14 ms·

This is of course extremely subjective, and I have no knowledge of what Google was and is on the inside except for a short internship almost 10 years ago: I som

by anyfoo 8y ago

This is of course extremely subjective, and I have no knowledge of what Google was and is on the inside except for a short internship almost 10 years ago: I somehow always felt that Google with Eric Schmidt as a CEO was a much different Google than later on. Under Eric Schmidt, Google seemed like this extremely innovative company with the brightest minds in the industry. Afterwards, it seemed to instead grow into just another corporation. Though maybe that's just what growth does in general. EDIT: I singled out Larry Page before, but that's a bit skewed, given that he founded Google and was its CEO for the first few years.

zavi 8y ago
Larry hasn't been the Google CEO for some time now. I do think the company got caught up in incremental goals and internal PC struggles during Sundar's time, making it feel like yet another large company rather than a powerful disruptor it used to be.
- vkou 8y ago
  > internal PC struggles There's plenty of reasons for why they started taking place, that have nothing to do with who is CEO. Societal expectations have changed, formerly unpopular ideas gained both a voice, and mindshare, and Google's influence over the Internet has grown - and with it, expectations that that influence should be wielded responsibly. Intelligent people strongly disagree as to what 'responsibly' means in this context.
  - avar 8y ago
    Do you think Oracle encourages the sort of open internal debate culture that precipitated that well-known incident? The responsibility for corporate culture is ultimately with the CEO and the board.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - joshuamorton 8y ago
      Do you think Google would have attracted the talent it did with a culture like oracle's?
      - avar 8y ago
        Just because a CEO decision has consequences doesn't mean it isn't ultimately up to the CEO or the board. Making executive decisions that involve trade-offs is their entire job.
dekhn 8y ago
The other big thing was Larry pushed social on the company without really understanding social as a product, and was absolutely unable to handle the huge negative response both internally and externally to that push. This all happened at the same time Microsoft and Amazon committed to Cloud (which Google has only tepidly adopted). The one time I met with Schmidt to explain my cloud project, he was delighted and encouraging and helped shape the design in a way that made it much more effective. He was a very effective leader (although not everybody agrees- some people think he's an arrogant asshole).
- pg_is_a_butt 8y ago
  Google Cloud is far from tepid.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- paganel 8y ago
  I think Page had the right idea, because if you look nowadays at people under 30 for them the Internet is represented by social networks, be it Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or even Snapchat, the internet/web represented by the browser and by visiting different websites via Google is no longer that important. I think Page realized that if Google doesn't hop on the social train they'll end up looking from the outside at a flowering walled garden in which they will have almost no relevance. I think they had a similar idea after Apple's iPhone started gaining traction, it's only that in the case of Android Google's execution was an order of magnitude better compared to what they did with Google+. I wouldn't put the blame for the failure of Google+ on Page only, I'd also assign it to Gundotra, after all he was the man directly in charge of it all, Page's fault is that he chose and supported the wrong man for the job.
  - dekhn 8y ago
    None of G+ was Page's idea. There was a product manager (who left for facebook!) who did the big pitch deck that got it rolling. Then they put Vic Gundotra in charge and gave him carte blanche to modify multiple products. I agree that was the wrong person for the job. But you can't even imagine the amount of groupthink and ego that Vic surrounded himself with. I don't think it was super-obvious 10 years ago, but social has turned out to be a growth product that led to a minefield for the successful companies (look at Twitter and Facebook now) because the growth strategies were so sketchy that people and the government ultimately had to reject them. Ultimately, it's on Page, though. He stood up at TGIF and told all the player to "get along" when Search had made a coherent argument that coupling the Social brand with search was brand suicide. I think Google could have made a much less obnoxious social network, maybe it would have been good, but without aggressive growth strategies, it wouldn't have been popular (a lot changed since the Orkut days, most people forget Google had a social network with half a billion users at one point!)
nostrademons 8y ago
Remember that Larry was CEO twice: 1998-2001 and 2011-2015. During the first period Google was exceptionally innovative. During the second, Google attempted to be exceptionally innovative but largely fell flat on its face. I'd blame size and market position more. Google was left as one of very few profitable giants standing when the dot-com crash hit, and yet they were young enough to not have the institutional inertia of Amazon, E-bay, and Yahoo. That left them exceptionally well positioned to capitalize on the Internet's deployment phase, where the technology got good enough and widespread enough to really build huge businesses off it. They managed to own the next platform (mobile) but were too large, slow, and entrenched to really understand the implications of it, and they're not even attempting to play in the cryptoverse.
