7 ms·

Google parent Alphabet ushers in ‘fiscal discipline era’

69 points by e15ctr0n 11y ago

ChuckMcM 11y ago
Yeah, pretty much as expected [1] :-) A good friend of mine was at Cisco when this mindset hit really really hard. He said everyone learned to ask "Is what I am working on Core to Cisco's business?" because if the answer was "no" it meant you were on the way out until the answer was "yes". It certainly helped inject tension into the employees at Cisco. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10037511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10037511
- iaw 11y ago
  The writing was on the wall after they grabbed Ruth Porat from Morgan Stanley in 2015.
  - trhway 11y ago
    it is typical example of corporate self-contradiction - a splurge, on CFO in this case, as a first step to 'financial discipline'. Like inviting a wolf to teach and promote vegetarianism. I remember how Sun killed Wednesday donuts as basically a centerpiece of 'financial discipline' back then. Another remarkable act was to allow business class for a given person only after meeting some threshold of travel - you can guess how it played out - yea, people were basically 'forcing' themselves to fly more (and not to Alaska or Antarctica) to meet the threshold :)
- douche 11y ago
  Shades of Bill Lumbergh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0NNVm5ajMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0NNVm5ajMQ
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  It seems like business schools just don't teach how companies that are that big should be run. They teach all this stuff about externalizing costs and internalizing benefits, but when your company owns the entire market (or even half of it), you don't have to worry that much about how to internalize benefits and prevent free riding because you're going to get the bulk of the benefit from anything good that happens regardless. So you see these hundred billion dollar companies still doing highly inefficient things to internalize benefits as if they have a hundred competitors because that's what people have been taught, when they should be looking to the classic AT&T monopoly's example with Bell Labs. You have the cash for a hundred moonshots and you're cutting things that could be the future of the company? Why?
  - greglindahl 11y ago
    ... because none of them are going to succeed? That's an excellent reason to cut. Just look at Google's financials. If they "sacrifice the future" and nuke everything other than search and search advertisements, they'd make a LOT more profit.
    - zaidf 11y ago
      Apply that retreospectively and Android or YouTube would have never been part of Google. It is reasonable to argue that had that happened, googe's core search business would be under significantly more risk today.
      - 3pt14159 11y ago
        Neither of those examples are apt. YouTube was purchased and Android was a carefully planned, institutionally supported move in order to safeguard existing revenue streams. The closest thing I can think of happening at Google is Gmail, and that was over a decade ago.
    - spc476 11y ago
      Xerox PARC invented a lot of stuff we now take for granted, network computers, the GUI, object oriented programming, etc. And it wasn't cheap, and almost all of it has nothing to do with the core mission of Xerox. But one invention that popped out of PARC did---the laser printer. That one invention paid for Xerox PARC many times over (maybe a hundred times over---PARC spent a few million but the laser printer pulled in a few billion). Fundamental research is expensive in the short term, but it pays off handsomely in the long term (unfortunately, longer than Wall Street will allow it seems).
      - booop 11y ago
        > maybe a hundred times over---PARC spent a few million but the laser printer pulled in a few billion Difference being Xerox made billions after spending a few million on research. Alphabet/Google on the other hand have poured in billions into what are now called their 'Other Bets' over the past two years and despite what impact they've made the revenues have been dismal and growth was stagnant last year.
vgeek 11y ago
Tough news for anyone in the SEO industry. Better go ahead and get AdWords certified.
- Implicated 11y ago
  Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? I'm curious how this is going to effect SEO/PPC in your eyes.
  - datamingle 11y ago
    If Google hits tough times, they might have more adword clients to the top of search results instead of organic sites using SEO.
apalmer 11y ago
i am not sure i understand how this is supposed to work, if we are being really logical in the financial discipline shouldnt like 75% of alphabet subsidiaries shut down?
- iaw 11y ago
  If you're familiar with the Time Value of Money [1] you can compare the discounted future revenue streams from the non-profitable subsidiaries to their current cost of operations (vs. a sale price). Boston Dynamics is, conservatively, more than 5 years off from having a product that anyone will purchase (the marines don't want their bulldogs). Other non-profitable ventures may have more near-term revenue streams that outweigh their present cost of operation. Hope that makes sense. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_value_of_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_value_of_money
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    >you can compare the discounted future revenue streams from the non-profitable subsidiaries to their current cost of operations (vs. a sale price). Not really. CFOs like to think they can. But the idea that anyone can estimate the revenue stream of a company five years - five years - away from profitability is just entrail reading. No one can see that far ahead. And in Google's case, with the ad industry in serious danger, it needs to give itself as many options for medium term survival as possible. Relying on Google X or a cloud service to deliver isn't enough, IMO.
