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:

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.?

...still writing after this...

_"Well, most Googlers do like to eat."_

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.