- manigandham 8y ago
  > cryptoverse What exactly is this and what business is doing well in it?
  - apl002 8y ago
    I am assuming he is referring to cryptocurrencies & blockchain tech. There are plenty of businesses doing well but that's irrelevant. Waiting for established businesses in a growing space before jumping in isn't very innovative.
    - sanderjd 8y ago
      This is an interesting point: is it innovative to jump into any new thing regardless of its actual potential? You could claim that yes, it is. I would argue that it actually isn't. The key to innovation is to be able to correctly evaluate where there are real opportunities for innovative technologies. It's possible "the cryptoverse" will eventually show that it has such potential, but it has stubbornly refused to do that for the near decade that I've been paying attention to it, despite metric gob-tons of money and hype being thrown at it. On the other hand, in the same time period (actually in a shorter time period!), machine learning driven technologies like voice and image recognition have gone from sci-fi to commonplace. I ask: which is more innovative?
innocentoldguy 8y ago
I worked at Novell while Eric Schmidt was the CEO. I thought he was a great leader and enjoyed working at Novell while he lead the company; in spite of the fact that my direct boss was an oversized tube of ass paste. I liked Google as a company a lot better during Schmidt's tenure as well. Best of luck to him in his next role.
fyoving 8y ago
What's the evidence to any of that? What's with the persistent narrative of google not being "just another company" and then (sadly?) becoming one? that's some fairytale nonsense.
- inlined 8y ago
  There’s plenty of anecdata from the employees. When I first joined Google 9 years ago I was terrified of not being as good to google as google was to me. I bled the google colors. The last time someone asked me what it’s like to work there, I said “it’s just a job” on instinct.
  - fyoving 8y ago
    There is nothing wrong with being "just a job", it most likely always was, the rest was just in your head. It's better for the company to help the delusional embrace the "it's just a job" mentality ASAP so that they and the rest of us might be spared the weekly public hissy fit.
amyjess 8y ago
So, a few years ago, someone mentioned something very similar, and I asked them to elaborate because I was curious. This was their response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14540332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14540332 It's well worth a read.
scarface74 8y ago
Google has been an ad company from the time they IPO’d until today when 85% of their revenue is still from ads. From a business side, they really haven’t done too much.
- nkozyra 8y ago
  > From a business side, they really haven’t done too much. Myopic. They've greatly increased the eyeballs available to them through new products and business relationships
  - scarface74 8y ago
    It’s been over 15 years and their net income was down year over year, their traffic acquisition costs were up and their margins were down. The “eyeballs” they are creating are less valuable and are more expensive to acquire. Isn’t that the same business plan of every startup? Get “eyeballs” and worry about profit later? What’s going to happen as more people start using ad blockers? They are still just a one trick pony.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      >> They are still just a one trick pony. Nothing wrong with that when it got them to a trillion dollar valuation. And Google Cloud has the potential to be even bigger than their entire ad business.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        Well “valuation” is just what the stock market thinks. Whether a business is sound is based on things like net income. If “valuatoon” is all that counts, Uber is a successful company. Google Cloud isn’t exactly capturing the hearts and minds of most companies compared to AWS and Azure.
      - bradleyjg 8y ago
        Regarding Google Cloud, that may be true but 1) they took way too long to figure out what an opportunity it represents and 2) in terms of internal culture and external reputation they are not well suited to take advantage of the opportunity. The former includes things like not being good at enterprise sales, the history of allowing employees to veto customers, and ADD induced by the wacky promotion system. The latter includes a legion of techies burned product shutdowns and abandonments that will never, ever believe that google really cares about back compat and long term support no matter what kind of contract language it puts out.
segmondy 8y ago
Had nothing to do with Schmidt, it was all timing. Google was young, new & hungry. Conquering and not defending. Google is grown in a new phase, relaxed and now having to play defense to all the new unicorns wanting a piece of her pie.
sidcool 8y ago
The growth phase at Google when Eric was A CEO was very different than later when Larry took the helm.