    - discodave 11y ago
      Cloud service (assuming you mean AWS/IaaS/PaaS competitor) is realistic since AWS is doing $10B run rate right now taking money out of legacy vendors like nobody's business.
dm8 11y ago
Isn't Google X that works on risky long term bets? And once projects graduate they are folded as new companies (or bets) within Alphabet. My understanding was that Google X is modeled after Google's own founding. Long term, research project that was successfully commercialized within 5-7 years (I believe Google started as a research project in 96). So once companies graduate in stable/mature businesses, shouldn't they be hold to any mature/public company standards?
- smaddox 11y ago
  Yeah, because splitting R&D into short term and long term commercial impact worked so great in academia. /s The valley of death is directly caused by this mindset. R&D in the middle doesn't get funded because either side thinks it's outside of their scope.
horsecaptin 11y ago
How often do we hear about Apple's internal changes in direction / philosophical shifts as they happen? How often do Apple's own employees hear about it?
InclinedPlane 11y ago
https://youtu.be/JBJh6U3Kv90?t=5 https://youtu.be/JBJh6U3Kv90?t=5 Seems like Google is all grown up now. How long until they are perceived by the public as being as stodgy and gross as IBM and Microsoft? The big downside here is that despite all of Google's amazing stock of talent they've been a remarkably dysfunctional company for most of their existence. They are almost genetically incapable of having real products (defined as things consumers pay for) or real customer relationships. They are absolutely horrible when it comes to investing in their businesses enough to see them to full maturity. Youtube and google docs (or drive or whatever they're calling it) could easily be multi-billion dollar businesses on their own, but their featureset, market stance, customer relations, etc. have been so poorly improved year over year that instead they merely stumble forward. A lot of this comes about because of google's corporate culture and business. Google revenue is basically all ads from google search plus some backbone networking (ISP/peering) business and then a tiny sliver of "other" (all of their "products"). Not only is there no priority for ramping up their other product lines into real businesses they are making so much money so easily from their main business there are no consequences for failure. So at google there's basically the main stuff that makes a ton of money and then everything else is a romper room of unseriousness and inconsequentiality. Add on to that google's quote flat unquote management structure and their median 1-year tenure and you have to really wonder how the business even functions at a basic level. In some ways they look like a towering monument of unassailable talent and market advantage, but in other ways they look like a teetering house of cards ready to fall over with the next stout breeze. And it seems like so much of the tech industry is in similar shape. No, I don't mean that it's all going to collapse tomorrow or anything like that, I just mean that it's shot through with strong veins of dysfunction at every level and through every aspect.
- douche 11y ago
  It is kind of amazing how Google let their lead in online office collaboration fizzle out. Now, Microsoft obviously is no slouch, but Google Docs was out with essentially the same feature set as it has now for nearly a decade before the online versions of Office in Office365 came out and became really useful. Now Office 365 is cleaning up in the old corporate settings where Office has always been dominant, plus racking up a lot of the education niche that Google Docs had gained a big share of.
zupreme 11y ago
This is unfortunate, but all too common among so-called "unicorn" startups. Often its their willingness to take big chances that gets them to the top of their market. But once they get there (especially after going public) the "adult supervision" takes over and they lose what made them successful in the first place almost as soon as the finance professionals or sales people take over. I'm not sure why it's so hard to understand that technology companies should be run by technology professionals. Would anyone walk into a hospital and suggest that it should be run by someone other than a doctor? Of course any successful tech company should employ finance professionals, but they should help the company achieve its mission, not define the mission.
- zenkat 11y ago
  You think hospitals are run by doctors? That's cute.
  - FD3SA 11y ago
    Your remark only holds in the magical wonderland that is the USA. Elsewhere, medical credentials are required.
  - e15ctr0n 11y ago
    Hospitals are run by hospital administrators who have special skills in this area and are usually not doctors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_administration Administrators and doctors usually loathe each other because they see things from very different points of view.
- anirudh24seven 11y ago
  I remember reading a PaulG essay[1] that explains why the above scenario happens. Willingness to take big chances might not hurt a small company as it does to a big company. Big companies try to maintain their position in their market rather than take big chances again & lose their position[2]. That essay goes on to say that this creates a chance for startups to make their presence felt, because big companies don't want to take risks anymore. [1] - I can't find the link right now. Will update this post, when I do [2] - This is slightly related to Gambler's fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy
pg_bot 11y ago
