16 ms·

Google's CEO is increasingly boxed in by regulators, critics, and employees

190 points by mastazi 9y ago

wonder_bread 9y ago
Headline is pretty clickbaity
- dang 9y ago
  We've changed it to language from the subtitle.
buttsu 9y ago
This is a pretty funny headline
losteverything 9y ago
Paywall
- Jesus_Jones 9y ago
  open the link in anonymous mode and it works.
- camus2 9y ago
  An archive of the article : http://archive.is/UP8Ze http://archive.is/UP8Ze
misterHN 9y ago
Google does not have adult supervision. Their employees are as disconnected from reality as the Soviets, and Google is now living the reality that Kennan described in the "Long Telegram". In particular, Google is unaware of - the California food cartel - the California sex industry - the California undocumented immigrant crisis Whereas Google was founded on the principle of organizing the world's information, it currently is in the business of denying vital and important news to Californians. Google has become filth. It has become an embarrassment. There is no reason for Californians to be proud of Google. Google is a scam.
ch4s3 9y ago
The article title is "Everyone’s Mad at Google and Sundar Pichai Has to Fix It" The very short TL:DR is that Pichai is beset on all sides by people who expect Google to move mountains, reinvent itself. It goes on to discuss Pichai is a leader/person and ends on the quote "As Pichai has learned, Big Tech companies can no longer skate by on faith in their fundamental benevolence"
- the_cat_kittles 9y ago
  i personally think "Big Tech companies can no longer skate by on faith in their fundamental benevolence" is a very good thing that deserves to be embraced. its kind of insane its taken this long, really. while being able to trust companies is ideal, i think there have been enough real examples now that its worth being much more skeptical of tech companies. i wonder if the crazy faith we used to have was a byproduct of some combination of big tech's interests being mostly aligned with the public, and the public being unaware of the activities big tech was up to that weren't.
  - rhizome 9y ago
    Everybody loves an underdog, and for decades the personal computer and internet industries were not dominant at a national scale. Now they are, so they don't get the built-in support of underdog status anymore.
- yahna 9y ago
  > Pichai is beset on all sides by people who expect Google to move mountains, reinvent itself TIL not showing fake news or having your advertisers associated with ISIS videos is "moving mountains".
  - zaphar 9y ago
    You have a ready made fool proof automated solution to detecting an ISIS video or fake news ready to go? Because at the scale of youtube you can't do it with manual checking. If you do then Google would probably pay for it. If not then, yes, these two things qualify as moving mountains.
nugget 9y ago
Google should learn from old Microsoft's mistakes and voluntarily become more partner-centric before they are forced down that road by the Government.
- jayd16 9y ago
  In what way is Microsoft more partner friendly than Google?
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    You can install Linux distributions and run them in Windows from Microsoft's own store. The bulk of .NET is open source. VSCode is pretty good. No one seems worried Microsoft will suddenly shut Azure down or lock non-Windows operating systems out. They did a lot of work to make git work on huge, complicated projects (for Windows) and shared it. (https://github.com/Microsoft/git https://github.com/Microsoft/git) Meanwhile, Google is...well, where are they? They never did give us that Linux Google Drive client they promised. They announce products then shut them down, so no one can really trust their products. Even the ones we had before Google lost its way (I miss Reader's trends feature). Aside from whoever's on the Takeout team, Google seems to have stopped caring about sharing and working with others.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      There's plenty to criticize in Google, but this idea that MS is suddenly so much better is absurd, in my opinion. Microsoft open sourced .NET. Meanwhile, Google... open sourced Android, Chromium (including V8), Tensorflow, Go, Dart, Angular, Kubernetes, and literally hundreds of other projects. They also fund Let's Encrypt and contributions to third-party OSS projects on their annual Summer of Code. And Microsoft was discontinued plenty of products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Microsoft_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Microsof... Finally, MS still uses patents as attack weapons, which AFAIK Google has never done.
      - kuschku 9y ago
jbob2000 9y ago
I guess when you want to control everything and position yourself as the controller of all things, then people expect you to do that. Google's problem is that it's too big and some of their core values are starting to become mutually exclusive of each other; you can't be a "you"tube where anyone can upload anything but also pull in TV-level advertising dollars.
ColanR 9y ago
