It's not necessarily a question of persons (and the CEO did a resigned after the Max crashes).
It's more a question of culture (oversimplifying, sales vs engineering) and this is harder to change most of the time. Apparently, even the Max debacle was not enough.
Some of these executive quotes read (admittedly with the benefit of hindsight) like satire.
> But the nearest Boeing commercial-airplane assembly facility would be 1,700 miles away. The isolation was deliberate. “When the headquarters is located in proximity to a principal business—as ours was in Seattle—the corporate center is inevitably drawn into day-to-day business operations,” Condit explained at the time.
Oh man, wouldn't want that to happen.
> With ethics now front and center, Condit was forced out and replaced with Stonecipher, who promptly affirmed: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”
1) The whole airspace environment is heavily regulated (ATC, rules, etc), cooperative (think transponders or TCAS for example) and usually quite sparse (several miles between planes).
2) Pilots are regularly trained and evaluated for these kind of take over in case of emergency.
3) You have two pilots monitoring each other.
4) The development cycles for these automations are far longer, and the QA a lot stricter.
5) At least in the most critical phases (take-off, landing), the automation is not exactly end-to-end. It's more the case of grouping batch of steps together into bigger actions to reduce the load on the pilots. The pilots are still quite busy during these periods and very much in the loop.
Given Golang popularity, it probably managed to solve more than Google's internal issues.
It most likely ticked quite few boxes right:
* easy syntax
* fairly extensive std lib
* easy memory management & mostly painless GC
* easy shipping of dependencies (everything in one file, including runtime)
* order of magnitude less tricky parallelism.
In a world where Golang doesn't exist, quite a few recent software would probably look really different:
* Etcd but in Java (hello Zookeeper)
* Terraform but in Python
* Docker but in C/C++ or Python
* Kubernetes, but in Java and/or Python and/or C++ (hello Mesos)
* Prometheus, but in Java and/or C/C++
And honestly, for most of these, either because alternatives in such languages do exist and mostly failed, or from performance/stability concerns, I think we would not have been better of.
Golang is not a complete replacement for Python and/or Java and/or C++.
For example, if you were to create a complex native application (browser, game, cad software, etc), C++ is still probably the best choice. For data manipulation/transformation or glue scripting, Python is still a more convenient choice. If you want to structure an extremely large codebase and depend on tons of "Enterprisy" stuff, Java is most likely a good choice. (note: I'm caricaturally oversimplifying)
Also software is rarely created in a vacuum:
1) software teams have certain skills and habits
2) new software is often created in a preexisting context
3) In fairness, language choice is often not that critical
4) Developers can be extremely vocal about technology choices, often way beyond the reasonable
For all these reasons, even if we fall right in the Golang niche (small to medium size web api/app, "devops" tools/infra management and partially, some DB use cases), choosing Java/C++ over Golang could actually be the right choice.
> A few decades ago anyone with a billion dollars could start making cellphones
Did you mixed-up million and billion?
A billion dollar is a gigantic pill of money. This feel a bit like saying "anyone with a British crown on his head can reign over the UK".
Also, looking at Fairphone, they operate with a fairly reasonable budget: all revenue, including phone sells in 2022 are around $60M, and if we exclude production, ~$17M are needed to pay for product development, marketing, support and all other expenses for a year. At 2 years to create a phone, that's ~$30M.
While the days around 2003 when the project had +2500 commits per year are long gone, coreutils is still fairly active, with ~200 commits per year.
Even looking at really simple tools like 'yes', git blame shows a bunch of fairly recent changes.
On commands with specific repository like grep (https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grep.git/log/), the project actually peaked not too long ago, in 2010, with 355 commits a year. And the current activity levels (82 commits 2023) are not that far off this high.
Of course, commits are not everything. I expect the actual code changes to be smaller (lots of 1-5 lines fixes vs ~100 lines new functionality). But these tools are still evolving quite significantly.
You are lucky, I got nothing for heavily suggesting a ~1M/year saving.
The only "personal" reward I get from that is: whenever I feel guilty for not having done much in a given day, I remind myself that by this action alone, I've saved my company several times what I would ever cost them.
Helps with self-esteem, but I don't think my company see it that way.
These 2008 slides talking about "Ads Quality" really sound weird compared to today.
The screenshots, with the ads being clearly visible, surrounded by yellow boxes, and not taking too much screen real estate, are quite striking compared to the Search Result page now days (which feels a lot more blurry and sneaky).
At the same time, we now get mandatory ads on Youtube, and personally, I was quite chocked by how low quality these can be. Best case, it's your traditional sugary food ads, worst case, it's propaganda or border line scam promo.
Maybe Youtube always was that bad for the ~2/3 of people not using ad-blockers and I was blind to it.
However, with the recent layoffs, the end of free money, the slow death of Twitter/X and the push for more monetization (ads on Youtube, API monetization on Reddit, etc), it feels we are reaching the end of an era.
It's more a question of culture (oversimplifying, sales vs engineering) and this is harder to change most of the time. Apparently, even the Max debacle was not enough.