6 ms·

Larry Page's first blunder

162 points by fiaz 16y ago

mariusmg 16y ago
Can't wait for this social fad to be over.
- cageface 16y ago
  I hear you, but don't hold your breath. Best case scenario is it becomes boring and people stop obsessing about it, I think.
- techdmn 16y ago
  Me either, but I don't think it's a fad. I think it's the way a lot of people relate to the internet and computers in general. Queue stories about grandma who's on facebook but doesn't know how to use the address bar in her browser, etc, etc. I wouldn't expect that to go away. Social will get a lot more attention than other computing topics for a long time to come, because the user base is so much larger.
  - dhimes 16y ago
    I'll go you one further: I think this will become more and more of everybody's life- like the automobile did. I think solving the problems with the social web (privacy, etc.) will also solve a lot of the problems faced, for instance, telecommuters. One of the problems telecommuters face is dealing with a sense of isolation from the team. If (when) we solve that problem (and similar ones), and social media experimentation is going to be required to do so, probably, then we have an opportunity for a real virtual office, virtual college, etc. I definitely see this happening.
- robryan 16y ago
  I wouldn't call it a fad, I think it's the natural progression of communication which will essentially be with us forever in some way. I think we are still in the period of experimentation, it's still new so there is a crazy amount of heat and investment in the area trying to work out what works and what doesn't where we end up with crazy and quirky ideas all tied to the idea of social. I think eventually it will all setting down and there will be new pushes based on yet new tech.
- revorad 16y ago
  Don't hold your breath. People are not going to turn into loners any time soon. What's wrong with technology helping people become more social? I love it and apparently, millions of others do too.
  - regomodo 16y ago
    "What's wrong with technology helping people become more social?" Banality?
    - revorad 16y ago
      You could say that about any form of communication. What's special this time?
      - daniel1980fl 16y ago
        nothing. you both right.
  - qjz 16y ago
    That's like asking, "What's wrong with marriage?" I'd rather choose my own mate than be forced into an arranged marriage. The current state of social networking is more like the latter. The individual needs to be in the driver's seat, controlling the nature of the social interactions. Hopefully, Google can offer a new approach that provides the kind of fine-tuned controls that reluctant adopters and privacy advocates want, without spoiling anyone's party.
  - daniel1980fl 16y ago
    pretty weak explanations: "millions of others do". millions are in prison rotting for murder -- would you consider that a "good thing to do" ? social in web is still inmature. most facebooker are on the war of whom got more friends on their list -- something in real society does not happen. most myspacers upload photos next to "cool" stuff, like friends porche claimed their own, owesome vacations that never took place, etc -- something in real society does not happen alot OR you are pushed outside the circle. what you see right now is very inmature social.
- joezydeco 16y ago
  The "social fad" is the internet finally maturing to the point where the unwashed masses can finally post things on a web page, share photos, and communicate to a subset of users without having to learn HTTP, IRC, Jabber, FTP, etc. It's just evolution.
  - gaius 16y ago
    We had that a decade ago with blogs. Social is about linking it all up which - and this is what Google doesn't get - is not a technical problem. No-one yet has a seamless, intuitive way to have a work social network, a personal social network, a social social network (for want of a better term... People who aren't really friends but that you do stuff with) and manage them all via one service. You can have friends on Facebook and work colleages on LinkedIn and random people on Twitter, for example. But that's not the same thing. Google thinks everyone who knows me even slightly wants to know everything about me, the more the better. That quite rightly annoys people.
    - joezydeco 16y ago
      Maybe Google hasn't solved it yet, but they're at least aware of it. Take a closer look at this slideshow from one of their UX guys... http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2 http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ... It's all about the problem where social circles overlap.
  - notahacker 16y ago
    The unwashed masses had bulletin boards, instant messengers, profile websites and Geocities ten years ago, although obviously fewer people spent less time on the internet then. The only real difference in is the increasing tendency for services to be dependent (for traffic, functionality and/or data) on an industry monopolist. It's easy to see why Google consider developing a Bing of social strategically important; less easy to see what they gain from making their litmus test for the success of that strategy public.
mrspeaker 16y ago
A similar take on it was discussed here: "You Can’t Threaten People Into Being Social" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2425512 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2425512
Keyframe 16y ago
IMO, Google COULD tackle "social", but not with the same approach that worked with facebook. They ought to forget about facebook's approach and attack from another angle. I have some ideas how it could be done, but it's a bit of a conundrum to say the least.
- iwwr 16y ago
  I have some ideas how it could be done, but it's a bit of a conundrum to say the least. Would you mind sharing some of that?