So what is this? A big PR piece so we'll feel all sorry for 'that poor Google CEO that's got such a tough job'? (first paragraph, he talks about how he's "not good at multitasking", and some things are "difficult".) At least, that's what I'm thinking after reading the article. it kinda makes sense, too, that Google is looking for a bit of a breather after this much coming against them. Still, I think the stuff they're dealing with is pretty much what they asked for. - ads next to "unseemly" youtube videos: this is their core business, and in every other place you buy ads it matters where those ads are placed and who sees them and in what context. This problem is exactly what Google is expected to solve. - gender inequality: this seems to come with the territory. every other CEO in the US, not to mention North America & Europe (etc.) is dealing with this too. - staff protest about Trump immigration policy: the CEO was on their side. In his words, "the fight will continue." He doesn't get to say this is a headache he's got to deal with when he takes that kind of approach. - a big regulatory fine. From what I've heard, it's almost impossible that Google wasn't rather careless in letting this happen. 'ask forgiveness, not permission' seems to be a mantra that Google follows, and this seems to be an instance where they're now asking forgiveness. - and finally, Google is 'too big' and people are worried about its power. "boo hoo, we were too successful." [sources for everything are in the main article or linked from it] Deal with it, Sundar Pichai. You've got the same job every other CEO has got, and the same pressure. Buck up.
- autokad 9y ago
  agree. i wouldnt be surprised if they weren't paid by google, doing something for a google employee, or invested in google.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Google does not pay for articles, AFAIK. However, having a high profile individual like Sundar Pichai interview with you has huge benefits for cash flow anyways: Your ad revenue will skyrocket, because other major sites will also cite you and link to you as they also post the story. Google does not have to pay a site for the site to profit from promoting Google. The big thing is, Google will not grant it's exclusive interview treatment to news sources which are heavily critical of them, which means that any news site or blog which gets interviews with Googlers isn't going to risk that revenue source by getting on the Google press folks' bad side. This is why sites like The Verge which regularly get insider treatment, and interviews with Sundar Pichai, Matias Duarte, and Astro Teller will never really write a truly critical article about Google.
maxxxxx 9y ago
I am actually happy that life becomes more difficult the bigger companies get. It was a good thing that Microsoft got some heat in the 90s and stopped dominating the market. I hope that Facebook and Apple also will also get more scrutiny.
- sosuke 9y ago
  I wonder if Apple is getting less scrutiny because they are staying out of sharing any private information with third parties and even trying to prevent themselves from being able to see it.
  - pwinnski 9y ago
    And yet as part of "less scrutiny," they lost a case in which they tried to disrupt the Amazon ebook near-monopoly.
    - rainbowmverse 9y ago
      Using behavior of oligarchies (price fixing) to fight a monopoly was maybe not the best strategy if they wanted to earn any sympathy.
- miniapp 9y ago
  All those firms you've mentioned are already too big. Anything they do will generate scrutiny so they've stopped innovating. That's why Google is trying to take up role as an 'angel investor.' https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/13/google-and-amazon-are-ready-to-disrupt-small-business-lending-former-obama-advisor-says.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/13/google-and-amazon-are-ready-...
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Trying to take up? Google Ventures is almost a decade old. Also, there's no actual facts about Google in that article.
  - stingrae 9y ago
narrator 9y ago
With political power comes political problems.
sosuke 9y ago
I didn't know that Sergey Brin and Larry Page still held 51% of the company. That feels unreal.
- hemancuso 9y ago
  51% of the voting shares
  - wonder_bread 9y ago
    If they still owned 51% of the company their respective net worth would make even Bezos seem paltry
    - maxxxxx 9y ago
      Market cap is around 700 billion at the moment.
ithilglin909 9y ago
With great power comes great scrutiny. And rightly so.
notsbrin 9y ago
if we as a society idolized our leaders less, leaders would not have it this hard. But we idolize them in big part because they are encouraging it. So that's where perhaps leaders should start: don't idolize me, I am a person, with similar deficiencies that you all have.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
alexnewman 9y ago
Pretty easy. Google will innovate like a startup or die slowly. All the other stuff is noise
