18 ms·
Ever since Sundar, a McKinsey guy, took over, the writing was on the wall for all of the bets that Sergey and Larry engaged in. He just cares about the bottom l
by 1024core 7y ago
Ever since Sundar, a McKinsey guy, took over, the writing was on the wall for all of the bets that Sergey and Larry engaged in. He just cares about the bottom line (as some would argue he should), and doesn't have a "passion" per se. He's more than happy to just keep the train rolling, and keep the perception of growth up by showing more ads and using dark patterns[1] to make users click on what they think are web links but are actually ads. Eventually the train will run out of steam, and then its on to the next gig.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823
- new_realist 7y agoGoogle has no leaders, only managers.
- tehlike 7y agoRealistically, very few companies has inspiring c-level people. Bezos is inspiring, maybe thats about it for me.
- mcny 7y ago> Bezos is inspiring, maybe thats about it for me. (Not an Amazon.com employee or ex-employee. I have no inside information.) I was excited to learn about the culture at Amazon.com but I'm personally very disappointed (perhaps because of the high bar I imagined). The story of buying a door and using as a desk probably gets repeated a lot but that and the touted base salary cap gets lost in the sky high executive compensation. Salary.com https://archive.md/oIQ67 https://archive.md/oIQ67 pegs both Jeffrey A. Wilke, CEO Worldwide Consumer and Andrew R. Jassy, CEO Amazon Web Services at over seventeen million dollars per year and Jeffrey M. Blackburn, SVP, Business Development at over ten million dollars per year. Even Jeff Bezos took in over a million and half dollars. I don't find it inspiring at all. I would find it inspiring if the leaders made closer to the salary cap (definitely under a million dollars a year).
- tehlike 7y agoThat simply will not happen in us corporations. That said, my inspiration is independent of their compensation package You can find engineers in faang companies making over a million, so that seems like a very restrictivr compensation package you are suggesting.
- m0zg 7y agoBallmer's salary was $260K IIRC. Many of his underlings made more than that. He's still an un-inspiring billionaire (and a very talented businessman, which few people give him credit for).
- tehlike 7y agoHe is underrated, thats true.
- zitterbewegung 7y agoHe helped make the Microsoft Surface line. At the time it had some trouble starting out but now Microsoft has a portfolio of Surface products that can actually go head to head with Apple products while Google's hardware strategy just keeps on being more and more confusing and weird.
- tehlike 7y agoBallmers main success was enterprise contracts with big corps.
- chrisweekly 7y agoPlus "Developers, developers, developers", right? Hilarious antics aside, doesn't he get some credit for pointing in that direction? FFWD a few years to VSC, Github, MS as arguably world's leading contrib to OSS... I came of professional age being pretty anti-M$ (and w good reason), but things do, sometimes, eventually, change.
- 7y ago
- m0zg 7y agoThis was true even when Larry was in charge. Google is not an energy company. It has no use whatsoever for weak sauce kite generators. Nor is it a car company, so expect Waymo to be spun off or sold in the foreseeable future. Nor is it a medical company or an ISP. Prediction: all "other bets" not related to Ads, Search, and Cloud will be gone and forgotten within 5 years. Deepmind will probably remain, but will refocus on stuff that has more than just PR value.
- foota 7y agoGoogle is not an energy company, but the (supposed claim, ymmv) is that Alphabet is a conglomerate, not just Google.
- jjeaff 7y ago>alphabet is a conglomerate Some may claim that. But there is little support for it besides the fact that they simply structured it that way for strategic purposes and possibly to try to de-emphasize their search dominance for the monopoly hawks. The 'Google' portion of Alphabet is the only net income producer and almost the only revenue producer. All other Alphabet business are big time money losers right now.
- davidivadavid 7y agoThat's the point Peter Thiel made to Eric Schmidt's face before Alphabet even existed. Google doesn't want people/regulators to think they're a monopolistic search engine, so they build that phony shell company to host a bunch of nonsense sideshows to divert attention.
- m0zg 7y agoFollow the money. Whoever pays (Google), defines the rules. Alphabet is a fiction, especially now under Sundar.
- jacquesm 7y agoGoogle is not a conglomerate either. Yamaha, that's a conglomerate. Real products, from musical instruments to motorcycles, supported and a relatively strong brand in every market they operate in on merit.
- davidwihl 7y agoAs a serial entrepreneur now Google employee, I think the bets have received too much funding. They seem like long term government research projects not scrappy startups trying to scale. Putting more rationality and business expectations is a good thing to determine the viability of some of the ideas. Opinion my own, not Google’s.