Google has lost its edge, I don't know any startups that are being built today that are worried about being put out of business by them. While they have been working on a bunch of products that have gotten a lot of PR in the last 3 years nothing they have built has stuck. Google+ and Glass were failures, their foray into hardware and robotics has been a mixed bag, and their core services have been stagnating. If I were to make a bold prediction, I don't think they will ever release another great product internally.
- raldi 11y ago
  I was gonna say Google Drive, but wow, it's nearly four years old at this point. Still, don't you think self-driving cars are going to be a huge success?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - greglindahl 11y ago
    No. If the only potential customers are huge car companies, they're going to prefer to build their own self-driving car tech to paying a high price for Google's.
    - raldi 11y ago
      Isn't that what they said about phones before 2007?
    - funwithjustin 11y ago
      That's hilarious. Most American car companies can barely build cars, let alone self-driving cars.
  - visarga 11y ago
    They are not going to come so soon, the fully automated ones. I have watched with interest for years the Google Self Driving Car project and they release very little actual information about the stage they are at and the problems they are solving.
msoad 11y ago
Google is the new Microsoft. Google's IPO filing stated that "Google is not an ordinary company and don't intent to be one" but it seems when a company has 60,000 employees it can't not be an ordinary big corporation. Facebook is the new Google I believe.
- anirudh24seven 11y ago
  I think Facebook, as a slightly younger company, seems to be on the same path as Google. Brilliant engineers, concerns around privacy, similar business models, big acquisitions, huge ambitions, etc. What would prevent Facebook from taking Google's path in a few years (assuming a similar scenario continues)?
  - visarga 11y ago
    Google, Microsoft and Apple have problems finding the next big thing, that's true. But, at the same time, Apple sits on millions of apps developed by external devs, same with Google and Microsoft. Each company has attracted a ton of developer investment and that portfolio will remain valuable.
    - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
      Yup, as long as they have the current market share, app devs won't invest in other platforms. Meaning Google and Apple (in mobile) and Microsoft (on desktop) can mostly rest on their laurels.
      - EvanPlaice 11y ago
        See React Native, and Universal Angular2. Both Facebook and Google are gearing up to aggresively go after the mobile market. Apple is stagnating after Steve Jobs' passing and both companies taste blood inn the water.
  - rachelbythebay 11y ago
    Nobody wants to go through that again.
nsxwolf 11y ago
Can we admit there is a downturn now, or are we still collectively denying it?
- mizchief2 11y ago
  The current generation of decision-making aged adults grew up watching Road Runner cartoons and know that you can run off the edge of a cliff indefinitely as long as you never look down.
simplemath 11y ago
>Her appointment was broadly seen as an effort to restore confidence in investors who were alarmed by increased spending and speculative investments in new technologies. I hate that this is how the world is.
AReallyGoodName 11y ago
Something to ponder. Engineer hiring at the big silicon valley firms usually consists of 3 intense rounds of technical interviews by peers and a huge amount of background checks and screening. Management hiring at the big silicon valley involves wining and dining with millions on the table and it has seen some spectacular examples of hiring MBAs with absolutely no past CEO experience - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carly_Fiorina#Hiring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carly_Fiorina#Hiring MBA degrees are by far the most common masters degree, 126,214 new MBAs graduating each year. Link - http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/there-are-officially-too-many-mbas/266880/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/there-ar... Meanwhile the number of new engineering graduates across all disciplines per year is 126,194. Link - http://www.computerworld.com/article/2508899/it-careers/obama---we-don-t-have-enough-engineers-.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2508899/it-careers/obam... This is leading to a cycle. Small startups run by the hard to hire engineers smash the competition. They then get established and stagnate, they stop hiring new engineers because it's too expensive (whilst hiring the more common MBAs for millions) and they stagnate because of this. Google came out of nowhere in the 90's as an innovative company of engineers. They became huge. They're now going into MBA focused stagnation mode just like HP, Yahoo, IBM and about a hundred other examples.
- carlosnunez 11y ago
  > Management hiring at the big silicon valley involves wining and dining with millions on the table and it has seen some spectacular examples of hiring MBAs with absolutely no past CEO experience Not quite. Hiring for high management positions is usually much more selective and fickle, and the risk for people in those positions to succeed is much MUCH higher than what most engineers need to deal with (hence the significantly larger compensation delta). I've never been to B-School, but if I had to posit a guess, they do do a better job of teaching people how to run existing companies in various scenarios than what most engineers learn over their career. (Also, keep in mind that the biggest value of going to an expensive B-School is the high value networking opportunities. This means that the school you choose matters A LOT. A lot of people get useless MBAs. :/ )
- rajacombinator 11y ago

