I guess we all kinda knew that, but it’s always nice to have a study backing your opinions.
Lol Don’t know anybody that does that, not since they closed in 2019 :P Amusingly, double quotes are still the standard ‘must include’ operator on Google search.
Google has also completely blown a very good opportunity to make a ubiquitous chat system. Several iterations of Google talk and Google meet and the like, only one of which federated outside of Google, none of which are compatible with each other, all of which seem to get remade or rebranded every few years.
Competitor to Facebook would have been a great idea. I had actually planned to join Google+. But shortly after it launched they started pushing it so fucking hard, like almost sneakly signing up people for it and making it damn near required to do anything, that made me say hell no. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t alone in that regard.
I don’t know what the hell is going on at Big G HQ, but it doesn’t seem like they have much of any real mission these days. Haven’t really since ‘don’t be evil’ stopped being part of their mission statement.
I don’t know what the hell is going on at Big G HQ, but it doesn’t seem like they have much of any real mission these days.
The company is increasingly compelled by Wall Street pressures
The latest round of layoffs was practically dictated by activist investors like Christopher Hohn.
Stupid short sighted crap too. Complaining about excessive compensation and too much stock given away… That’s the people who build the best generation of money making products there. If they have no skin in the game and aren’t being compensated well, they aren’t going to attract and keep the best talent. The best talent is going to go to companies like Tesla and OpenAI and various startups where those people have a chance to become millionaires on stock options.
It’s one thing to pull the Netflix strategy, keep only the very best of the best people, pay them a lot, and get rid of everybody else. But treating labor overall like a cost and not an investment is not a good long-term strategy.
If they have no skin in the game and aren’t being compensated well, they aren’t going to attract and keep the best talent.
I think the theory being challenged is that “best talent” translates to “most lucrative product”.
Certainly, there’s no shortage of shitty mass market crap that makes enormous amounts of money purely by saturating the market. What’s more, the model of cornering the market through regulatory capture or cartelization means that the talent of your staff has less and less of an impact on your market dominance. Eventually, when you’ve got a full blown monopoly, the only thing you really care about is the margin on your sales.
It’s one thing to pull the Netflix strategy, keep only the very best of the best people, pay them a lot, and get rid of everybody else.
Netflix hasn’t even been following the Netflix strategy. They’re routinely cutting bait on the highest watched shows and opting for cheaper productions with less overhead. One reason they love pumping out anime stems from the fact that licensing an English sub of a foreign media import is crazy lucrative relative to sourcing original content from Hollywood.
WB is taking this strategy into overdrive with their quest to saturate HBO with reality TV and old movies.