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  They will probably end up like Microsoft or Oracle. Solid companies but the magic is gone. Same probably for Apple after Jobs.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Agreed. Mostly because the amount of cash companies like Google and Apple have mean they can afford to not be magical for a long time. They have plenty of cash they can burn while trying to regain that magic. After Microsoft lost it's pedestal, it didn't go anywhere remarkable until Nadella's big cloud services push, where they have changed up quite a bit and reentered the marketplace in a big way. There may just be a point a company becomes too large to ever completely die, since they have enough cash to spend decades looking for a way to revitalize themselves. Though I say that as we've seen former giants like Sears be brought to the brink of death.
    - cromwellian 9y ago
      I don't know why this was voted down, but there is merit to it. Successful, world changing product launches are mostly serendipity, luck, and timing. You could have the right product at the wrong time, or the wrong product at the right time, or both. Most of the home runs (Google Search, iPod, iPhone, Windows 95, etc) happened because of simultaneous fit of product and time. I'd argue the original Mac was too early, and Win95 was timed right. In 1984, the vast majority of people weren't ready for a home computer, especially at $5000+ in 2017 dollars. Computing was still highly technical and reserved for specialists -- even though the Mac wanted to change that. It wasn't until the mid 90s and into 2000s, where hundreds of millions of people were ready to integrate computers as "must haves" as part of their life. Microsoft rode that wave, the way Google rode the wave of the internet explosion, and Apple rode the wave of the mobile that had been building. Everyone's looking for the "next big thing", they're spending money like crazy in a thousand different directions: AI, AR, VR, Health, Cars, etc. But no one knows. There's the assumption that it's AI, because of the scale, but does AI need a big company? Part of the assumption is you need lots of data, an inherent advantage for big companies, but what if you don't? AlphaGoZero just proved, that unlike AlphaGo, you can start with nothing, and still succeed. Silicon Valley executives fear the big AI breakthrough will happen at a small startup, come out of nowhere, and disrupt them. AI firms are being bought almost as soon as they form with no product. All the while, what if the next big breakthrough isn't even AI? What if it's battery chemistry? If someone discovers a battery with just 10x the density, it would change everything. For example, drones could fly for 5 hours instead of 30 minutes. What would that enable? It's hard to compute what the downstream effects of small disruptive changes in tech will bring, and if history is any guide, new companies will come out of no where with shocking results. One of the things small scrappy startups can do is, ignore the bad rep and government oversight. A large company that missteps will grab the world's attention, so they have to be risk averse, which means slow. Google can't ship a self driving car that kills people, but startups can ship self driving aftermarket add-ons that do, because in the worst case, they lose the investors money, and they start another company, they don't end up exploding $200 billion in market cap.
throwaway187234 9y ago
Recent Xoogler. My observations/opinions: - To many inside, the company feels like it lacks direction. It feels like the leadership doesn't know where to take Google and this pervades pretty much everything; - There is a lot of discontent at the the amount of money Google throws at executives. I mean Sundar got paid ~$200m LAST YEAR. Levandowski got $120m+. Back in the day, Patrick Pachette was parising the benefits of scrappiness, which saved $40m in travel costs that year. Incidentally, his was paid ~$40m extra that year; - It feels like there are constant reorgs going on. This plays into the directionless point above but is also symptomatic of politics run amok and middle managers creating work for themselves and covering their asses. I mean a decision can never be judged good or bad if it lasts at most 6 months before another reorg. - Some units were deliberately keep apart from Google. Most notably Youtube, Android and X. This exacerbates a cultural drift such that Google is really becoming autonomous and separate business units; - Internal mobility is harder than it used to be and also less advisable for your career, as a general rule. - It takes too long to do pretty much anything, particularly anything UI related. This is in part because UI work is looked down upon by the engineering leadership and the tech stacks are like 10 years behind the rest of the world. - Sundar came up through Chrome and still seemed to me see everything through a Chrome colored lens. Chrome in particular had (has?) a bad rep for hazing and their retention numbers for women engineers in particularly aren't great. - Google promotion culture seems to value individual technical ability above all else. I can see how this breeds the views of the likes of Damore. Worse, it seems like a lot of PAs tolerate someone being an ass if they're a high performer, which