Not at all. I conveyed you the perspective of the users. Who, really don’t care about ‘engineering’ without a product to justify its existence.
I don’t remember saying there should be only PMs and engineers should be gotten rid of. That’s your extreme extrapolation.
However I did say that without product and the users, there isn’t any need for, leave aside any point to, engineering. Horse must be put before the carriage, not the other way around.
Being an engineer, of course I know that those who decided that many Google products should be ‘deprecated’ with practically zero concern for users were Google’s product people of earlier periods. Not necessarily the engineers — though it is certain that there would be a lot of pure-engineering-mentality-initiated moves to deprecate products because some other new thing is ‘better’ than one particular product engineering-wise. However the majority of such ‘deprecations’ should naturally come from such product people with sole ‘engineering’ perspective. That’s why I specifically said that ‘engineering mentality’ — which covers also the product people who solely view the world through those glasses.
Therefore the total non-concern for their user base, their needs, their businesses, any commitment to them. Easily ‘deprecating’ products out of the blue and leaving people out in the cold periodically until they are properly alienated from using Google products. Even the word ‘deprecated’ itself is a manifestation of that mentality — ‘Hey, we did not shut down the service on your faces — we just ‘deprecated’ it. As if that somehow makes things ok for the people and businesses who had made the mistake of building anything with Google-specific tools.
Result?
The result is Google playing catch-up with everyone else and not catching up. And losing things it had the upper hand in before.
Despite Meet’s potential headstart that you mentioned in 2011, it was Zoom who wiped the floor with everyone else.
Despite GoogleTalk already had a respectable user base which could be expanded upon, it was ‘deprecated’ and today Google is trying to come back to that market with ‘Google Chat’ now. after Discord literally revived the space and monopolized it. The examples are plenty. But one example badly stands out:
Even in a space in which good engineering would not only be understood and appreciated by the user/customer base but where it also would be a requirement, Google is literally struggling to gain traction. And its continually falling behind Amazon and struggling to cope with even latecomers into the space — despite Google Cloud’s demonstrable engineering precision in many services compared to even AWS.
Why?
From the awareness that building any business on Google-specific tools could easily end up the door getting shut down on your face unexpectedly in a few years, literally putting your business in a pinch to the Google Cloud reps incessantly and abruptly asking you how much you are willing to spend at Google Cloud in every other call — compared to Amazon reps trying to actually solve your problems without even bringing up anything as such — Google literally does not care about the needs of its user/customer base, less their opinions and feelings. The users eventually notice such things. And it shapes their choices.
I won’t even touch on more extreme examples like how Google totally missed the onset of the creator economy etc. And all it did was a pretty awkward landing/marketing page that pitches existing Google services like Google Ads as if it was revealing anything important related to the creator economy.
…
So basically yeah, Google’s product-oriented move does sound like a very good move that was sorely needed by Google to balance the pure engineering perspective that somehow made people think that engineering could exist in a vacuum by itself and everything would ‘just’ be okay.
