The Man Who Killed Google Search
Edward Zitron has been reading all of google's internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ's antitrust case against google.
This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.
The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.
HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation
Sundar Pichai
Satya Nadella
Shantanu Narayen (CEO of Adobe since 2008)
Tech companies with Indian CEOs have defined and refined rent-seeking over innovations.
Unlike Brin, Page, Zuckerberg, Gates who had interest in technology and the product, these are just fucking yes men who exist to please the board by trying to keep the line going up, as long as they're not required to take risks themselves.
They'll buy competition, give shit pay to employees, and cut costs even if that harns the company in the long run.
Fuck them.
Satya Nadella turned MS around after the disaster years under Balmer. Your racism is blinding you if you think that he's a problem - from a product perspective or from profit perspective.
Not to take up for his point, but windows 10 was in development years before Nadella. The only version of windows totally under his governance has been the disastrous windows 11. So I guess I have him to thank for finally giving me the kick in the pants to fully switch to Linux.
I guess the point I need to make is that Microsoft was not good before or during Nadella. There have been bright spots, but not enough for me to have then outweigh all the other crap pulled both during and before Nadella.
Windows is only a small part of MS.
Nadella gets a lot of/all the credit for Azure which is the only legit competition to AWS.
O365 has been great for their adoption too.
And then there's all the "free" dev tools like GitHub (acquisition), typescript, vs code etc. which bolsters their image.
I can't even imagine ms under Balmer giving away that much shit. Hell, I wanted to build apps for lumia and they wanted to charge me an arm and a leg just to get started. This was at a time when their store didn't have anything going for itself.
They also fired entire QA department and crowdsourced it to paying customers.
And it's not my racism. I'm a born and raised Indian who everyday meets people like these. Our culture is fucked up.
You talk as though every other company in the west hasn't been enshittified too.
Ajit Pai comes to mind.
Not really. Unlike other three, he was not born and brought up in India.
Are we playing a game where we list the names of greedy fucks who have ruined society? Because I assure you that we're looking at a ration of 10:1, at least, of white names vs. any other ethnicity. And that's being extremely generous. It's all old white dudes.
Stop fooling yourself. Power is defined by "whiteness," it's literally a synonym for systemic power and control. If you're in a position to negatively affect society in such a way, then you're white.
Naming a handful of outliers means nothing. Not to mention that those people have all been furthering the goals of that systemic "white" control structure, regardless of their skin color.
Oh shit guys he named three people!
Three people who are steering highly influential mega corporations.
Piss off.
You know what, I just had a great idea... Why don't we try to actually make this at least somewhat scientific.
Let's compile a list of the worst "most evil" corporations on the planet. Your Nestles, your Amazons, your Down Chemicals, your Union Carbides, your Godman Sachs, your Blackwaters, etc. etc. and break down their C-Suite employees by ethnicity.
Let's see how unique this concept of greed is to Indians. I would bet my next paycheck that at the very least it would be a white plurality.
Do you have any concept of how statistics works? It's interesting (I mean, maybe but probably not really) that you can name a few greedy Indian tech execs, and act like this is some sort of nationwide or worldwide trend. As if your ability to name three people somehow negates centuries of history of the planet (including India, "your land") being ravaged by white people for profit at the expense of native populations.
If you think your ability to name three people is somehow meaningful, why don't we just take a few minutes on LinkedIn to see who's running these massive US corporations. If you want to make this a racial thing, let's see how many of them are old white dudes. Let's see how many of them ARE LITERALLY RUNNING THE SAME CORPORATIONS YOU REFER TO. But they've got one Indian dude in their C-Suite, and for you that's a smoking gun that this is a problem with their race right?
Brain broken. Taking you at your word that you're actually Indian (and that this isn't some overflow from some ethno-religious, Hindu vs. Muslim bullshit), it's pretty fucking sad that your mind seems to work this way. Talk about self-loathing.