Not Everyone Is Nervous about Google

April 3, 2018

Over at the Android Authority, writer Tristan Rayner has crafted a counter argument to former Google engineer Steve Yegge’s criticism of the company. Yegge spent 13 years at Google, after a 6-year stint at Amazon, and claims Google is suffering from a profound failure to innovate. Rayner disagrees, mostly, countering the departing engineer’s assertion with specific points. See the write-up for the details of those defenses, including shifting perceptions of what is “innovative” and considerations of scale. A list of several areas where Google is in the lead rounds out Rayner’s case, beginning with AI:

“A short and incomplete list of things Google is leading in starts with AI. Google Assistant dominates everything other than Alexa. The DeepMind acquisition has famously beaten Go, and also improved energy efficiency at global data centers, and their photo and image AI is world class. Of course, that’s only scratching the surface. It’s very hard to see what’s changing in Search, which raises an important point. First we see the big innovations, such as Search, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, and StreetView. The curse of such successful innovation is that it grows to become enormous. The Google Search codebase is more than two billion lines of code. Search is locked into first place, and decades of fine-tuning — more than 50 million commits — have kept Google in front. That’s innovation we’ll rarely see any hint of beyond better results. Most of us use Google Maps as a boring-but-necessary utility, rather than a source of delight. It isn’t exciting anymore, but Google is so far ahead of other map services it’s ridiculous. … “With the new AI-powered Clips camera, Google Photos will offer amazing AI insight into your photos, as well as free storage and a host of new experimental Photos apps. Google AMP was a response to Facebook Instant Articles and it won — AMP is now a significant part of the web for publishers.”

Speculation about certain personalities involved and inter-corporate rivalry conclude the write-up. Rayner makes a point of his respect for Yegge as a professional, but is firmly convinced he is mistaken on this one.

Cynthia Murrell, April 3, 2018

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Google, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.