  - Keyframe 16y ago
    Sure, but I don't think my general idea would suit google (as of their current behaviour). Allow me to elaborate a bit. Google has 'social' platform already - Gmail. However, what they have tried to do so far is to force 'social' elements into their current offerings, and they have tried to append external turn-key systems like orkut. You can't force social behavior onto your users, as they have successfully demonstrated. As I see it, only two successful platforms so far, facebook and myspace (which died) had a different start. They started out from human element, which is people started banding together and dragging along their friends into it - onto a central place. Email is social too, but it isn't one central place, but more peer to peer. What I think Google should do is to do something they have never done before. Humanize Google. Introduce customer support, active engagement with current user base, expand into traditional media, and not only with google ads, but with interactive shows based on google platform, editorialized part of google news, etc... only then will users start to feel google is something they can empathize with and concentrate around it vs only using their services and go away. tl;dr; humanize google, bring human element to it. Actual humans into their services.
    - daniel1980fl 16y ago
      humanize google -- that will NEVER happen for pure economical reason. you are not talking here about hiring a customer team of 50 folks answering the phone. you talking about half a million team of humans sticked to the phone 24/7 in order to accomplish that and succeed. I dont think AdSense revenue would cover the payroll and still keep GOOG stock going up. here is the blueprint as of HOW google can win social: take me as an example: I am a web programmer, mostly php and mysql. google can determine that from my searches I am sure. but no matter how much I google I am still getting pages of C++ and Oracle results to my php/mysql problems. To win social they should let webadmins of all sort of websites and all subjects (not only programming but anything else there is) implement more narrowed down system that would let them talk back to Google spider (sort of key tagging or GQL some sort of Google Query Language that would let admins describe what google boot see in more mechanical/technical language), and this way Google search results will be more precise, near to perfection! who goes beyond second results page?? I only found garbage after that! All I need is an answer to my question, not 50 pages of results. Accomplish that, Google, and I am stick to your search for next 10 years at least!
yanw 16y ago
I wish people would keep some of their opinions to themselves, classifying something as a 'blunder' because you don't agree with it is just bad reporting. You wanted a startup and there you have it, with startups there is a certain amount of risk involved which galvanises people to succeed.
- ivoflipse 16y ago
  Actually his suggestion at the end of grouping all the different features together on one cohesive page would be an improvement over being spread out over all the separate products. But whether the decision is a blunder remains to be seen... We'll see in a couple of months if its for better or worse.
  - yanw 16y ago
    They might just do that, he doesn't know and that's my point, he's quick to judge.
- jbooth 16y ago
  It's opinion, so it's not bad reporting. But, yeah.. he's just a hater. Whatever Page does there'll be some joker with an op-ed calling it a huge blunder, so who cares.
  - brown9-2 16y ago
    It's not even reporting, it's just commentary - speculation on the success or failure of something that hasn't come to pass yet.
    - jbooth 16y ago
      Yeah, that's what I said.
      - brown9-2 16y ago
        Oops, read that as "in my opinion it's not bad reporting.."
kunjaan 16y ago
I wish Google continued to being an awesome Information Retrieval company that they always were. I loved Google's original mission, the automation and the algorithms.
- arctangent 16y ago
  I don't have a source for Google's original mission, but I think it is fair to say that their current mission is to collect as much information of all kinds as they can, make it findable by people, and make money by selling targeted advertising accordingly. If Google make their products more social then their is a clear value-add for the consumer of the data, and also a value-add for advertisers. I don't think Page is making a mistake here at all.
- waqf 16y ago
  Google's original mission was predicated on the existence of Web as it was in the late '90s. Doing just what they did then is not an option, and it's not merely because they've grown.
raju 16y ago
Interesting article. I agree - Google is now singing FaceBook's mantra and potentially losing sight of their own. Today, Google knows who I email most often, who my contacts are, what's happening in my life (via my Calendar), what I like to read and bookmart (via Reader), what I like to talk about (via Google AdSense/Analytics on my blog and via Search), even places I tend to go often or plan to go (via GMaps). The list goes on. That is a huge piece of the puzzle. They need to figure out a way to put all of that together rather than push (and potentially fail) new "social" incentives. There are two parts to this that escape me - 1. Whatever happened of "Google Me"? How is it that no one ever mentions that anymore? 2. Google has (IMO) always been a company that places emphasis on being algorithmic than having humans do the work for them (if that even makes sense). It's part of their DNA. That's hard to change. Finally, this is Google chasing the current fad, and forgetting to focus on what's the next thing. [Edit - Formatting]
stevenj 16y ago
To get me to change social networks, Google will have to convince my friends to switch; especially my close ones, as using Facebook to communicate with many of them has replaced email.