69 points by e15ctr0n 11y ago

Yeah, pretty much as expected [1] :-) A good friend of mine was at Cisco when this mindset hit really really hard. He said everyone learned to ask "Is what I am working on Core to Cisco's business?" because if the answer was "no" it meant you were on the way out until the answer was "yes". It certainly helped inject tension into the employees at Cisco. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10037511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10037511

iaw 11y ago
The writing was on the wall after they grabbed Ruth Porat from Morgan Stanley in 2015.
- trhway 11y ago
  it is typical example of corporate self-contradiction - a splurge, on CFO in this case, as a first step to 'financial discipline'. Like inviting a wolf to teach and promote vegetarianism. I remember how Sun killed Wednesday donuts as basically a centerpiece of 'financial discipline' back then. Another remarkable act was to allow business class for a given person only after meeting some threshold of travel - you can guess how it played out - yea, people were basically 'forcing' themselves to fly more (and not to Alaska or Antarctica) to meet the threshold :)
douche 11y ago
Shades of Bill Lumbergh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0NNVm5ajMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0NNVm5ajMQ
AnthonyMouse 11y ago
It seems like business schools just don't teach how companies that are that big should be run. They teach all this stuff about externalizing costs and internalizing benefits, but when your company owns the entire market (or even half of it), you don't have to worry that much about how to internalize benefits and prevent free riding because you're going to get the bulk of the benefit from anything good that happens regardless. So you see these hundred billion dollar companies still doing highly inefficient things to internalize benefits as if they have a hundred competitors because that's what people have been taught, when they should be looking to the classic AT&T monopoly's example with Bell Labs. You have the cash for a hundred moonshots and you're cutting things that could be the future of the company? Why?
- greglindahl 11y ago
  ... because none of them are going to succeed? That's an excellent reason to cut. Just look at Google's financials. If they "sacrifice the future" and nuke everything other than search and search advertisements, they'd make a LOT more profit.
  - zaidf 11y ago
    Apply that retreospectively and Android or YouTube would have never been part of Google. It is reasonable to argue that had that happened, googe's core search business would be under significantly more risk today.
    - 3pt14159 11y ago
      Neither of those examples are apt. YouTube was purchased and Android was a carefully planned, institutionally supported move in order to safeguard existing revenue streams. The closest thing I can think of happening at Google is Gmail, and that was over a decade ago.
  - spc476 11y ago
    Xerox PARC invented a lot of stuff we now take for granted, network computers, the GUI, object oriented programming, etc. And it wasn't cheap, and almost all of it has nothing to do with the core mission of Xerox. But one invention that popped out of PARC did---the laser printer. That one invention paid for Xerox PARC many times over (maybe a hundred times over---PARC spent a few million but the laser printer pulled in a few billion). Fundamental research is expensive in the short term, but it pays off handsomely in the long term (unfortunately, longer than Wall Street will allow it seems).
    - booop 11y ago
      > maybe a hundred times over---PARC spent a few million but the laser printer pulled in a few billion Difference being Xerox made billions after spending a few million on research. Alphabet/Google on the other hand have poured in billions into what are now called their 'Other Bets' over the past two years and despite what impact they've made the revenues have been dismal and growth was stagnant last year.

