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Wait, our CEO has a vision? Google company culture strongly erodes for two reasons: De-facto retirement of Larry and Sergey and significant deepening of the r
by vl 8y ago
Wait, our CEO has a vision?
Google company culture strongly erodes for two reasons:
De-facto retirement of Larry and Sergey and significant deepening of the reporting structure in the last few years (ie endless layers of middle management).
Both of these make consistent vision and values much harder to achieve. Recent Googlegeist just reflects that.
- jpm_sd 8y agoAlso, Larry and Sergey got obsessed with useless and irrelevant things. (Flying cars? Robot butlers? Airship yachts? Glass?)
- felipemnoa 8y ago>>Robot butlers This is actually pretty cool. The butler part makes it sound silly but if you were able to pull it off it would mean that we have reached a technological breakthrough. It would be very close to a technological singularity.
- Baeocystin 8y agoSpeaking as someone who was the caregiver for both my parents as they aged, good lord would it have been wonderful if I could have been able to offload some of those tasks to a 'bot while I enjoyed the remaining time I had with my folks.
- riffraff 8y agoforgive me for asking, but why not hire a caretaker/nurse?
- mac01021 8y agoThose are expensive. And their presence compromises your family's privacy.
- Baeocystin 8y agoExactly. We were already hemorrhaging money, and skilled nursing care for even a few hours a week is incredibly expensive. Not to mention you now have a stranger in your home, and without going in to details, we caught some very unsavory behavior via IP Camera with one of the caregivers we'd hired early on. It's just an incredibly stressful time in a family's life, no matter how you cut it.
- feanaro 8y agoI'm afraid having Google's robot butlers around all the time wouldn't do wonders for privacy either.
- piyush_soni 8y agoBetter than an actual person though, at least for now.
- feanaro 8y agoIs it? The privacy effects of a person are fairly localised, while the effects of having a spying, data collection machine are potentially unbounded.
- mac01021 8y agoAre we saying Google's robot butlers won't work without an internet connection? That would severely diminish their value.
- hopler 8y agoGlass is useful and relevant. https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/03/18/514299682/google-glass-didnt-disappear-you-can-find-it-on-the-factory-floor https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/03/18/51...
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoAlso Waymo, which seems promising.
- XenophileJKO 8y agoone of the reasons I own google/alphabet stock.
- dasmoth 8y agoThose were pretty much the only reasons I continued to admire Google for as long as I did. They gave hope that the company might one day have a meaningful consumer revenue stream that isn’t advertising. They’ve gone for “cloud services” instead. Drastically, drastically, less inspiring — and also pretty competitive. What happens if Amazon drop their prices a bit?
- apathy 8y agoAWS accounts for something like half of Amazon’s operating revenue. It may not be exciting but it is a license to print money. Why wouldn’t google (and MSFT, and anyone else with a big sunk investment in data centers) want to monetize their investment too? Originally bezos was pissed off that Amazon’s excess capacity for the Black Friday/Christmas surge was going to waste the other 50 weeks of the year. I suspect that’s a pretty powerful motivation. But google absorbs huge spikes too (9/11 was one of the first harbingers of this) so it seemed inevitable, even back then, that they’d do it eventually. Fighting the momentum of entire markets and hoping a muse settles on your shoulder isn’t a sustainable business strategy for most companies, let alone very large public companies.
- vl 8y agoCloud for Google is like Internet for Microsoft - was in great position to take advantage of and entirely missed. There was a hard pivot in TechInfra when Cloud became a priority. And there is a business reason for it - if was estimated that with other cloud providers growing and consolidating Google will cease to be hardware buyer #1 and thus will not get best hardware discounts, affecting profitability of Ads/Search. So there was no choice but to get serious about cloud. As for dropping prices, nothing will happen - clouds already run on relatively small, albeit oligopolic margins. If one provider reduces price, other providers will follow, with a bit less profit for everyone. This happens from time to time.
- practice9 8y agoGlass was interesting product that died on the hands of outrage journalists. It's possible they Google release another version when technology will be ready (better battery, camera, sound packed into much smaller form & size)
- aetherson 8y agoI don't think that's true. Glass died because nobody could think of anything to do with it. Talk about "glassholes" dominated the conversation because there was no other subject to discuss. The explorer program was supposed to let people come up with cool ideas for applications and nobody ever did. This is broadly true of wearables so far: nobody has come up with a use case for them more compelling than, "shave a few seconds off checking notifications on your phone."
- shereadsthenews 8y agoHonestly as a Googler I neither saw nor needed the vision of Larry, Sergey, Eric, Sundar, or anyone else except maybe Urs, Jeff, and Sanjay. I mean I worked on the C++ toolchain. Making a bitchin' compiler is its own reward. I guess things are different on product teams?
- whoisjuan 8y agoYour work is crucial for the foundation of whatever Google builds. Unfortunately just like in construction, having a good foundation doesn’t mean that what gets build on top is the right thing.
- shereadsthenews 8y agoWell I think of it more like carpentry. I can build a beautiful house and not get upset later that the owner sits on the couch watching game shows on tv all day. Similarly it doesn’t have to bother me that the result of all my optimizations at Google was they had more capacity to let a computer play Starcraft against itself for fifty million CPU-years. Just does not concern me at all as long as my paycheck didn’t bounce.
- antpls 8y agoAre you saying you have no ethic at all ? Are you comparing yourself to an independent carpenter ? An independent carpenter would be like a mercenary, who first works to earn money, and then eventually selects his/her clients according to his/her own vision. A carpenter working for a big corporation would wonder what is the vision of the company, what is he contributing to, beyond the delivering of the building, imo
- shereadsthenews 8y agoNo, but I am saying that I don’t need any executive “vision” to motivate my work, especially when the executive vision is obviously insipid, like it was with Vic Gundotra and G+. It is motivating enough for me if search gets 10% faster every year. If you hook your motivations to corporate figureheads then you’ll eventually find yourself without any reason to go to work.
- cravespotato 8y agoAre you not afraid to speak what you think? Google likely knows who you are... or is your comment already filtered?
- lazyjones 8y agoHow important are vision and values in a situation where not hitting revenue and earnings targets can destroy hundreds of billions? With some of those billions belonging to Google employees...
- crag 8y agoLayers of middle management always sucks the life out of companies. And indeed governments. Try working for a bank, and you'll see exactly what I am talking about.
- alecco 8y agoSure, but just try to make career progress in a flat organization.