Unfortunately Google's problem is the product is dictated by the architecture of the APIs and this is an issue for anything they do. At one point long ago every Google product was disjointed and Larry Page told everyone they needed to be unified under a single theme and login. Then over time with the scale of the company you become entirely dependent on the current workflows. To work around it, all of a sudden there's a new UI for a new product and it looks super clean right until you try do something with that login or roles or an API key that has to effectively jailbreak the flow you're in. Painful. It's why startups win. Small, nimble, none of that legacy cruft to deal with. Whoever is working hard to fix these problems at Google KUDOS TO YOU because it's not easy. It's not easy to wrangle these systems across hundreds of teams, products and infrastructure. The unification and seamless workflow at that scale is painfully hard to achieve and the issue is entirely about operating within the limitations of the system but for good reason.

I hope they figure out a lot of the issues but at the same time, I hope Gemini just disappears back into products rather than being at the forefront, because I think that's when Google does it's best work.

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dbuxton 2 days ago | parent [-]

> The unification and seamless workflow at that scale is painfully hard to achieve

It does make you wonder, why not just be a lot smaller? It's not like most of these teams actually generate any revenue. It seems like a weird structural decision which maybe made sense when hoovering up available talent was its own defensive moat but now that strategy is no longer plausible should be rethought?

	▲	asim 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Two reasons. 1 - they print cash through Ads which means there's opportunity or desire to do more things, or even a feeling like you should or can. So new products emerge but also to try diversify the revenue stream. 2 - the continuous hiring and scale means churn, people get bored, they leave teams, they want to do something new, it all bifurcates. It keeps fragmenting and fragmenting until you have this multilayered fractal. It's how systems in nature operate so we shouldn't think corporation's will be any different. The only way to mitigate things like this is putting in places limits, rules and boundaries, but that also limits the upside and if you're a public company you can't do that. You have to grow grow grow and then cut cut cut and continue in that cycle forever or until you die.
	▲	BozeWolf 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And yet google generates around $1.9miljon revenue per employee per year. Which is a lot, almost as good as competitors.