This is valid criticism but … Google faces the very difficult problem of operating a really big organization. In such a place, there is bound to be hyper specialization. An L5 engineer doesn’t worry about customers because they don’t interact directly with them. And this is good.
I think the author is just pointing out the difficulties involved in operating a large organization. There’s certainly ways in which Google can improve, but Im not sure the author has provided any valuable insight into how to fix its deficiencies.
We’ve seen this before several times. The behemoths of yesteryears are todays laggards (IBM, HP etc.). Its the cycle of life for Tech companies.
The author points to Microsoft as an example of company that did not end up like HP. Not all large tech companies have to end up like IBM. It takes a very special CEO to turn things around, but it can happen.
Interesting. Has MS in fact turned the corporate culture around? When I was there, the Windows org was full of fiefdoms with, at times, petty alpha nerds running things. The culture at Google, while far from perfect, was more respectful and data-driven.
I’ve never worked at MS but have gone in and out of their ecosystem as a dev over the years.
With Azure and those kinds of moves, a lot of MS tech clearly became more about getting the tech right rather than protecting some random other MS product. At least the .NET stuff did for sure as you saw more and more open source stuff flourish, pragmatic decisions getting made, elegant APIs, etc.
Google seems to be hopeless right now but as the author states, they need their own Nadella. Sundar Pichai seems to be one hell of a dud, clearly a Ballmer-like figure.
I think the author is just pointing out the difficulties involved in operating a large organization. There’s certainly ways in which Google can improve, but Im not sure the author has provided any valuable insight into how to fix its deficiencies.
We’ve seen this before several times. The behemoths of yesteryears are todays laggards (IBM, HP etc.). Its the cycle of life for Tech companies.