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Larry Page, Google Founder, Is Still Innovator in Chief
- psbp 11y agoI have no problem with the guy, but has anyone noticed that there's a fluff piece about Larry nearly every year around this time?
- MCRed 11y agoMore than that I've noticed about 30 years of consistent and regular fluff pieces to glamorize people such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. One of the notable exceptions is Steve Jobs who stopped giving interviews to these kinds of reporters in the 1980s, and also stopped getting covers around that time (after that, if he's on a cover he's holding a new product.) One observable consequence of this is that Steve Jobs who gave us so much is widely reviled, while Bill Gates who destroyed the packaged software industry, almost killed the internet and went so far as to have schools raided by SWAT to make them buy windows licenses for their computers (computers that were Macs, by the way, back when Macs ran PowerPC and couldn't run windows anyway)... is widely regarded as a humanitarian[1]. Jeff Bezos (whom I've known personally) is widely regarded as a Tech guy (despite being really just a pointy haired boss.) There's a reason these guys spend money on PR-- the PR becomes the public perception. [1] I've been in the room when both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos lost their cool (three separate occasions, fortunately I was not the target.) Steve was quietly upset "how are we going to fix this?" and "we're never going to let this happen again, are we?" with all the weight those comments imply. Bezos and Gates both lit into the person with a clear intention to make their victims feel like nothing (both in different ways brought up the victims family as well.) I worked at Amazon and Microsoft, but not Apple.
- abawany 11y agoRe. Gates/humanitarian: he is not regarded as one for his work at Microsoft but due to his work at the Gates Foundation. Are you able to say that the world would be better off if the Gates Foundation did not exist?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- johansch 11y agoThe more relevant question is: would the world be better off if Microsoft (and thus also the Gates Foundation) never existed?
- Nullabillity 11y ago> One observable consequence of this is that Steve Jobs who gave us so much is widely reviled, while Bill Gates who destroyed the packaged software industry Hahaha, what? iOS set a huge negative precedence and pretty much killed off any hope for a mainstream phone that wasn't focused on consuming pre-approved content.
- eli 11y ago> iOS set a huge negative precedence That's unfair. Before iOS you typically had to go to your carrier's app store to download anything. Verizon's policies about who gets listed and how much it costs were much worse than iOS.
- enjo 11y agoPalmOS had a wide open app model and it was awesome.
- jshevek 11y agoYes. The iPhone was a huge step backwards in my opinion, but at the time the only people who seemed to understand this were PalmOS users.
- robotresearcher 11y agoAnd Blackberry users. Blackberry was pretty damn good.
- Nullabillity 11y agoEven S60 had a pretty decent open market.
- Spooky23 11y agoYes, the dozen applications available were great.
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- pboutros 11y agoTo be fair, Larry Page apparently declined several times to be interviewed for this article.
- tamana 11y agoJobs gave these interviews for Apple products not himself. He arranged massive puff pieces (magazine covers) on Apple and their products to coincide with launches of new products.
- tamana 11y agoJobs gave these interviews for Apple products not himself. He arranged massive puff pieces (magazine covers) on Apple and their products to coincide with launches of new products.
- lukasm 11y agoWas gonna say. But why? Just pure PR?
- ProAm 11y agoProbably because of Davos?
- IBM 11y agoI seem to read one around their earnings reports.
- ekianjo 11y agoJust like there is a piece on Musk every now and then. I dont mind either way but these articles are really shallow in substance.
- avmich 11y agoI'd like to know what innovation Larry brings to the company these days. Especially technical innovation, rather than managerial one, as the primary meaning of the word. Musk is the chief technical specialist in SpaceX, as he put himself. It's unclear what he does on this role, but his explanations are touching some rather deep details, so at least he looks like having a good understanding of technical aspects of SpaceX systems.
- colechristensen 11y agoAerospace vehicles are designed in a hierarchy with a whole lot of individuals specializing in one piece of one subsystem, but by the nature of aircraft everything is very codependent. You can't just design thermo, avionics, structures, aero, payload, etc. in a vacuum; the tiniest details of one subsystem have reverberating effects in all of the others. At the top you usually have a set of old guys (you might have read Skunk Works, those old guys are Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich in that book) but in this case Musk and likely a few others... a set of people who have to know a little bit about everything and enough to drive the important piece of engineering of the moment towards a successful project.
- tamana 11y agoWow some people think Musk is the chief technical specialist on SpaceX? That guy is an awesome self-promoter.
- ignoramous 11y agoLarry Page and Elon Musk probably have hired the same PR firm? Not a far fetched possibility given that they're friends with each other themselves.
- visakanv 11y ago
- hgh 11y agoAlphabet earnings report coming up: http://www.nasdaq.com/earnings/report/goog http://www.nasdaq.com/earnings/report/goog
- eva1984 11y agoAditorial
- rmason 11y agoI've got a tech friend who enrolled his young son in the local Montessori school. He told me once about how the lobby was full of successful people who had graduated like judges, congressmen, federal government officials and heads of non-profits. I told him that Larry Page was a graduate of that school and he was astounded. A while later he met with the headmaster and asked him why Page's picture wasn't featured in the lobby? He never got a direct answer but apparently they didn't feel that merely making a lot of money was enough of an accomplishment ;<).
