4 ms·

Speaking of Apple. Perhaps for personal reasons PG omits to mention the business trajectory and the personality of the leaders.This includes the element of luck

Speaking of Apple. Perhaps for personal reasons PG omits to mention the business trajectory and the personality of the leaders.This includes the element of luck that is far greater component of success that a culture, even the hacker culture. This doesn't mean that the culture is not important but you cant have an argument about "what went wrong with Yahoo" without "what went right with Yahoo" or Google, etc. In case of Yahoo a nothing HTML page was propelled to a media empire during the crazy dotcom boom, while Google stumbled as randomly onto the search goldmine. Both companies were created in the PhD classrooms of Stanford U, not in a garage like Apple. Next both Google and Yahoo brought in professional executives or "suits" to run the firms, speak to Wall St. etc. Eric Schmidt is a professional CEO, not a hacker. He was at Sun, then he tried to revive Novell and then was tapped for Google.Yahoo is also run by a professional CEO now. How does that compare to the single minded life long vision of Steve Jobs? What role the leadership and their personalities plays in running the companies beyond the culture? Remember Apple was a "has been" company with plenty of suits and they even fired Steve Jobs at some point. There is a fundamental flaw in PG's argument, he is trying to have a rational explanation about an irrational path to success of failure.

jonknee 16y ago
Eric Schmidt is a hacker... He even wrote lex.
- acqq 16y ago
  Wow that's interesting: I've found a paper from 1975 Lex − A Lexical Analyzer Generator http://staff.ustc.edu.cn/~shzhang/staff/lesk-lex.pdf http://staff.ustc.edu.cn/~shzhang/staff/lesk-lex.pdf and Google's Eric E Schmidt was only 20 at that time according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_E._Schmidt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_E._Schmidt He got BSEE on Princeton in 1976. OK, both Bell Labs and Princeton are in New Jersey, but it's still quite impressive to be the developer of lex in Bell Labs as a 20-year old Princeton student. Of course even more impressive is being 129th richest person in the world in 2006.
geebee 16y ago
Eric Schmidt does wear a suit, that is true. But I always thought that the type of professional CEO chosen by yahoo and google essentially told the story of the future of the two companies. Eric Schmidt has a PhD in CS (according to wikipedia, he wrote his dissertation on solving problems in distributed computing). Terry Semel has a BS in accounting and worked in the entertainment industry for two decades (warner bros). I don't know much more about the two men, but I'm 100% certain that Schmidt did a colossal amount of programming in his day, and I really doubt that Semel ever did, though I can't be sure of this. This has to have a serious effect on the hacker culture. If nothing else, Google's choice sends a message to programmers that technical ability matters all the way to the top. Yahoo's says it doesn't, at least not enough to be a required attribute of the highest ranking person at the company.

jonknee 16y ago

Eric Schmidt is a hacker... He even wrote lex.

acqq 16y ago
Wow that's interesting: I've found a paper from 1975 Lex − A Lexical Analyzer Generator http://staff.ustc.edu.cn/~shzhang/staff/lesk-lex.pdf http://staff.ustc.edu.cn/~shzhang/staff/lesk-lex.pdf and Google's Eric E Schmidt was only 20 at that time according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_E._Schmidt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_E._Schmidt He got BSEE on Princeton in 1976. OK, both Bell Labs and Princeton are in New Jersey, but it's still quite impressive to be the developer of lex in Bell Labs as a 20-year old Princeton student. Of course even more impressive is being 129th richest person in the world in 2006.

geebee 16y ago

Eric Schmidt does wear a suit, that is true. But I always thought that the type of professional CEO chosen by yahoo and google essentially told the story of the future of the two companies. Eric Schmidt has a PhD in CS (according to wikipedia, he wrote his dissertation on solving problems in distributed computing). Terry Semel has a BS in accounting and worked in the entertainment industry for two decades (warner bros). I don't know much more about the two men, but I'm 100% certain that Schmidt did a colossal amount of programming in his day, and I really doubt that Semel ever did, though I can't be sure of this. This has to have a serious effect on the hacker culture. If nothing else, Google's choice sends a message to programmers that technical ability matters all the way to the top. Yahoo's says it doesn't, at least not enough to be a required attribute of the highest ranking person at the company.