is an unfortunate reward loop. - This all said, there are a lot of talented and great people and projects at Google. At the same time you could probably get rid of half the company because they don't really seem to have anything to do. - Left to their own devices teams will create work for themselves. This is most apparent in Maps, which definitely went through a period of new work and features making the experience decidedly worse by, say, unifying data pipelines because consistency to some is an absolute good. - The effects of Vic's disastrous reign can still be felt and Larry needs to take the ultimate blame for that. - There seems to be little or no regard for the harm in burning user trust. This comes in many forms but includes announcing projects and then cancelling or abandoning them.
- camus2 9y ago
yahna 9y ago
> Discussing the issue, Pichai deploys the vocabulary of an apologetic CEO that’s become de rigueur in Silicon Valley since last November. He says the word “thoughtful” 13 times and “deeply” (feeling, listening, en I'm reminded of the BP CEO on South Park. Not that he's actually anything like that guy, it's just what comes to mind. > Pichai’s solution to the gnawing problems of fake news and illicit content that slip through Google artificial intelligence is, no surprise, more artificial intelligence Of course it is. What do they say the definition of insanity is again? > has stirred general alarm about AI; he thinks computers that make their own decisions and are smarter than people could enslave humanity. at least google isn't saying this.
raldi 9y ago
> Google has historically stumbled in the difficult business of hardware, despite several multibillion-dollar attempts, including the $12 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility (since sold off for $2.9 billion) Are we really still repeating this nonsense? The $2.9B number quoted above was merely what Google sold Motorola Mobility's handset division for. It also sold the company's set-top box division for another $2.35B, plus it kept the $2.9B cash hoard that came with the acquisition, and additionally $2.4B in tax credits and a patent portfolio valued at around $4B. Add those numbers up, and you get $14.55B. Source: https://seekingalpha.com/article/1987261-googles-acquisition-of-motorola-not-such-a-failure-after-all https://seekingalpha.com/article/1987261-googles-acquisition... Another source, with somewhat different numbers, but in the same ballpark and an order of magnitude above what Bloomberg reported: https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/did-google-really-lose-on-its-original-motorola-deal/?_r=0 https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/did-google-really-lo...
- bitmapbrother 9y ago
  I expect these types of inaccurate financial reporting to come from Forbes, not Bloomberg.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  Revenue from selling the set-top box division, cash, and tax credits are all cash-like and easily countable. Do they have revenue from the patents? In the standard model of tech patent ownership, wherein you accumulate a big hoard of patents so that you can threaten to countersue anyone who sues you for patent infringement, a patent portfolio valued at $4B would be worth nothing to Google -- they already have patents.
  - raldi 9y ago
    Even if the patents were worth $0, there's a big difference between a basket of assets worth $2.9B and a basket of assets worth $10.55B.
    - thaumasiotes 9y ago
faragon 9y ago
What about Elon Musk or John Carmack running Google? I would love it.
dogruck 9y ago
Oh no, the internet search-driven-advertising monopoly is getting some static from regulators. Not Fair! Maybe the CEO should have a 3 martini lunch with some Investment Bank CEOs.
dingo_bat 9y ago
Awww... the poor multi-millionaire has actual hard-work to do! How pitiful!
whatyoucantsay 9y ago
Putting Sundar Pichai in this highly public position was a great move for the founders.
Gatsky 9y ago
I don't get why Google cops so much flack. Other companies which are considerably less useful (facebook), more intrusive (facebook), actively manipulate user psychology (facebook), sell highly addictive harmful products (Snap inc, big tobacco) or are destroying the planet (the frackers, Schlumberger), seem to escape much criticism.
known 9y ago
Once a company gets listed in NYSE, govt should impose tax on its revenues, not profits;
Khaine 9y ago
This just sounds like whining from someone who gets paid a metric shit-ton of money to run google. Frankly, he should just shut-up and get on with his job, If its too fking hard, resign.
badwulf 9y ago
> Pichai says he’s also considering promoting vetted news sources in Google’s News search results—elevating, say, articles in the Las Vegas Review-Journal over posts on the anything-goes bulletin boards 4chan or Reddit Inc. “We want to be balanced in making sure a range of perspectives are available, but I think a flight to quality is important,” This is coming from a company that fires people who have different opinions. Even if Google's track record was spotless I still wouldn't trust a single company with my news.