by anyfoo 8y ago

zavi 8y ago

Larry hasn't been the Google CEO for some time now. I do think the company got caught up in incremental goals and internal PC struggles during Sundar's time, making it feel like yet another large company rather than a powerful disruptor it used to be.

vkou 8y ago
> internal PC struggles There's plenty of reasons for why they started taking place, that have nothing to do with who is CEO. Societal expectations have changed, formerly unpopular ideas gained both a voice, and mindshare, and Google's influence over the Internet has grown - and with it, expectations that that influence should be wielded responsibly. Intelligent people strongly disagree as to what 'responsibly' means in this context.
- avar 8y ago
  Do you think Oracle encourages the sort of open internal debate culture that precipitated that well-known incident? The responsibility for corporate culture is ultimately with the CEO and the board.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - joshuamorton 8y ago
    Do you think Google would have attracted the talent it did with a culture like oracle's?
    - avar 8y ago
      Just because a CEO decision has consequences doesn't mean it isn't ultimately up to the CEO or the board. Making executive decisions that involve trade-offs is their entire job.

dekhn 8y ago

The other big thing was Larry pushed social on the company without really understanding social as a product, and was absolutely unable to handle the huge negative response both internally and externally to that push. This all happened at the same time Microsoft and Amazon committed to Cloud (which Google has only tepidly adopted). The one time I met with Schmidt to explain my cloud project, he was delighted and encouraging and helped shape the design in a way that made it much more effective. He was a very effective leader (although not everybody agrees- some people think he's an arrogant asshole).

pg_is_a_butt 8y ago
Google Cloud is far from tepid.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
paganel 8y ago
I think Page had the right idea, because if you look nowadays at people under 30 for them the Internet is represented by social networks, be it Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or even Snapchat, the internet/web represented by the browser and by visiting different websites via Google is no longer that important. I think Page realized that if Google doesn't hop on the social train they'll end up looking from the outside at a flowering walled garden in which they will have almost no relevance. I think they had a similar idea after Apple's iPhone started gaining traction, it's only that in the case of Android Google's execution was an order of magnitude better compared to what they did with Google+. I wouldn't put the blame for the failure of Google+ on Page only, I'd also assign it to Gundotra, after all he was the man directly in charge of it all, Page's fault is that he chose and supported the wrong man for the job.
- dekhn 8y ago
  None of G+ was Page's idea. There was a product manager (who left for facebook!) who did the big pitch deck that got it rolling. Then they put Vic Gundotra in charge and gave him carte blanche to modify multiple products. I agree that was the wrong person for the job. But you can't even imagine the amount of groupthink and ego that Vic surrounded himself with. I don't think it was super-obvious 10 years ago, but social has turned out to be a growth product that led to a minefield for the successful companies (look at Twitter and Facebook now) because the growth strategies were so sketchy that people and the government ultimately had to reject them. Ultimately, it's on Page, though. He stood up at TGIF and told all the player to "get along" when Search had made a coherent argument that coupling the Social brand with search was brand suicide. I think Google could have made a much less obnoxious social network, maybe it would have been good, but without aggressive growth strategies, it wouldn't have been popular (a lot changed since the Orkut days, most people forget Google had a social network with half a billion users at one point!)

nostrademons 8y ago

Remember that Larry was CEO twice: 1998-2001 and 2011-2015. During the first period Google was exceptionally innovative. During the second, Google attempted to be exceptionally innovative but largely fell flat on its face. I'd blame size and market position more. Google was left as one of very few profitable giants standing when the dot-com crash hit, and yet they were young enough to not have the institutional inertia of Amazon, E-bay, and Yahoo. That left them exceptionally well positioned to capitalize on the Internet's deployment phase, where the technology got good enough and widespread enough to really build huge businesses off it. They managed to own the next platform (mobile) but were too large, slow, and entrenched to really understand the implications of it, and they're not even attempting to play in the cryptoverse.