- elkos 7y agoIt's interesting that while these projects don't go forward, Google doesn't open-source the work they already did on them. It may not be viable for a business like Google to pursue such an operation, but it might be a viable solution for other entities that could benefit from it.
- tobinfricke 7y agoSometimes the projects are "open sourced." For example, the findings of "Project Foghorn," which aimed to produce a synthetic fuel from seawater, were published in two academic papers, one explaining the economics and the other the chemistry. https://x.company/projects/foghorn/ https://x.company/projects/foghorn/ Another, "Project Malta," which aims to store energy in molten salt, was spun out into an independent company. https://www.maltainc.com/our-story https://www.maltainc.com/our-story
- Teodolfo 7y agoDo you happen to have links to the papers? Edit: Looks like https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1750583617304322 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17505... and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S175058361730436X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17505...
- elkos 7y agoHope on way or another Makani while keep on exploring new interesting ways to evolve.
- TaylorAlexander 7y ago
- tigerBL00D 7y agoIt's also possible that the idea is not competitive. The article is not quite clear. If it were the case, then it would be irresponsible to continue to finance what amounts to a rather exotic hobby.
- tobinfricke 7y agoAt Makani we believe that the technology is not only viable, but would confer a significant competitive advantage in the deepwater offshore scenario.
- fnbr 7y agoWhy isn’t this view shared by Alphabet?
- tobinfricke 7y agoAstro Teller is quoted in the FT article as saying: “Our estimate of the rewards for the world, the reward to Alphabet, and the risks and costs to get there . . . they change over time. It’s part of my job to assess that and make sure that we’re picking the best ones we can for Alphabet to spend its money on.”
- sunstone 7y agoPlan B could be large vertical shafts drilled into tall mountains. Let the high altitude winds create the venturi effect (low pressure) to suck air up the shaft and have turbines in the shaft to generate electric power. Similar to hydro power the construction costs are significant but after that it's almost trouble free energy.
- mike_d 7y agoLarge scale drilling operations at altitude are not even remotely economically viable. Not to mention we can hardly build telescopes on mountains, let alone power stations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope_protest...
- throwGuardian 7y agoThere's no basis for this claim - well before Sundar, Makani and many other moonshot bets were spun out. Ruth Porat was brought in specifically to account for the wild-west type haphazard spending, resulting in the Google --> Alphabet restructuring. Most of all, investors wanted clarity on spending, and Google reacted with the restructuring. Let's take a moment to fairly summarize what's happened: extremely risky ideas that no sane investor would fund, received disproportionate funding, and as far as I can tell, they all failed even after a decade+ of not expecting profitability. There's no reason to pin this on Sundar - the ideas failed on merit Also, speaking honestly, he's been rather generous with many projects (Chrome OS and related hardware, Stadia, even horribly performing pixel phone sales), despite decades of losing billions for Google.
- toyg 7y agoThose projects you mention him being generous about, are purely commercial moves. I don’t understand why you think they should reflect well on anyone.
- throwGuardian 7y agoDoes anyone really expect Chrome OS to ever make a dent against Mac or windows in the PC market? Continuing to lose billions with no hope of moving the market is - generous. At least Microsoft knew when to cut their losses with Windows phone
- lowdose 7y agoEducational market is 60% on chromebooks. They are clearly playing the long game.
- usrusr 7y agoThat's how it happened, but it's also a display of tragic lack of creativity: the way to fund something like Makani is not to pretend that they would be rational bets. If they were rational everyone would be doing them. I think they could and should be "sold" to shareholders more honestly and sustainably as a brand maintenance efforts like the Oracle boats. On the slim chance that they end up turning a profit nonetheless nobody will complain. Perhaps the failure to put smaller projects like Makani on that track is a consequence of the old Google exceptionalism attitude. (Smaller projects, because Waymo certainly wouldn't fit that framework. But Waymo is sitting right at the ad business core: "ok car, take me to an Italian restaurant" would be 100% directory ad business)
- mongol 7y agoWhat does it mean that Sundar is a McKinsey guy?
- scarejunba 7y agoIt doesn't mean anything. It's just the standard HN psychoanalysis combined with nerdrage against the MBA machine that's been par for the course since the 1990s.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nl 7y agoHe literally worked for McKinsey & Co.
- gimmeThaBeet 7y agoHe was at McKinsey for like 2 years, and Google for 16, but the management consulting after the MBA is the all-important indoctrination period.