vgeek 11y ago

Tough news for anyone in the SEO industry. Better go ahead and get AdWords certified.

Implicated 11y ago
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? I'm curious how this is going to effect SEO/PPC in your eyes.
- datamingle 11y ago
  If Google hits tough times, they might have more adword clients to the top of search results instead of organic sites using SEO.

apalmer 11y ago

i am not sure i understand how this is supposed to work, if we are being really logical in the financial discipline shouldnt like 75% of alphabet subsidiaries shut down?

iaw 11y ago
If you're familiar with the Time Value of Money [1] you can compare the discounted future revenue streams from the non-profitable subsidiaries to their current cost of operations (vs. a sale price). Boston Dynamics is, conservatively, more than 5 years off from having a product that anyone will purchase (the marines don't want their bulldogs). Other non-profitable ventures may have more near-term revenue streams that outweigh their present cost of operation. Hope that makes sense. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_value_of_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_value_of_money
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  >you can compare the discounted future revenue streams from the non-profitable subsidiaries to their current cost of operations (vs. a sale price). Not really. CFOs like to think they can. But the idea that anyone can estimate the revenue stream of a company five years - five years - away from profitability is just entrail reading. No one can see that far ahead. And in Google's case, with the ad industry in serious danger, it needs to give itself as many options for medium term survival as possible. Relying on Google X or a cloud service to deliver isn't enough, IMO.
  - discodave 11y ago
    Cloud service (assuming you mean AWS/IaaS/PaaS competitor) is realistic since AWS is doing $10B run rate right now taking money out of legacy vendors like nobody's business.

dm8 11y ago

Isn't Google X that works on risky long term bets? And once projects graduate they are folded as new companies (or bets) within Alphabet. My understanding was that Google X is modeled after Google's own founding. Long term, research project that was successfully commercialized within 5-7 years (I believe Google started as a research project in 96). So once companies graduate in stable/mature businesses, shouldn't they be hold to any mature/public company standards?

smaddox 11y ago
Yeah, because splitting R&D into short term and long term commercial impact worked so great in academia. /s The valley of death is directly caused by this mindset. R&D in the middle doesn't get funded because either side thinks it's outside of their scope.

horsecaptin 11y ago

How often do we hear about Apple's internal changes in direction / philosophical shifts as they happen? How often do Apple's own employees hear about it?

