>I’m pretty sure the engineers responsible for Google Search aren’t happy about the quality of results either. I’m wondering if this isn’t really a tech problem but the influence of some suit responsible for quarterly ad revenue increases.
This seems like a pretty irresponsible and ridiculous thing to say. "I think X product is shit, and I'm fairly sure that the engineers working on X would agree and blame product managers" sounds like a valid thing to say if you were at reddit, or dropbox - where it's both true and Seibel should know about it (since he's in a position to know how rubbish they are), but to speculate about one of your competitors in this way is a little... self serving.
Google search actually really reassures me, because Seibel is right, there aren't really any direct network effects, if it got bad I'd move. In fact I did move. I started using duckduckgo when I could, but any time I search for technical issues (something that's likely to result in stackoverflow results or similar) I go back to google. Why? It works.
Agreed. I am really surprised that people aren't calling this out more. It is an example of terrible reasoning to go from "google search is bad" to "it must be bad on purpose so they can sell us stuff" without any actual evidence.
This seems like a pretty irresponsible and ridiculous thing to say. "I think X product is shit, and I'm fairly sure that the engineers working on X would agree and blame product managers" sounds like a valid thing to say if you were at reddit, or dropbox - where it's both true and Seibel should know about it (since he's in a position to know how rubbish they are), but to speculate about one of your competitors in this way is a little... self serving.
Google search actually really reassures me, because Seibel is right, there aren't really any direct network effects, if it got bad I'd move. In fact I did move. I started using duckduckgo when I could, but any time I search for technical issues (something that's likely to result in stackoverflow results or similar) I go back to google. Why? It works.