- pdaviesa 16y ago
  That's really the heart of the issue - no matter how good your social product is, people are only going to make the switch from facebook if a significant number of their "social network" switch as well. I wonder if the next big social site needs to incentivize entire groups to switch rather than just individuals, e.g. promotions that only go into effect after x number of your friends sign up.
spinchange 16y ago
My comment there seems to have been immediately flagged as spam, so I'll say it here. I think it must be much, much easier to write articles like this about managing Google than it is to actually manage Google. We're talking about tying a portion of bonuses to performance in an area that is crucial to the success of this company! What a blunder, indeed.
- vixen99 16y ago
  Much easier to write the article, yes (of course) but why make the point? It's utterly irrelevant to whether the author has a valid criticism or not.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    I think it's implied the article author has to deal with a much simpler analysis than whatever is needed to manage Google. It's therefore implied the article is based on faulty/incomplete information.
  - abbasmehdi 16y ago
    Agree vix.
  - spinchange 16y ago
    My point is that there is little empirical basis for these criticisms. In the absence of this, what basis do I have to trust this author's intuition? His experience running enterprises like Google? His experience managing some of the brightest engineers in the world? Or his experience chasing an ephemeral position on Techmeme?
- dangero 16y ago
  "I think it must be much, much easier to write articles like this about managing Google than it is to actually manage Google." Based on comments like this getting so many votes, I'm starting to wonder how many Google fanboys use this site. This is true for any critic in any industry. If you have to be the de-facto source of information on something before you can comment on it, then nobody would ever be able to comment on anything. "It's much easier to eat food from a restaurant and pick it apart, then actually go in the kitchen and cook it yourself." True, the critic doesn't risk much. Motivation is when you give someone an incentive to work hard. As mentioned in the article, if I work on search algorithms, how is a bonus contingent on social networking going to motivate me? I think it's a valid question, and if that's really what's happening at Google, then I would agree, it's a blunder.
AlexC04 16y ago
I completely disagree with the article. The 25% bonus is not a blunder at all. It's a big shake-up that's certain, but based on what I've been reading about Google recently, I think it's actually quite a visionary move. If you've been reading Hacker News for the last few months you'l' probably have read two major complaints about the company. 1) their search results are getting spammier 2) if you're an employee on the inside, there's more politicking than engineering going on. The +1 bonus addresses both. In terms of spammy results, if millions of people are applying upvotes to good results every day, true human-eyeball search QA will be working at massive scale. And YES the spammers botnets have probably already started +1'ing their spammy links, but hey, answering that is part of the bonus. (I can think of a few algorithms already that might actually further identify spam by finding 'unnaturally correlated voting blocks) +1 directly improves Google's core business, which is finding good results in web search. Having 25% of your bonus tied to the success of Google's core business is appropriate. The second major issue I've read about (nearing the point of deluge) is the problem with 'internal politicking'. It happens at all mega-corporations I'm sure, but how in the hell do you address it? Individual departments work against certain other departments, they willfully work a little slower or protest a little too much and some projects that didn't deserve to die do. The complaints about Google's ability to innovate are evidence of this stuff. The internal middle managers' squabbles. Well what better way to ensure that you cut through the corporate squabbles than by looking at all the projects you've got going on, picking the one that you think has the best chance of helping the bottom line and saying to everyone in the company "you can either help or get the fuck out of the way. 25% of your bonus is tied to this project" If morale is going to be take a hit if this project fails, then the answer is don't fail.
- bostonscott 16y ago
  I agree that rallying their entire company around a key strategic initiative like this is not a blunder. It's an act of transparency that clearly communicates Google's direction both internally and externally. There are many different perspectives at Google, and by focusing the entire organization on "social," he attempts to tap into the creativity of individuals throughout the entire organization. That type of engagement leads to unexpected benefits. There are some good ideas in the article, like, "People want to isolate social from nonsocial aspects of their lives." I suspect there is something to that, although there is also another factor the author may want to consider... the how much better are you than the current leader factor? If a great new search engine launched tomorrow, that was a little better than Google, would it beat Google? No. Years ago at a Kelsey Group conference (2004ish) an executive at Google talked about the 50% rule. She said that for a search engine to beat Google, it had to be 50% better. The point is that it is very difficult to persuade humans to change their behavior, and they will only do so when there is a huge benefit.
zokiboy 16y ago
Imagine one central place where all Google products would be conneced. It would look like an improved Facebook main page: stream of information from gmail, reader, picasa, groups, docs, news, link recomends (+1) from friends, ORDER BY important; with search bar at top and gmail chat at the bottom. Fail or win?