190 points by mastazi 9y ago

wonder_bread 9y ago

Headline is pretty clickbaity

dang 9y ago
We've changed it to language from the subtitle.

buttsu 9y ago

This is a pretty funny headline

losteverything 9y ago

Paywall

Jesus_Jones 9y ago
open the link in anonymous mode and it works.
camus2 9y ago
An archive of the article : http://archive.is/UP8Ze http://archive.is/UP8Ze

misterHN 9y ago

Google does not have adult supervision. Their employees are as disconnected from reality as the Soviets, and Google is now living the reality that Kennan described in the "Long Telegram". In particular, Google is unaware of - the California food cartel - the California sex industry - the California undocumented immigrant crisis Whereas Google was founded on the principle of organizing the world's information, it currently is in the business of denying vital and important news to Californians. Google has become filth. It has become an embarrassment. There is no reason for Californians to be proud of Google. Google is a scam.

ch4s3 9y ago

The article title is "Everyone’s Mad at Google and Sundar Pichai Has to Fix It" The very short TL:DR is that Pichai is beset on all sides by people who expect Google to move mountains, reinvent itself. It goes on to discuss Pichai is a leader/person and ends on the quote "As Pichai has learned, Big Tech companies can no longer skate by on faith in their fundamental benevolence"

the_cat_kittles 9y ago
i personally think "Big Tech companies can no longer skate by on faith in their fundamental benevolence" is a very good thing that deserves to be embraced. its kind of insane its taken this long, really. while being able to trust companies is ideal, i think there have been enough real examples now that its worth being much more skeptical of tech companies. i wonder if the crazy faith we used to have was a byproduct of some combination of big tech's interests being mostly aligned with the public, and the public being unaware of the activities big tech was up to that weren't.
- rhizome 9y ago
  Everybody loves an underdog, and for decades the personal computer and internet industries were not dominant at a national scale. Now they are, so they don't get the built-in support of underdog status anymore.
yahna 9y ago
> Pichai is beset on all sides by people who expect Google to move mountains, reinvent itself TIL not showing fake news or having your advertisers associated with ISIS videos is "moving mountains".
- zaphar 9y ago
  You have a ready made fool proof automated solution to detecting an ISIS video or fake news ready to go? Because at the scale of youtube you can't do it with manual checking. If you do then Google would probably pay for it. If not then, yes, these two things qualify as moving mountains.

nugget 9y ago

Google should learn from old Microsoft's mistakes and voluntarily become more partner-centric before they are forced down that road by the Government.

jayd16 9y ago
In what way is Microsoft more partner friendly than Google?
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  You can install Linux distributions and run them in Windows from Microsoft's own store. The bulk of .NET is open source. VSCode is pretty good. No one seems worried Microsoft will suddenly shut Azure down or lock non-Windows operating systems out. They did a lot of work to make git work on huge, complicated projects (for Windows) and shared it. (https://github.com/Microsoft/git https://github.com/Microsoft/git) Meanwhile, Google is...well, where are they? They never did give us that Linux Google Drive client they promised. They announce products then shut them down, so no one can really trust their products. Even the ones we had before Google lost its way (I miss Reader's trends feature). Aside from whoever's on the Takeout team, Google seems to have stopped caring about sharing and working with others.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    There's plenty to criticize in Google, but this idea that MS is suddenly so much better is absurd, in my opinion. Microsoft open sourced .NET. Meanwhile, Google... open sourced Android, Chromium (including V8), Tensorflow, Go, Dart, Angular, Kubernetes, and literally hundreds of other projects. They also fund Let's Encrypt and contributions to third-party OSS projects on their annual Summer of Code. And Microsoft was discontinued plenty of products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Microsoft_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Microsof... Finally, MS still uses patents as attack weapons, which AFAIK Google has never done.
    - kuschku 9y ago

jbob2000 9y ago

I guess when you want to control everything and position yourself as the controller of all things, then people expect you to do that. Google's problem is that it's too big and some of their core values are starting to become mutually exclusive of each other; you can't be a "you"tube where anyone can upload anything but also pull in TV-level advertising dollars.

