Googley: A Dip Below Good Enough
June 16, 2025
A dinobaby without AI wrote this. Terrible, isn’t it? I did use smart software for the good enough cartoon. See, this dinobaby is adapting.
I was in Washington, DC, from June 9 to 11, 2025. My tracking of important news about the online advertising outfit was disrupted. I have been trying to catch up with new product mist, AI razzle dazzle, and faint signals of importance. The first little beep I noticed appeared in “Google’s Voluntary Buyouts Lead its Internal Restructuring Efforts.” “Ah, ha,” I thought. After decades of recruiting the smartest people in the world, the Google is dumping full time equivalents. Is this a move to become more efficient? Google has indicated that it is into “efficiency”; therefore, has the Google redefined the term? Had Google figured out that the change to tax regulations about research investments sparked a re-thing? Is Google so much more advanced than other firms, its leadership can jettison staff who choose to bail with a gentle smile and an enthusiastic wave of leadership’s hand?
The home owner evidences a surge in blood pressure. The handyman explains that the new door has been installed in a “good enough” manner. If it works for service labor, it may work for Google-type outfits too. Thanks, Sam AI-Man. Your ChatGPT came through with a good enough cartoon. (Oh, don’t kill too many dolphins, snail darters, and lady bugs today, please.)
Then I read “Google Cloud Outage Brings Down a Lot of the Internet.” Enticed by the rock solid metrics for the concept of “a lot,” I noticed this statement:
Large swaths of the internet went down on Thursday (June 12, 2025), affecting a range of services, from global cloud platform Cloudflare to popular apps like Spotify. It appears that a Google Cloud outage is at the root of these other service disruptions.
What? Google the fail over champion par excellence went down. Will the issue be blamed on a faulty upgrade? Will a single engineer who will probably be given an opportunity to find his or her future elsewhere be identified? Will Google be able to figure out what happened?
What are the little beeps my system continuously receives about the Google?
- Wikipedia gets fewer clicks than OpenAI’s ChatGPT? Where’s the Google AI in this? Answer: Reorganizing, buying out staff, and experiencing outages.
- Google rolls out more Gemini functions for Android devices. Where’s the stability and service availability for these innovations? Answer: I cannot look up the answer. Google is down.
- Where’s the revenue from online advertising as traditional Web search presents some thunderclouds? Answer: Well, that is a good question. Maybe revenues from Waymo, a deal with Databricks, or a bump in Pixel phone sales?
My view is that the little beeps may become self-amplifying. The magic of the online advertising model seems to be fading like the allure of Disneyland. When imagineering becomes imitation, more than marketing fairy dust may be required.
But what’s evident from the tiny beeps is that Google is now operating in “good enough” mode. Will it be enough to replace the Yahoo-GoTo-Overture pay-to-play approach to traffic?
Maybe Waymo is the dark horse when the vehicles are not combustible?
Stephen E Arnold, June 16, 2025
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