- stevenj 16y ago
  For the average user, that seems like an overly complicated thing.
  - zokiboy 16y ago
    Facebook is complicated for the average user. At least based on questions I get about it.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- riffraff 16y ago
  wasn't this the Buzz mission? It also has gmail chat and search :)
chmike 16y ago
My impression is that the fundamental factor in play is catching eye balls. Social networking like facebook is a success on this perspective. But facebook can't be the end of the story, I hope not. Stop aping existing social networking services. Make something people want, something that provides a new dimension to human interaction. Smart phones is a disruptive technology change which should provide opportunities for new usage and applications which would be disruptive too. This "market" opportunity emerged post facebook and because of Android, google has a significant advantage over competitors it could and should leverage. The wise points at the moon and the fool looks at the finger. Social networking is the finger. Look where it points to and target this. Restore the initiative of creativity and invention. Reconsider google wave for instance.
maverhick 16y ago
In a sales organization you can tie people upto a similar performance incentive structure, because everyone (the majority) sell. The key being, the people you are incentivizing should have the ability to move the story forward. I find it odd about the entire co's bonus being attached to social, when the entire co is not allowed/designed to 'do social'. What is the point of incentivizing gmail/maps/apps/search to do social? (some social widgets make not a coherent social strategy). Its a textbook wrong move. May be implementation details differ - but that info is available in the article
hieronymusN 16y ago
Personally, few things rile me up like a manager giving me directives to 'evangelize' products to my family & friends on my personal social accounts. I am currently in this situation. I have no problem evangelizing on social accounts tied to the company (the company's official twitter, facebook, etc.) or writing posts on the company blog, but I do not use my personal social accounts for company business and don't plan on doing so in the future. Maybe I'm just old, but I need a separation between my business and personal life on the web. I'm sure the techs who keep the servers running in the Google data centers love having 25% of their bonuses tied to social products they may truly dislike, don't use, etc.
- frossie 16y ago
  "few things rile me up like a manager giving me directives to 'evangelize' products to my family" Few things make me worry more about the product too. If it was good, you wouldn't need to order people to evangelize it. They would be doing it because showing off something cool is fun, doubly so if you had a hand in it.
millerc 16y ago
How is the incentive a blunder? Google employees can voluntarily devote a large portion of their paid time to any project of their choosing. By announcing this incentive, Larry is actually focusing the efforts of whole company into the market he thinks they need to grab. I say the move is genious. There might be a little fewer tomato gardens on the campus at the end of the year, but he'll be leveraging the ideas and strength of the whole workforce into that single market. Zuck might very well have something to worry about now.
- daniel1980fl 16y ago
  I agree with your first sentence and strongly disagree with second. I think its the dumbest move on Page part. Let Google be AND REMAIN the best what it is the best SIMPLE SEARCH. if not, then Page may wake up in 5 years with half of Goog valuation as a zombie-lunatic who still tries to create a Social network when his main money making machine is broken dues to poor maintenance.
NathanKP 16y ago
I don't necessarily agree that social is a blunder, but I do agree with the analogy of comparing social to a party. Just like having a party everywhere, all the time is not appropriate, so having social elements everywhere can quickly get old. I go to Facebook when I want to see what my friends are doing, but I don't necessarily want to see what they are doing all the time. Imagine if social elements were deeply integrated into Google search, distracting you with stuff from friends every time you tried to do a Google search on a programming topic. The challenge I think will be to see if Google can properly integrate social aspects where people will appreciate them, and leave them out of places where they will just be a distraction or a frustration.
ajays 16y ago
These are all just cheap shots. If something goes wrong down the road, the writer can crow "I told you so" and strut around like a rooster. If nothing goes wrong, then who remembers some unknown writer in some forgotten rag? The beauty of these naysayers is that, like a broken clock (or a stuck display ;) ), they're right about the outcome (and not the cause) once in a while by sheer chance.
- Confusion 16y ago
  I could make the exact same argument about any criticism of any random thing, because it does not address the correctness of the criticism at all. If I made this argument against some criticism you fully agree with, you would probably lash out against me for not addressing the issues raised. I haven't even read the article and yet I can safely judge your comment to be completely irrelevant.