ColanR 9y ago

So what is this? A big PR piece so we'll feel all sorry for 'that poor Google CEO that's got such a tough job'? (first paragraph, he talks about how he's "not good at multitasking", and some things are "difficult".) At least, that's what I'm thinking after reading the article. it kinda makes sense, too, that Google is looking for a bit of a breather after this much coming against them. Still, I think the stuff they're dealing with is pretty much what they asked for. - ads next to "unseemly" youtube videos: this is their core business, and in every other place you buy ads it matters where those ads are placed and who sees them and in what context. This problem is exactly what Google is expected to solve. - gender inequality: this seems to come with the territory. every other CEO in the US, not to mention North America & Europe (etc.) is dealing with this too. - staff protest about Trump immigration policy: the CEO was on their side. In his words, "the fight will continue." He doesn't get to say this is a headache he's got to deal with when he takes that kind of approach. - a big regulatory fine. From what I've heard, it's almost impossible that Google wasn't rather careless in letting this happen. 'ask forgiveness, not permission' seems to be a mantra that Google follows, and this seems to be an instance where they're now asking forgiveness. - and finally, Google is 'too big' and people are worried about its power. "boo hoo, we were too successful." [sources for everything are in the main article or linked from it] Deal with it, Sundar Pichai. You've got the same job every other CEO has got, and the same pressure. Buck up.

autokad 9y ago
agree. i wouldnt be surprised if they weren't paid by google, doing something for a google employee, or invested in google.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Google does not pay for articles, AFAIK. However, having a high profile individual like Sundar Pichai interview with you has huge benefits for cash flow anyways: Your ad revenue will skyrocket, because other major sites will also cite you and link to you as they also post the story. Google does not have to pay a site for the site to profit from promoting Google. The big thing is, Google will not grant it's exclusive interview treatment to news sources which are heavily critical of them, which means that any news site or blog which gets interviews with Googlers isn't going to risk that revenue source by getting on the Google press folks' bad side. This is why sites like The Verge which regularly get insider treatment, and interviews with Sundar Pichai, Matias Duarte, and Astro Teller will never really write a truly critical article about Google.

maxxxxx 9y ago

I am actually happy that life becomes more difficult the bigger companies get. It was a good thing that Microsoft got some heat in the 90s and stopped dominating the market. I hope that Facebook and Apple also will also get more scrutiny.

sosuke 9y ago
I wonder if Apple is getting less scrutiny because they are staying out of sharing any private information with third parties and even trying to prevent themselves from being able to see it.
- pwinnski 9y ago
  And yet as part of "less scrutiny," they lost a case in which they tried to disrupt the Amazon ebook near-monopoly.
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    Using behavior of oligarchies (price fixing) to fight a monopoly was maybe not the best strategy if they wanted to earn any sympathy.
miniapp 9y ago
All those firms you've mentioned are already too big. Anything they do will generate scrutiny so they've stopped innovating. That's why Google is trying to take up role as an 'angel investor.' https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/13/google-and-amazon-are-ready-to-disrupt-small-business-lending-former-obama-advisor-says.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/13/google-and-amazon-are-ready-...
- icebraining 9y ago
  Trying to take up? Google Ventures is almost a decade old. Also, there's no actual facts about Google in that article.
- stingrae 9y ago

narrator 9y ago

With political power comes political problems.

sosuke 9y ago

I didn't know that Sergey Brin and Larry Page still held 51% of the company. That feels unreal.

hemancuso 9y ago
51% of the voting shares
- wonder_bread 9y ago
  If they still owned 51% of the company their respective net worth would make even Bezos seem paltry
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    Market cap is around 700 billion at the moment.

ithilglin909 9y ago

With great power comes great scrutiny. And rightly so.

