User:Woozle/Google+/2014/05/03

This discussion of Google corporate policy is excerpted from comments on this thread.

The discussion basically began when I said:

...Google has never given any genuine indication of being the slightest bit interested in my suggestions or in the suggestions of anyone I know. If they were, there would at least be a bug-tracker of some kind so we'd know whether our suggestions were even being considered or not.

To which Regalo replied:

There is a public bug tracker for Chrome, but for most non-open-source projects they keep that stuff hidden so nobody has to be afraid of leaking confidential information when talking about bugs.

My view from the inside is that people at Google care a great deal about making the best products they can, but practical realities get in the way a lot. Sometimes Google does stupid things because of an executive decision (e.g. real names), but usually it's just a lack of resources. Google is a big company, but it has a huge number of products, and only so many people can work on the same product at once, and there are often fierce debates about the best way to fix any given problem.

Google typically doesn't respond to feedback because there's no point; the problem is usually already known, and your feedback is basically a vote fixing that problem before working on something else. Our policy is not to discuss work in progress or commit to releasing things at specific times, so there's not much to say until a bug actually gets fixed.

At this point, the conversation became multi-threaded, so here is my attempt to represent that:

• RC: ...but for most non-open-source projects they keep that stuff hidden so nobody has to be afraid of leaking confidential information when talking about bugs.
  • WH: In other words, the profit motive keeps the developers from doing the right thing.
    • RC: Well, most Googlers do like to eat.
      • WH:
        • There is a difference between corporate profits and employee salaries. Even nonprofits pay their employees.
        • You can't be a force for good _and_ place profit over doing the right thing.
        • And finally, it seems to me that long-term business health is harmed by opacity -- unless Google has (as many of us suspect) truly given up not being evil [and decided to focus on being profitable].
• RC: Google typically doesn't respond to feedback because there's no point; the problem is usually already known.
  • WH: Again, why isn't there at least a searchable listing of known problems, with status indicators? That wouldn't risk divulging proprietary information, since all text would be user-submitted.
• RC: ...and your feedback is basically a vote fixing that problem before working on something else.
  • WH: The list could show how many "votes" there are for a given fix, so I'd know whether I was barking up the wrong tree or not.
• RC: Our policy is not to discuss work in progress or commit to releasing things at specific times...
  • WH: Why?

    I'm not really expecting an answer to this. I have a close relative who was on the G+ privacy team (something like that) around the public launch time, and we spent about 2 hours going back and forth about Google's policy of opaqueness.

    My position was (and is) that opacity just makes each leak that much more problematic -- whereas if the overall process were transparent, nobody would care. This attitude seems to be so deeply ingrained in the corporate culture that Goog insiders can't even see how destructive it is; it's the fishtank effect, where it's difficult to conceive of the idea of "water" when you're surrounded by it. Anything else seems alien.

    This is what will ultimately kill Google: the rest of the world will move on to open-source, distributed systems, while Google will still be trying to be Microsoft Mark 2.

    Either that, or Google will take over everything so completely that there will be no escape from the centralized control it increasingly enforces on its users.?