  - waqf 16y ago
    I think that's a fair criticism of all of GP's post except the first sentence, "These are all just cheap shots." That single assertion is a meaningful one, albeit one with which I totally disagree.
divtxt 16y ago
I found the article pretty good. It states clearly the issue: Google need to be clear to their employees what the definition of success in social and they should define it based on their strengths rather than the competition's product. I believe Google is very close to getting there: they need to deliver a great ChromeOS experience and they improve their apps. I wait impatiently to give Google 2 photo-sharing customers who won't make it to facebook: my parents.
Cossolus 16y ago
It's only a blunder if it doesn't work. And that depends not on the bonus but whether there's a clear top-down plan for a well-defined social product. Bottom-up development, where each team figures out whether/how to integrate into +1... that will probably amount to nothing revolutionary. If social "features" are just spread like jam around all of Google's offerings, the result will be a sticky mess that nobody wants to touch. But Google has a good fall-back position with +1, since the worst case scenario is that it simply evolves into a global digg/reddit-style thumb's up signal for the relevancy of a search result (which alone would be a great result). Beyond that, success in "social" will depend on having a well-defined product that's good enough to sell itself, so I basically agree with the article.
ScottBurson 16y ago
Huh, interesting that people here don't seem to be getting this article. Every organization has a culture, and every culture has blind spots: things that it doesn't value and is not good at. Because it doesn't value them, it doesn't bring in people who are good at them. Because it doesn't have people who know about them to remind everybody else about them, it continues not to value them. The only way out of this is for senior management to realize that their beliefs about how to build a company -- the very foundation of their success to this point -- are now what is limiting them. In this case, Google has gone massively overboard on hiring engineers, and has neglected designers, UX experts, human factors experts, people who understand the "soft side" of computing. What they need to do is to bring a bunch of such people in and give them power. But their whole hiring process is built around finding the very best engineers; they have no process for hiring "soft side" experts. Worse, they have nobody who even knows how to evaluate such people. Now if Page realized all this, he could do something about it. But to realize it he has to see the limitations in his existing beliefs about who he wants working at Google, about what skills are important. He has to realize he needs people unlike himself. And he has to make a fundamental change in his vision of what kind of company Google is and how it can be most successful. It is very rare to see a CEO with the level of self-reflection to be able to make changes like that.
- jdp23 16y ago
  It's very analogous to Microsoft's situation earlier this decade: the hiring process, power structure, and rewards have been optimized for years around a certain kind of person with certain skills. Now, other people with different skills are just as important -- but the people in power have blind spots about what will motivate or attract that kind of person, or make them effective once they're there.
  - earl 16y ago
    Dennis Crowley has to be one of the single best examples of jdp23's point. Google bought 4square v1 nee Dodgeball, and had one of the people with what seems to be the best insights into social / gamification / local in house. That he left so pissed at Google really understates how hostile Google is to people who aren't amazing technologists. Social seems to require a different type of person / knowledge / skills, and Google seems incapable of hiring, promoting, and supporting anything but technologists. Letting dodgeball languish and pushing Crowley out of Google really ought to be the subject of a bunch of management self reflection and probably even some firings, all the way up to the CEO level.
melling 16y ago
How do you know it was an "accident?" He wants the entire company to think about integrating social into their products. He wants people to be thinking about how to accomplish this. Android, Chrome, Ads, Docs, etc. By the end of 2011, a lot of "social" is going to appear in places you didn't expect.
digitalvisions 16y ago
I'm actually surprised Google is trying to compete with Facebook. Their whole premise is they develop products outside the realm of chasing someone else's product or service. This is what separates them from every other company out there. To me, this decision is WAY too late, as the article points out. You can't win the game when you haven't even been on the field for the majority of the match. This is going to be a HUGE blunder and cost them dearly. Dropping a ton of cash and effort into chasing a dead horse is going to come back and haunt them. I give Page about 2 years tops before they pull the plug on him.
mixmax 16y ago
It seems that I'm one of the only people here who thinks the author of the article is on to something substantial. Here's why. First of all, wanting to get into social is accepting to play second fiddle to Facebook - google is not a leader but a follower in this game. They're known for innovating and this seems to be at odds with that. Second, as the author points out, Google is not very good when it comes to people and how they work play and interact. This is what social is all about, and it's very hard to put into an algorithm which is the Google way of doing things. Third, I agree that making all bonuses dependant on the success of their social endeavours is a huge mistake. What happens to the really good algorithmic search people at Google? Do they bust their ass of doing what they do best, or do they try to implement some kind of social search that they know nothing about because that's what their bonus depends on. What will happen to my search results because of this? Yes, it will get worse, and yes it will undermine Googles core product. What Larry has done is basically told everyone that they should start working on something Google is historically not very good at and not worry about their core business. Huge mistake. Fourth, this shows a poor understanding of the dynamics of incentives, which is something that a CEO of a company as large as Google should be very good at. Paying everyone a bonus based on how one division performs is at best disillusioning to the people who don't work in that division and have absolutely no control over their bonus. It doesn't matter how hard a division works if it doesn't have anything to do with social. What will this do to their morale? At best they'll just hum along, knowing there's not much they can do, at worst they'll start cannibalising their product to try and make it social.