notsbrin 9y ago

if we as a society idolized our leaders less, leaders would not have it this hard. But we idolize them in big part because they are encouraging it. So that's where perhaps leaders should start: don't idolize me, I am a person, with similar deficiencies that you all have.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

alexnewman 9y ago

Pretty easy. Google will innovate like a startup or die slowly. All the other stuff is noise

maxxxxx 9y ago
They will probably end up like Microsoft or Oracle. Solid companies but the magic is gone. Same probably for Apple after Jobs.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Agreed. Mostly because the amount of cash companies like Google and Apple have mean they can afford to not be magical for a long time. They have plenty of cash they can burn while trying to regain that magic. After Microsoft lost it's pedestal, it didn't go anywhere remarkable until Nadella's big cloud services push, where they have changed up quite a bit and reentered the marketplace in a big way. There may just be a point a company becomes too large to ever completely die, since they have enough cash to spend decades looking for a way to revitalize themselves. Though I say that as we've seen former giants like Sears be brought to the brink of death.
  - cromwellian 9y ago
    I don't know why this was voted down, but there is merit to it. Successful, world changing product launches are mostly serendipity, luck, and timing. You could have the right product at the wrong time, or the wrong product at the right time, or both. Most of the home runs (Google Search, iPod, iPhone, Windows 95, etc) happened because of simultaneous fit of product and time. I'd argue the original Mac was too early, and Win95 was timed right. In 1984, the vast majority of people weren't ready for a home computer, especially at $5000+ in 2017 dollars. Computing was still highly technical and reserved for specialists -- even though the Mac wanted to change that. It wasn't until the mid 90s and into 2000s, where hundreds of millions of people were ready to integrate computers as "must haves" as part of their life. Microsoft rode that wave, the way Google rode the wave of the internet explosion, and Apple rode the wave of the mobile that had been building. Everyone's looking for the "next big thing", they're spending money like crazy in a thousand different directions: AI, AR, VR, Health, Cars, etc. But no one knows. There's the assumption that it's AI, because of the scale, but does AI need a big company? Part of the assumption is you need lots of data, an inherent advantage for big companies, but what if you don't? AlphaGoZero just proved, that unlike AlphaGo, you can start with nothing, and still succeed. Silicon Valley executives fear the big AI breakthrough will happen at a small startup, come out of nowhere, and disrupt them. AI firms are being bought almost as soon as they form with no product. All the while, what if the next big breakthrough isn't even AI? What if it's battery chemistry? If someone discovers a battery with just 10x the density, it would change everything. For example, drones could fly for 5 hours instead of 30 minutes. What would that enable? It's hard to compute what the downstream effects of small disruptive changes in tech will bring, and if history is any guide, new companies will come out of no where with shocking results. One of the things small scrappy startups can do is, ignore the bad rep and government oversight. A large company that missteps will grab the world's attention, so they have to be risk averse, which means slow. Google can't ship a self driving car that kills people, but startups can ship self driving aftermarket add-ons that do, because in the worst case, they lose the investors money, and they start another company, they don't end up exploding $200 billion in market cap.

throwaway187234 9y ago

Recent Xoogler. My observations/opinions: - To many inside, the company feels like it lacks direction. It feels like the leadership doesn't know where to take Google and this pervades pretty much everything; - There is a lot of discontent at the the amount of money Google throws at executives. I mean Sundar got paid ~$200m LAST YEAR. Levandowski got $120m+. Back in the day, Patrick Pachette was parising the benefits of scrappiness, which saved $40m in travel costs that year. Incidentally, his was paid ~$40m extra that year; - It feels like there are constant reorgs going on. This plays into the directionless point above but is also symptomatic of politics run amok and middle managers creating work for themselves and covering their asses. I mean a decision can never be judged good or bad if it lasts at most 6 months before another reorg. - Some units were deliberately keep apart from Google. Most notably Youtube, Android and X. This exacerbates a cultural drift such that Google is really becoming autonomous and separate business units; - Internal mobility is harder than it used to be and also less advisable for your career, as a general rule. - It takes too long to do pretty much anything, particularly anything UI related. This is in part because UI work is looked down upon by the engineering leadership and the tech stacks are like 10 years behind the rest of the world. - Sundar came up through Chrome and still seemed to me see everything through a Chrome colored lens. Chrome in particular had (has?) a bad rep for hazing and their retention numbers for women engineers in particularly aren't great. - Google promotion culture seems to value individual technical ability above all else. I can see how this breeds the views of the likes of Damore. Worse, it seems like a lot of PAs tolerate someone being an ass if they're a high performer, which is an unfortunate reward loop. - This all said, there are a lot of talented and great people and projects at Google. At the same time you could probably get rid of half the company because they don't really seem to have anything to do. - Left to their own devices teams will create work for themselves. This is most apparent in Maps, which definitely went through a period of new work and features making the experience decidedly worse by, say, unifying data pipelines because consistency to some is an absolute good. - The effects of Vic's disastrous reign can still be felt and Larry needs to take the ultimate blame for that. - There seems to be little or no regard for the harm in burning user trust. This comes in many forms but includes announcing projects and then cancelling or abandoning them.