InclinedPlane 11y ago

https://youtu.be/JBJh6U3Kv90?t=5 https://youtu.be/JBJh6U3Kv90?t=5 Seems like Google is all grown up now. How long until they are perceived by the public as being as stodgy and gross as IBM and Microsoft? The big downside here is that despite all of Google's amazing stock of talent they've been a remarkably dysfunctional company for most of their existence. They are almost genetically incapable of having real products (defined as things consumers pay for) or real customer relationships. They are absolutely horrible when it comes to investing in their businesses enough to see them to full maturity. Youtube and google docs (or drive or whatever they're calling it) could easily be multi-billion dollar businesses on their own, but their featureset, market stance, customer relations, etc. have been so poorly improved year over year that instead they merely stumble forward. A lot of this comes about because of google's corporate culture and business. Google revenue is basically all ads from google search plus some backbone networking (ISP/peering) business and then a tiny sliver of "other" (all of their "products"). Not only is there no priority for ramping up their other product lines into real businesses they are making so much money so easily from their main business there are no consequences for failure. So at google there's basically the main stuff that makes a ton of money and then everything else is a romper room of unseriousness and inconsequentiality. Add on to that google's quote flat unquote management structure and their median 1-year tenure and you have to really wonder how the business even functions at a basic level. In some ways they look like a towering monument of unassailable talent and market advantage, but in other ways they look like a teetering house of cards ready to fall over with the next stout breeze. And it seems like so much of the tech industry is in similar shape. No, I don't mean that it's all going to collapse tomorrow or anything like that, I just mean that it's shot through with strong veins of dysfunction at every level and through every aspect.

douche 11y ago
It is kind of amazing how Google let their lead in online office collaboration fizzle out. Now, Microsoft obviously is no slouch, but Google Docs was out with essentially the same feature set as it has now for nearly a decade before the online versions of Office in Office365 came out and became really useful. Now Office 365 is cleaning up in the old corporate settings where Office has always been dominant, plus racking up a lot of the education niche that Google Docs had gained a big share of.

zupreme 11y ago

This is unfortunate, but all too common among so-called "unicorn" startups. Often its their willingness to take big chances that gets them to the top of their market. But once they get there (especially after going public) the "adult supervision" takes over and they lose what made them successful in the first place almost as soon as the finance professionals or sales people take over. I'm not sure why it's so hard to understand that technology companies should be run by technology professionals. Would anyone walk into a hospital and suggest that it should be run by someone other than a doctor? Of course any successful tech company should employ finance professionals, but they should help the company achieve its mission, not define the mission.

zenkat 11y ago
You think hospitals are run by doctors? That's cute.
- FD3SA 11y ago
  Your remark only holds in the magical wonderland that is the USA. Elsewhere, medical credentials are required.
- e15ctr0n 11y ago
  Hospitals are run by hospital administrators who have special skills in this area and are usually not doctors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_administration Administrators and doctors usually loathe each other because they see things from very different points of view.
anirudh24seven 11y ago
I remember reading a PaulG essay[1] that explains why the above scenario happens. Willingness to take big chances might not hurt a small company as it does to a big company. Big companies try to maintain their position in their market rather than take big chances again & lose their position[2]. That essay goes on to say that this creates a chance for startups to make their presence felt, because big companies don't want to take risks anymore. [1] - I can't find the link right now. Will update this post, when I do [2] - This is slightly related to Gambler's fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy

pg_bot 11y ago

Google has lost its edge, I don't know any startups that are being built today that are worried about being put out of business by them. While they have been working on a bunch of products that have gotten a lot of PR in the last 3 years nothing they have built has stuck. Google+ and Glass were failures, their foray into hardware and robotics has been a mixed bag, and their core services have been stagnating. If I were to make a bold prediction, I don't think they will ever release another great product internally.

raldi 11y ago
I was gonna say Google Drive, but wow, it's nearly four years old at this point. Still, don't you think self-driving cars are going to be a huge success?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- greglindahl 11y ago
  No. If the only potential customers are huge car companies, they're going to prefer to build their own self-driving car tech to paying a high price for Google's.
  - raldi 11y ago
    Isn't that what they said about phones before 2007?
  - funwithjustin 11y ago
    That's hilarious. Most American car companies can barely build cars, let alone self-driving cars.
- visarga 11y ago
  They are not going to come so soon, the fully automated ones. I have watched with interest for years the Google Self Driving Car project and they release very little actual information about the stage they are at and the problems they are solving.