- AndyJPartridge 16y ago
  I agree the author is onto something substantial. Google is a bunch of great add-ons without a message board. Facebook is a great message board with mediocre add-ons. Google needs a message board.
  - maxwell 16y ago
    Buzz.
    - 16y ago
dstein 16y ago
When I heard that Eric Schmidt was stepping down I couldn't help but be reminded of the "free ice cream" video from a few months earlier (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbg8IOfdbA0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbg8IOfdbA0). I wonder if that video hit a nerve. It should have, because this is the way a lot of people are perceiving Google these days. And I think that perception is primarily the reason Google hasn't been very successful in their social offerings.
- ryanhuff 16y ago
  Considering that Facebook has comparable (potential) privacy issues, I don't think people are avoiding Google because of such concerns. Its simply a matter of superior execution from Facebook on social.
rbanffy 16y ago
I think there is plenty of space for Google to be more "social" without building a Facebook. FB is a form of aggregating and extracting value from tenuous social relationships that would be too much work otherwise. Google needs to make the same within their space - which is search, mail for end users and ads for content/service providers. Going head-on Facebook is stupid. The one who succeeds will not have invented a better Facebook - will have invented the next social thing, whatever that is.
tomx 16y ago
How much of an incentive is a 25% bonus modifier? I can imagine people (who presumably are already paid well) ignoring the incentive entirely, and continuing to work on more interesting projects. Additionally, many people will be in positions entirely irrelevant to social: This includes non-engineers, perhaps sales, and people working at lower levels of the engineering stack (i.e. people working on large scale filesystems, racking servers, the chef...). These people are more likely to be alienated or more simply confused, rather than encouraged in the long run.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
snissn 16y ago
It seems like the Page move is a step in the right direction. The article takes that premise as an assumption, and then goes on to argue that Page's first few leadership plays won't be a panacea against Google's problems, which I think is missing the point, that they're taking a good first step, at the cost of saying that it won't solve all of their problems.
gallerytungsten 16y ago
From the article: "Page wants employees to advocate Google's social networking features to family and friends." Sounds like the Amway approach.
abbasmehdi 16y ago
For everybody hating on the author, he is not just a nay sayer, he actually offered a valid solution. Also there is nothing that will disenfranchise employees faster than tying their income to something that they cannot control. Also, Google has dominated search, web mail, smartphones, this author is just lending advice on how to bring it all together for social. It might be just me but I would rather have friends tell me what's wrong with me than praise me all the time.
colinhowe 16y ago
It strikes me that Larry Page shouldn't be making this decision about bonuses at all. It should be up to the head of social to make the call about how he wants to motivate his folks. One of the biggest complaints you hear in large organisations is that they don't get to reward their people how and when they want to. Larry Page just made this a problem for Googlers, big time.
ChuckMcM 16y ago
I think large changes to complex systems are fraught with risks, and Larry's changes are quite large. But given how different Google is, as a company, than any other company out there, its not really possible to evaluate this change apriori as a 'win' or as a 'blunder.'. I've been out of the 'plex for a year. But when I worked there, every year things changed; from bonus plans, to quality of life 'perks', to who ran what. Google is good at change, they change things all the time. Google measures a lot. For some it seemed like extreme surveillance but it really was mostly about measuring effectiveness. Of course it also reduced the time to catch the contractor who helped his friends help themselves to some laptops to about 15 minutes after they were noted as being missing :-). They don't always interpret what they measure well. The feedback loop on that seems poor. From the outside it would seem that Larry is embracing one of the core Google beliefs which are "Change things to be what you think is the better way, measure what you change, fix what you break." Does that belief scale to the CEO's office? Guess we'll see. If its broken it won't stay broken since I'm sure there are a number of experiments in place to provide feedback on its effectiveness. The only danger to Google at that point is whether or not they can understand and internalize the feedback effectively. That was a skill I didn't see a lot of when I was there.
gcheong 16y ago
A bit of an aside from the assertions of the article, but there is some research to suggest tying anything that involves creative solutions to a bonus is actually a disincentive: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/opinion/20ariely.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/opinion/20ariely.html
Apocryphon 16y ago
It really seems to me that Google is failing to understand social media the same way Microsoft failed to understand the internet back in the '90s. So the question always is: what will Facebook fail to understand?
