alt Hacker NewsAnother takeaway: if Google can become a shell of what it once was (in terms of institutional competence, I assume you mean; Alphabet market cap seems to be doing just fine), so can your organization. As such: making something that isn't supposed to be part of your security strategy, look like it could be, is actually a long-term security risk. Sooner or later a new team will not read your own documentation, and jump to wrong conclusions. Also, it probably trains a bad security posture into your users. How many inexperienced devs saw that it was safe and expected (and apparently even required) to leave these keys out in the open, and concluded that the same logic might apply to someone else's API keys?
I think this was much less likely to happen without the needless obfuscation. If the only purpose is to identify what project the data is for, and you're trusting the client to report that value, and counseling the client to use that value in a way that trivially exposes it to everyone... what is the point of making it look like cryptic garbage? Just use the account signup name or something, and don't call it a "key" in your query parameters. Keys are supposed to unlock stuff. A name tag is not a key.
A thing I’ve learned about market cap in tech recently is that actually very little needs to get done on the core product. The momentum behind the brand is what carries the stock through time. The brand becomes its own compounding monetary instrument. Google had built a very very strong brand over the last 25 years or so. Only now is that starting to shift away from them. Because of that, I think we’ll start seeing them take more bold risks or they’ll be crushed by the weight of their own bureaucracy. This also tends to be the same reason startups can disrupt so swiftly.
An oversimplified version is this: So there are two core very critical components to the mid/late-phase tech megacorp strategy, you need to protect the core money printing product at all cost first and sustain that fiercely over a long period of time (decade+), then use any and all profits to find/fund the next cash cow, looking for optionality. While doing that, grow the market or consume a larger share of market. Google benefited from mainly the latter two and all while the internet blew up globally, funneling even more money into the machine.
It’s no secret that nearly every Google product that wasn’t search, lost them money. They were searching for the next big thing. They likely were some of the first to see AI as exactly that but moved too slowly to commercialize. Likely because of bureaucracy risk and also perhaps some sense of altruism in knowing the cataclysmic impacts AI could have. There have been plenty of former Google employees confirming this.
They also used to do things just to be cool, but those days have been long gone since Larry Page tapped out (and probably a few years before that, about a decade). Since then they’ve almost completely lost sight of what made them so successful that nobody even knows their vision or identity as a company today. These don’t correlate to market cap but they do silently lead to stagnation.
Their brand protects them from quite a lot but it’s not invincible.