camus2 9y ago

yahna 9y ago

> Discussing the issue, Pichai deploys the vocabulary of an apologetic CEO that’s become de rigueur in Silicon Valley since last November. He says the word “thoughtful” 13 times and “deeply” (feeling, listening, en I'm reminded of the BP CEO on South Park. Not that he's actually anything like that guy, it's just what comes to mind. > Pichai’s solution to the gnawing problems of fake news and illicit content that slip through Google artificial intelligence is, no surprise, more artificial intelligence Of course it is. What do they say the definition of insanity is again? > has stirred general alarm about AI; he thinks computers that make their own decisions and are smarter than people could enslave humanity. at least google isn't saying this.

raldi 9y ago

> Google has historically stumbled in the difficult business of hardware, despite several multibillion-dollar attempts, including the $12 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility (since sold off for $2.9 billion) Are we really still repeating this nonsense? The $2.9B number quoted above was merely what Google sold Motorola Mobility's handset division for. It also sold the company's set-top box division for another $2.35B, plus it kept the $2.9B cash hoard that came with the acquisition, and additionally $2.4B in tax credits and a patent portfolio valued at around $4B. Add those numbers up, and you get $14.55B. Source: https://seekingalpha.com/article/1987261-googles-acquisition-of-motorola-not-such-a-failure-after-all https://seekingalpha.com/article/1987261-googles-acquisition... Another source, with somewhat different numbers, but in the same ballpark and an order of magnitude above what Bloomberg reported: https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/did-google-really-lose-on-its-original-motorola-deal/?_r=0 https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/did-google-really-lo...

bitmapbrother 9y ago
I expect these types of inaccurate financial reporting to come from Forbes, not Bloomberg.
thaumasiotes 9y ago
Revenue from selling the set-top box division, cash, and tax credits are all cash-like and easily countable. Do they have revenue from the patents? In the standard model of tech patent ownership, wherein you accumulate a big hoard of patents so that you can threaten to countersue anyone who sues you for patent infringement, a patent portfolio valued at $4B would be worth nothing to Google -- they already have patents.
- raldi 9y ago
  Even if the patents were worth $0, there's a big difference between a basket of assets worth $2.9B and a basket of assets worth $10.55B.
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago

faragon 9y ago

What about Elon Musk or John Carmack running Google? I would love it.

dogruck 9y ago

Oh no, the internet search-driven-advertising monopoly is getting some static from regulators. Not Fair! Maybe the CEO should have a 3 martini lunch with some Investment Bank CEOs.

dingo_bat 9y ago

Awww... the poor multi-millionaire has actual hard-work to do! How pitiful!

whatyoucantsay 9y ago

Putting Sundar Pichai in this highly public position was a great move for the founders.

Gatsky 9y ago

I don't get why Google cops so much flack. Other companies which are considerably less useful (facebook), more intrusive (facebook), actively manipulate user psychology (facebook), sell highly addictive harmful products (Snap inc, big tobacco) or are destroying the planet (the frackers, Schlumberger), seem to escape much criticism.

known 9y ago

Once a company gets listed in NYSE, govt should impose tax on its revenues, not profits;

Khaine 9y ago

This just sounds like whining from someone who gets paid a metric shit-ton of money to run google. Frankly, he should just shut-up and get on with his job, If its too fking hard, resign.

badwulf 9y ago

> Pichai says he’s also considering promoting vetted news sources in Google’s News search results—elevating, say, articles in the Las Vegas Review-Journal over posts on the anything-goes bulletin boards 4chan or Reddit Inc. “We want to be balanced in making sure a range of perspectives are available, but I think a flight to quality is important,” This is coming from a company that fires people who have different opinions. Even if Google's track record was spotless I still wouldn't trust a single company with my news.