- marshray 16y ago
  "The Internet is hot. Let's wire a web browser deeply into our operating system and office suite people won't know if they're accessing trusted local data or untrusted internet data. What could possibly go wrong?" "Social media is hot. Let's wire social deeply into our successful search engine, web apps, and operating system. What could possibly go wrong?" It reminds me of the first part of the 20th century (well I'm not really that old :-) where every kind of business reacted to the disruptive change of the automobile by simply bolting on drive-through windows. It fundamentally misses the point and will seem silly in the long run.
pedalpete 16y ago
I think the author has seriously missed the mark in the comparison of Google vs. Facebook mission statements. Google's mission statement is to organize the worlds information. Facebook is organizing your personal/social information. That is all facebook really is, a good organization of your relationships, photos, things you like, etc. etc. This is directly inline with Google's mission.
philfreo 16y ago
I love this quote: It focuses Google on Facebook's mission. Google's mission is to "organize the world's information." Facebook's mission is to "give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." In a way, Page's edict tells employees: "Stop working on Google's mission and start working on Facebook's.
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SergeyHack 16y ago
> Google has a blind spot about the "human element" in usability I agree with that. I reported a problem with search localization 3 times for the last 2 years to my friend who is working at Google. And monthes after the last time I saw the bad localization behaviour in the search. I also had to involve my friend for this bug and a few gmail ones because I just could not find the feedback form. 1. That was a one-three years ago. 2. The bad behavior is that Google search invited a new user (without its cookie) with a locale based on geolocation instead of much better indicator - browser accepted languages. 3. This behavior is extremely annoying when you search from the Linux console in Links (or Lynx) that has no yet native language installed.
djcapelis 16y ago
I hate the writing of the article, but the point of having a 25% bonus tied to social being a dumb move I actually find myself agreeing with based on the information presented. (I'd love to read the full memo...) People should share social features because they want to, not because they're getting a bonus. Google is ignoring an intensely valuable internal feedback mechanism by re-aligning their employees to adopt new social features without skepticism. The other big problem I see is tying bonus compensation to an area where you are looking for passion and innovation is the easiest way to replace intrinsic motivation with external motivation, the latter having been proven ineffective in research over and over and over again. You can't incentivize passion, you can only create the environment for it. They will likely end up with products built for bonuses instead of products built out of passion as a result.
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jeffreyrusso 16y ago
Why does Google need to have some centralized social product? I think that the strongest thing about +1 is that it's totally built on top of their wildly successful core product. Its social, but it's more passive, and relevance remains at the core. I don't need another timeline of stuff that is relevant to people I know, but not necessarily me.
chrischen 16y ago
I'd say Facebook's party ended when peoples' moms and dads joined.
Metapony 16y ago
I agree that tying these bonuses for everyone's participation is Larry Page's first big blunder. I think there's two things that google can do to be a leader in the social space. Maybe you won't agree. First. Buy Reddit. Buy all of Conde Nast if you have to, Larry. Second. Given that search is an instant gratification thing (which google does so well) what would happen if, like in a subreddit, I wanted to be aware of goings on in a certain subject? Facebook is great for checking up on what a bunch of my friends are doing all over the world. But if I want a good daily overview of what's going on in a subject I'm interested in, with generally good coments, I go over to Reddit. Google could rule in this "automated newsgroup" space quite well. You would turn to this space to get commentary on articles all over the web. Google could keep it free from bots and not easily gamed. But Reddit's doing it right, and has the biggest userbase. (And yes, I find it pretty annoying most days, but now I filter out a lot of the subreddits I don't like.) My point here is that Google should look at and learn from Reddit's model so much that it'd be better if they just bought it outright.

162 points by fiaz 16y ago

mariusmg 16y ago

Can't wait for this social fad to be over.

cageface 16y ago
I hear you, but don't hold your breath. Best case scenario is it becomes boring and people stop obsessing about it, I think.
techdmn 16y ago
Me either, but I don't think it's a fad. I think it's the way a lot of people relate to the internet and computers in general. Queue stories about grandma who's on facebook but doesn't know how to use the address bar in her browser, etc, etc. I wouldn't expect that to go away. Social will get a lot more attention than other computing topics for a long time to come, because the user base is so much larger.