msoad 11y ago

Google is the new Microsoft. Google's IPO filing stated that "Google is not an ordinary company and don't intent to be one" but it seems when a company has 60,000 employees it can't not be an ordinary big corporation. Facebook is the new Google I believe.

anirudh24seven 11y ago
I think Facebook, as a slightly younger company, seems to be on the same path as Google. Brilliant engineers, concerns around privacy, similar business models, big acquisitions, huge ambitions, etc. What would prevent Facebook from taking Google's path in a few years (assuming a similar scenario continues)?
- visarga 11y ago
  Google, Microsoft and Apple have problems finding the next big thing, that's true. But, at the same time, Apple sits on millions of apps developed by external devs, same with Google and Microsoft. Each company has attracted a ton of developer investment and that portfolio will remain valuable.
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    Yup, as long as they have the current market share, app devs won't invest in other platforms. Meaning Google and Apple (in mobile) and Microsoft (on desktop) can mostly rest on their laurels.
    - EvanPlaice 11y ago
      See React Native, and Universal Angular2. Both Facebook and Google are gearing up to aggresively go after the mobile market. Apple is stagnating after Steve Jobs' passing and both companies taste blood inn the water.
- rachelbythebay 11y ago
  Nobody wants to go through that again.

nsxwolf 11y ago

Can we admit there is a downturn now, or are we still collectively denying it?

mizchief2 11y ago
The current generation of decision-making aged adults grew up watching Road Runner cartoons and know that you can run off the edge of a cliff indefinitely as long as you never look down.

simplemath 11y ago

>Her appointment was broadly seen as an effort to restore confidence in investors who were alarmed by increased spending and speculative investments in new technologies. I hate that this is how the world is.

AReallyGoodName 11y ago

Something to ponder. Engineer hiring at the big silicon valley firms usually consists of 3 intense rounds of technical interviews by peers and a huge amount of background checks and screening. Management hiring at the big silicon valley involves wining and dining with millions on the table and it has seen some spectacular examples of hiring MBAs with absolutely no past CEO experience - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carly_Fiorina#Hiring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carly_Fiorina#Hiring MBA degrees are by far the most common masters degree, 126,214 new MBAs graduating each year. Link - http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/there-are-officially-too-many-mbas/266880/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/there-ar... Meanwhile the number of new engineering graduates across all disciplines per year is 126,194. Link - http://www.computerworld.com/article/2508899/it-careers/obama---we-don-t-have-enough-engineers-.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2508899/it-careers/obam... This is leading to a cycle. Small startups run by the hard to hire engineers smash the competition. They then get established and stagnate, they stop hiring new engineers because it's too expensive (whilst hiring the more common MBAs for millions) and they stagnate because of this. Google came out of nowhere in the 90's as an innovative company of engineers. They became huge. They're now going into MBA focused stagnation mode just like HP, Yahoo, IBM and about a hundred other examples.

carlosnunez 11y ago
> Management hiring at the big silicon valley involves wining and dining with millions on the table and it has seen some spectacular examples of hiring MBAs with absolutely no past CEO experience Not quite. Hiring for high management positions is usually much more selective and fickle, and the risk for people in those positions to succeed is much MUCH higher than what most engineers need to deal with (hence the significantly larger compensation delta). I've never been to B-School, but if I had to posit a guess, they do do a better job of teaching people how to run existing companies in various scenarios than what most engineers learn over their career. (Also, keep in mind that the biggest value of going to an expensive B-School is the high value networking opportunities. This means that the school you choose matters A LOT. A lot of people get useless MBAs. :/ )
rajacombinator 11y ago