized to by Search History.

Also, their last few releases haven't had the terrible scaling problems they had perhaps half a year ago. Finally, viewing my search history page (with 100 searches per page) was sped up by an order of a magnitude a few months ago.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I just entered calendar.gooogle.com, one of Google's recent products. The page was white for ~14 seconds...

Andrew Hitchcock [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Holy crap. It took me 20 seconds to load calendar. Most of that seemed to be a DNS lookup, though. Okay, I loaded it again (after going to another website) and it only took 4-5 seconds. I don't have a complicated calendar, though.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Exactly the same happening here... only the first load time is long!

Fred Schebesta [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

calendar.gooogle.com is going to struggle because you have too many o's....

Art-One [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

My callendar is still loading quite fast. Maybe, Philipp, it are all those soccer fans near you that are using their calendar...

FunnyBoy [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

Haha!!

Very funny read, but you are wrong at the core. Google is KING, and always has been in my books. Yes they make mistakes, and some products are far less than perfect, but have you ever asked yourself why you have come to expect perfection from them? Becuase everything they do, they do sooooo well!

Get a life. Google ROCKS!
Their new apps (even the beta ones) are great.

In the next few years google will surpass even Microsoft at the biggest IT company, and are already the BEST in the optinion of a sixth of the worlds population.

Laters

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