<story><title>The death of Google</title><url>https://lauren.vortex.com/2018/10/08/the-death-of-google</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>&amp;quot;They are consistently bogglingly bad at human interaction -- communications, PR, management, UX, customer service.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think that&amp;#x27;s actually true.  In particular, I think that Google for most of its history was masterful at PR and communications - they managed to maintain a very positive public image all the way through 2011, despite being both far more powerful, more naughty, and more ruthless than the general public saw them as.  I think management and UX are also quite strong at Google - they&amp;#x27;re known for sparse design and UX fails, but there&amp;#x27;s often a lot of subtlety to how Google products are designed that makes them very effective for their purposes.  They did always suck at customer service, though.&lt;p&gt;Rather, I think Google&amp;#x27;s hubris is...hubris.  They feel the need to have their fingers in everything.  It&amp;#x27;s not enough to be the world&amp;#x27;s best Search company or even organize the world&amp;#x27;s information and make it universally accessible and useful, they also need to be the best social network, and best cloud provider, and best AI company, and best mobile-phone OS, and best web browser, and best daily deals site (remember their aborted Groupon purchase, soon followed by a competitor?), and do government contracts for the military, and get into China, and build self-driving cars and robotics, and be a major payment provider and operate half a dozen different chat services.&lt;p&gt;Most of the PR, communication, management, and UX fails are forced errors.  They happen because there&amp;#x27;s an inherent contradiction in Google&amp;#x27;s business model.  You can&amp;#x27;t simultaneously market yourself to engineers with &amp;quot;Don&amp;#x27;t be evil&amp;quot; while devising ways to help the military kill people more accurately or censoring Chinese search results; hell, at some point the military is likely going to have an issue with China potentially hacking into Google&amp;#x27;s cloud infrastructure through their partnerships.  A surprising number of the UX fails also come about because some executive is protecting their turf and won&amp;#x27;t let the obvious integration &amp;amp; UI simplification happen even though both engineers and customers want it.</text></item><item><author>kenhwang</author><text>Google&amp;#x27;s hubris is believing engineering brilliance alone can solve everything. They are consistently bogglingly bad at human interaction -- communications, PR, management, UX, customer service.&lt;p&gt;There always seems to be a lack of well-roundedness at Google. It didn&amp;#x27;t really matter back when they just did search, but now that they&amp;#x27;re expanding into other fields, they&amp;#x27;re looking more and more like an expert hammerer than an master of many tools.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sonnyblarney</author><text>Google are accidental PR geniuses. The whole &amp;#x27;do no evil&amp;#x27; thing was instinctive PR, not really thought out in the den of some PR genius.&lt;p&gt;They made their brand synonymous with the word &amp;#x27;search&amp;#x27; - my god man, that&amp;#x27;s worth billions, minimum.&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;ve done it in an oddly naive &amp;#x27;authentic&amp;#x27; way, by I think truly believing their own schtick, and drinking their own coolaid. And I&amp;#x27;m not nearly as cynical as the above posters, Google is &lt;i&gt;way&lt;/i&gt; more ethnical that most companies. My god man, if Google wanted to they could change electoral outcomes, simply form a massive hedge fund and beat &lt;i&gt;everyone&lt;/i&gt; at investing, do evil things the likes of which we&amp;#x27;ve never hard of. I&amp;#x27;m constantly impressed by how actually objective they&amp;#x27;ve been about a lot of stuff given 99% of other CEO&amp;#x27;s would have abused the data position a long, long time ago. Not to say they are perfect, but ... compared to most, they have been pretty good. Though that&amp;#x27;s changing.&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;ve done it without any hardcore ad spends, or any real classical marketing attempts to make us believe things one way or another, so kudos on them.&lt;p&gt;But yes, they are kind of bad at most classical parts of marketing, communications ... heck even some kinds of product management. But the &amp;#x27;Engineers first&amp;#x27; mentality got them where they are, I&amp;#x27;m going to doubt that part of their DNA will change.</text></comment>
<story><title>The death of Google</title><url>https://lauren.vortex.com/2018/10/08/the-death-of-google</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>&amp;quot;They are consistently bogglingly bad at human interaction -- communications, PR, management, UX, customer service.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think that&amp;#x27;s actually true.  In particular, I think that Google for most of its history was masterful at PR and communications - they managed to maintain a very positive public image all the way through 2011, despite being both far more powerful, more naughty, and more ruthless than the general public saw them as.  I think management and UX are also quite strong at Google - they&amp;#x27;re known for sparse design and UX fails, but there&amp;#x27;s often a lot of subtlety to how Google products are designed that makes them very effective for their purposes.  They did always suck at customer service, though.&lt;p&gt;Rather, I think Google&amp;#x27;s hubris is...hubris.  They feel the need to have their fingers in everything.  It&amp;#x27;s not enough to be the world&amp;#x27;s best Search company or even organize the world&amp;#x27;s information and make it universally accessible and useful, they also need to be the best social network, and best cloud provider, and best AI company, and best mobile-phone OS, and best web browser, and best daily deals site (remember their aborted Groupon purchase, soon followed by a competitor?), and do government contracts for the military, and get into China, and build self-driving cars and robotics, and be a major payment provider and operate half a dozen different chat services.&lt;p&gt;Most of the PR, communication, management, and UX fails are forced errors.  They happen because there&amp;#x27;s an inherent contradiction in Google&amp;#x27;s business model.  You can&amp;#x27;t simultaneously market yourself to engineers with &amp;quot;Don&amp;#x27;t be evil&amp;quot; while devising ways to help the military kill people more accurately or censoring Chinese search results; hell, at some point the military is likely going to have an issue with China potentially hacking into Google&amp;#x27;s cloud infrastructure through their partnerships.  A surprising number of the UX fails also come about because some executive is protecting their turf and won&amp;#x27;t let the obvious integration &amp;amp; UI simplification happen even though both engineers and customers want it.</text></item><item><author>kenhwang</author><text>Google&amp;#x27;s hubris is believing engineering brilliance alone can solve everything. They are consistently bogglingly bad at human interaction -- communications, PR, management, UX, customer service.&lt;p&gt;There always seems to be a lack of well-roundedness at Google. It didn&amp;#x27;t really matter back when they just did search, but now that they&amp;#x27;re expanding into other fields, they&amp;#x27;re looking more and more like an expert hammerer than an master of many tools.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ddebernardy</author><text>Getting bad commentary on geeky&amp;#x2F;nerdy HN is, almost by definition, bad communications&amp;#x2F;PR for a tech company.&lt;p&gt;Getting into too many fields and ending up all over the place is bad management.&lt;p&gt;Executives protecting their turfs may indeed be a recipe to getting bad UX, but that doesn&amp;#x27;t excuse the fact that it&amp;#x27;s bad UX or that bad UX is all over Google. If anything the latter points towards more bad management.&lt;p&gt;And as you wrote, customer service has always been bad.</text></comment>