- hanniabu 11y agoBollocks....by that argument, would have never though congressmen and government officials wasting a lot of money was an accomplishment.
- peter303 11y agoDoesnt sound like a very knowledgeable headmaster. Larry invented PageRank and did a respectable implementation of it before he had other engineers take it over. And only googlers know what he has done inside the company. Bill Gates gets a bad tech rap too, even though he was coding successful compilers himself for several years.
- noblethrasher 11y agoGates also made a significant mathematical discovery that wasn’t bested for 30 years[1], and he published a paper on it while he was a sophomore at Harvard. [1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92236781 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9223678...
- rtpg 11y agoI am constantly thinking of ways to apply pancake sorting in a real-life environment that doesn't involve working at IHOP
- jbigelow76 11y agoDoesnt sound like a very knowledgeable headmaster. Larry invented PageRank and did a respectable implementation of it before he had other engineers take it over. Here is a video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ, of everyday people trying to explain what a browser is, a browser, the most important piece of (general use) software developed since the word processor or spreadsheet. Try asking the general public what PageRank is, much less who invented it, and be prepared for a montage of silent deer-in-headlights responses with the occasional stammering about librarians for good measure :)
- meeper16 11y agoThis why I love Google. They are leaps and bounds by orders of magnitude above other companies like twitter, facebook, snapchat, linkedin etc. in terms of revenue, value and real innovation.
- surds 11y agoIMO, it is the attitude to take a leap at difficult and off-the-beaten-path projects ("MoonShots") that sets Google apart from many other large companies. Are they looking to profit? Sure. Does that mean that profit is the only motive? I don't think so. It takes guts to jump into a totally different area from what a company primarily does. It is probably an attitude that needs to be powered by the founders themselves. That way, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are appreciable too. Apple has its strengths, but they don't score well when you look at it from this perspective.
- millstone 11y agoGoogle doesn't leap, which implies commitment. Instead they dally. And it's not yet clear that this sort of dallying can actually produce results. It may even have the opposite effect, e.g. the way Glass ruined the wearables market.
- adventured 11y agoFive years from now the average consumer won't remember anything about the Glass fiasco and wearables will be everywhere. Glass didn't do anything to the wearables market of any consequence, at all. It couldn't have been more irrelevant. The only place it was relevant, for 15 minutes, was in a tiny little echo chamber in California. In what way has Google not been committed to eg autonomous vehicles or Google Fiber? They've produced amazing results already in both examples. The Google Fiber result alone is astounding and almost single-handedly responsible for the broadband speed boom going on in the US right now.
- millstone 11y agoIs Google committed to either of these? These are basically hobbies: there's no evidence that Google is pushing hard on them. Six years after starting, and they're still pilot programs at best. These are certainly cool technologies and producing amazing preliminary results. What I am questioning is whether this strategy of dipping their toes in a bunch of different ideas actually works. Google's hope seems to be to throw a bunch of stuff and see what sticks, whereas Apple's approach is to pick a few ideas, and then devote tremendous resources at it until they get it right. Google thinks that their autonomous vehicles will be ready for broad scale use by 2020, the same year that Elon Musk thinks Tesla will have their autonomous car ready, and the rumored date of the Apple car. So it doesn't seem that their head start allowed them to bring things to market any faster. Maybe Google's offering (in whatever form) will work way way better than its competition, but my guess is they'll be roughly comparable. And six years on, Google Fiber is only available in a tiny number of municipalities, and has a small fraction of the subscriber base of, say, Verizon Fios. Six years! I'm an outsider, but I speculate that these types of projects are low pressure. There's no revenues at stake, no expectation of profit, no hard deadlines, and probably no serious threat of cancellation. So it is not surprising that progress is slow. Recall that the literal moon shot - the Apollo program - was a national goal, set by the President, with an explicit deadline.
- dataker 11y agoIs this supposed to be a good thing? Something to be admired? With over 60000 employees, only one decides what technology will receive billions of dollars. See the problem?
- raldi 11y agoYes. A much better approach would be for all the shareholders of the company to elect a group of experts to periodically review Larry's ideas and sign off on his major capital outlays. We could refer to these people as the "Board of Directors".
- MaysonL 11y agoElected by Larry and Sergei.
- tamana 11y agoThat's not substantially different. How about some of those 60000 geniuses make some choices about what to pursue?
- raldi 11y agoThey do, in fact, have quite a bit of leeway. Eventually, though, when they need significant funding, or headcount, they ask their managers. As the project grows, it continues escalating, and if it's a major strategic commitment, it goes all the way up to the CEO and Board of Directors. It's worked really, really well for Google thus far; have you seen the long-term trend of their stock price? Nonetheless, if you'd like to change it, you're welcome to acquire a controlling share of the company, and then you can run it however you please.
- petke 11y agoSounds like he is getting sidelined. He gets a pie in the sky job where he can do less harm to profits ... And the running of the core advertisement business is left to harder men.