manigandham 8y ago
> cryptoverse What exactly is this and what business is doing well in it?
- apl002 8y ago
  I am assuming he is referring to cryptocurrencies & blockchain tech. There are plenty of businesses doing well but that's irrelevant. Waiting for established businesses in a growing space before jumping in isn't very innovative.
  - sanderjd 8y ago
    This is an interesting point: is it innovative to jump into any new thing regardless of its actual potential? You could claim that yes, it is. I would argue that it actually isn't. The key to innovation is to be able to correctly evaluate where there are real opportunities for innovative technologies. It's possible "the cryptoverse" will eventually show that it has such potential, but it has stubbornly refused to do that for the near decade that I've been paying attention to it, despite metric gob-tons of money and hype being thrown at it. On the other hand, in the same time period (actually in a shorter time period!), machine learning driven technologies like voice and image recognition have gone from sci-fi to commonplace. I ask: which is more innovative?

innocentoldguy 8y ago

I worked at Novell while Eric Schmidt was the CEO. I thought he was a great leader and enjoyed working at Novell while he lead the company; in spite of the fact that my direct boss was an oversized tube of ass paste. I liked Google as a company a lot better during Schmidt's tenure as well. Best of luck to him in his next role.

fyoving 8y ago

What's the evidence to any of that? What's with the persistent narrative of google not being "just another company" and then (sadly?) becoming one? that's some fairytale nonsense.

inlined 8y ago
There’s plenty of anecdata from the employees. When I first joined Google 9 years ago I was terrified of not being as good to google as google was to me. I bled the google colors. The last time someone asked me what it’s like to work there, I said “it’s just a job” on instinct.
- fyoving 8y ago
  There is nothing wrong with being "just a job", it most likely always was, the rest was just in your head. It's better for the company to help the delusional embrace the "it's just a job" mentality ASAP so that they and the rest of us might be spared the weekly public hissy fit.

amyjess 8y ago

So, a few years ago, someone mentioned something very similar, and I asked them to elaborate because I was curious. This was their response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14540332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14540332 It's well worth a read.

scarface74 8y ago

Google has been an ad company from the time they IPO’d until today when 85% of their revenue is still from ads. From a business side, they really haven’t done too much.

nkozyra 8y ago
> From a business side, they really haven’t done too much. Myopic. They've greatly increased the eyeballs available to them through new products and business relationships
- scarface74 8y ago
  It’s been over 15 years and their net income was down year over year, their traffic acquisition costs were up and their margins were down. The “eyeballs” they are creating are less valuable and are more expensive to acquire. Isn’t that the same business plan of every startup? Get “eyeballs” and worry about profit later? What’s going to happen as more people start using ad blockers? They are still just a one trick pony.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    >> They are still just a one trick pony. Nothing wrong with that when it got them to a trillion dollar valuation. And Google Cloud has the potential to be even bigger than their entire ad business.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      Well “valuation” is just what the stock market thinks. Whether a business is sound is based on things like net income. If “valuatoon” is all that counts, Uber is a successful company. Google Cloud isn’t exactly capturing the hearts and minds of most companies compared to AWS and Azure.
    - bradleyjg 8y ago
      Regarding Google Cloud, that may be true but 1) they took way too long to figure out what an opportunity it represents and 2) in terms of internal culture and external reputation they are not well suited to take advantage of the opportunity. The former includes things like not being good at enterprise sales, the history of allowing employees to veto customers, and ADD induced by the wacky promotion system. The latter includes a legion of techies burned product shutdowns and abandonments that will never, ever believe that google really cares about back compat and long term support no matter what kind of contract language it puts out.

segmondy 8y ago

Had nothing to do with Schmidt, it was all timing. Google was young, new & hungry. Conquering and not defending. Google is grown in a new phase, relaxed and now having to play defense to all the new unicorns wanting a piece of her pie.

sidcool 8y ago

The growth phase at Google when Eric was A CEO was very different than later when Larry took the helm.