I would like more info on the factors hinted at in the article:
The effect of buying and closing innovative potential competitors?
Product design distortion due to companies being valued by unreal factors, so most of the market is acting on partly false data (raw MAU rather than sophisticated analysis of likely actually meaningful paying DAU)
Actual errors due to not measuring user sentiment: failing to build long term value since the life cycle of users from new-> user-> advocate -> generational aligned customer is not understood at all. In this thesis, most companies profit model is just wrong on long term time scales. They're actually burning the goodwill of potential dedicated customers in return for flat growth and revenue. This is Google to me; they have no way to detect that I've gone from loving to hating their products over the last ten years, since I spend as much as ever. But I'm looking for any way to jump to another product.
In the end I still don't know. Am I just wrong that Google isn't suffering from me hating them? It feels so true that if they respected power users more it would be so beneficial to them, but in a hard to measure way. Recruiting, advocacy, lobbying, let alone bug fixes, wanting to work there. It could be that the hate they receive doesn't hurt them. But I think a certain type of person will always exist, who wants to love and respect the groups they're associated with, beyond just realized profit. I would jump at the chance to associate with a company which makes 50% as much money as google, but which I can still admire and feel aligned with. And long term it seems people will try to form societies and economies where companies can be viewed as actually aligned. So day to day google does fine, but maybe they're not pricing in the rare negative effects of existing in a less loved state?
> Am I just wrong that Google isn't suffering from me hating them?
No, I think you're right that Google is suffering in the long term. It's a combination of measurement difficulty and agency problems - there's no way for the VP of the product to get a credible signal about whether a change was good or not other than by looking at something incontrovertible like DAUs. You might try to introduce a metric like "user happiness" but the design space of such metrics is so large that a misaligned product manager could always use it to shove a bad change through.
Kind of like we all know GDP is a bad metric for human flourishing, but everything else feels even worse.
The effect of buying and closing innovative potential competitors?
Product design distortion due to companies being valued by unreal factors, so most of the market is acting on partly false data (raw MAU rather than sophisticated analysis of likely actually meaningful paying DAU)
Actual errors due to not measuring user sentiment: failing to build long term value since the life cycle of users from new-> user-> advocate -> generational aligned customer is not understood at all. In this thesis, most companies profit model is just wrong on long term time scales. They're actually burning the goodwill of potential dedicated customers in return for flat growth and revenue. This is Google to me; they have no way to detect that I've gone from loving to hating their products over the last ten years, since I spend as much as ever. But I'm looking for any way to jump to another product.
In the end I still don't know. Am I just wrong that Google isn't suffering from me hating them? It feels so true that if they respected power users more it would be so beneficial to them, but in a hard to measure way. Recruiting, advocacy, lobbying, let alone bug fixes, wanting to work there. It could be that the hate they receive doesn't hurt them. But I think a certain type of person will always exist, who wants to love and respect the groups they're associated with, beyond just realized profit. I would jump at the chance to associate with a company which makes 50% as much money as google, but which I can still admire and feel aligned with. And long term it seems people will try to form societies and economies where companies can be viewed as actually aligned. So day to day google does fine, but maybe they're not pricing in the rare negative effects of existing in a less loved state?