Latency is actually an interesting case, because it’s one of those things that, by default, nobody owns end-to-end

If you’re booting a computer or building web search, every subsystem can contribute to latency. If you have more teams and more features, you’re likely to have more latency.

In the early days of Google, Larry Page would push hard on this as well, in person. So Google search was fast.

But later the company became larger and bureaucratized, so nobody was in charge of latency. So then each team contributes a bit to latency, and that’s what ends up shipping.

Google products used to be known for being fast, but they’ve reverted to the mean