It does remind me bit of "Big Data is Dead", which I believe was written by someone who worked on BigQuery (external version of Dremel), and then realized it doesn't actually add much value for customers:
Big Data is Dead (2023) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34694926
My opinion is that Google culture enforces scale because it can lead to doing something competitors can't, or if you want to put it less charitably, "monopoly"
For example, there are stories YouTube being a few months from falling over when it was acquired, and being saved by Google scale
At the time, I do think it was true that few other companies could scale to what YouTube users demanded, or at least absorb that cost
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So the company has a culture of scale, for sure, because it has business value FOR GOOGLE
I remember Marissa Mayer sent out "product guidance", and said that technical advantage is one of the criteria, i.e. being able to do something that a competitor can't do
The market is very hostile -- profits are eroded away by competition. But yeah for most companies, like approximately all Google Cloud customers, scale is not the reason they exist. The product is the reason they exist
By definition, there can only be one company that uses scale as a competitive weapon :)
i.e. there is only one "most scalable" company
Of course that's not strictly true, because there are different dimensions of scale, but it's perhaps a useful way of thinking about why Google culture is obsessed with scale. And conversely, why Google seemingly ignores and sunsets products that don't scale.
Big Data is Dead (2023) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34694926
My opinion is that Google culture enforces scale because it can lead to doing something competitors can't, or if you want to put it less charitably, "monopoly"
For example, there are stories YouTube being a few months from falling over when it was acquired, and being saved by Google scale
At the time, I do think it was true that few other companies could scale to what YouTube users demanded, or at least absorb that cost
---
So the company has a culture of scale, for sure, because it has business value FOR GOOGLE
I remember Marissa Mayer sent out "product guidance", and said that technical advantage is one of the criteria, i.e. being able to do something that a competitor can't do
The market is very hostile -- profits are eroded away by competition. But yeah for most companies, like approximately all Google Cloud customers, scale is not the reason they exist. The product is the reason they exist
By definition, there can only be one company that uses scale as a competitive weapon :)
i.e. there is only one "most scalable" company
Of course that's not strictly true, because there are different dimensions of scale, but it's perhaps a useful way of thinking about why Google culture is obsessed with scale. And conversely, why Google seemingly ignores and sunsets products that don't scale.