- dhimes 16y ago
  I'll go you one further: I think this will become more and more of everybody's life- like the automobile did. I think solving the problems with the social web (privacy, etc.) will also solve a lot of the problems faced, for instance, telecommuters. One of the problems telecommuters face is dealing with a sense of isolation from the team. If (when) we solve that problem (and similar ones), and social media experimentation is going to be required to do so, probably, then we have an opportunity for a real virtual office, virtual college, etc. I definitely see this happening.
robryan 16y ago
I wouldn't call it a fad, I think it's the natural progression of communication which will essentially be with us forever in some way. I think we are still in the period of experimentation, it's still new so there is a crazy amount of heat and investment in the area trying to work out what works and what doesn't where we end up with crazy and quirky ideas all tied to the idea of social. I think eventually it will all setting down and there will be new pushes based on yet new tech.
revorad 16y ago
Don't hold your breath. People are not going to turn into loners any time soon. What's wrong with technology helping people become more social? I love it and apparently, millions of others do too.
- regomodo 16y ago
  "What's wrong with technology helping people become more social?" Banality?
  - revorad 16y ago
    You could say that about any form of communication. What's special this time?
    - daniel1980fl 16y ago
      nothing. you both right.
- qjz 16y ago
  That's like asking, "What's wrong with marriage?" I'd rather choose my own mate than be forced into an arranged marriage. The current state of social networking is more like the latter. The individual needs to be in the driver's seat, controlling the nature of the social interactions. Hopefully, Google can offer a new approach that provides the kind of fine-tuned controls that reluctant adopters and privacy advocates want, without spoiling anyone's party.
- daniel1980fl 16y ago
  pretty weak explanations: "millions of others do". millions are in prison rotting for murder -- would you consider that a "good thing to do" ? social in web is still inmature. most facebooker are on the war of whom got more friends on their list -- something in real society does not happen. most myspacers upload photos next to "cool" stuff, like friends porche claimed their own, owesome vacations that never took place, etc -- something in real society does not happen alot OR you are pushed outside the circle. what you see right now is very inmature social.
joezydeco 16y ago
The "social fad" is the internet finally maturing to the point where the unwashed masses can finally post things on a web page, share photos, and communicate to a subset of users without having to learn HTTP, IRC, Jabber, FTP, etc. It's just evolution.
- gaius 16y ago
  We had that a decade ago with blogs. Social is about linking it all up which - and this is what Google doesn't get - is not a technical problem. No-one yet has a seamless, intuitive way to have a work social network, a personal social network, a social social network (for want of a better term... People who aren't really friends but that you do stuff with) and manage them all via one service. You can have friends on Facebook and work colleages on LinkedIn and random people on Twitter, for example. But that's not the same thing. Google thinks everyone who knows me even slightly wants to know everything about me, the more the better. That quite rightly annoys people.
  - joezydeco 16y ago
    Maybe Google hasn't solved it yet, but they're at least aware of it. Take a closer look at this slideshow from one of their UX guys... http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2 http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ... It's all about the problem where social circles overlap.
- notahacker 16y ago
  The unwashed masses had bulletin boards, instant messengers, profile websites and Geocities ten years ago, although obviously fewer people spent less time on the internet then. The only real difference in is the increasing tendency for services to be dependent (for traffic, functionality and/or data) on an industry monopolist. It's easy to see why Google consider developing a Bing of social strategically important; less easy to see what they gain from making their litmus test for the success of that strategy public.

mrspeaker 16y ago

A similar take on it was discussed here: "You Can’t Threaten People Into Being Social" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2425512 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2425512

Keyframe 16y ago

IMO, Google COULD tackle "social", but not with the same approach that worked with facebook. They ought to forget about facebook's approach and attack from another angle. I have some ideas how it could be done, but it's a bit of a conundrum to say the least.

iwwr 16y ago
I have some ideas how it could be done, but it's a bit of a conundrum to say the least. Would you mind sharing some of that?
- Keyframe 16y ago
  Sure, but I don't think my general idea would suit google (as of their current behaviour). Allow me to elaborate a bit. Google has 'social' platform already - Gmail. However, what they have tried to do so far is to force 'social' elements into their current offerings, and they have tried to append external turn-key systems like orkut. You can't force social behavior onto your users, as they have successfully demonstrated. As I see it, only two successful platforms so far, facebook and myspace (which died) had a different start. They started out from human element, which is people started banding together and dragging along their friends into it - onto a central place. Email is social too, but it isn't one central place, but more peer to peer. What I think Google should do is to do something they have never done before. Humanize Google. Introduce customer support, active engagement with current user base, expand into traditional media, and not only with google ads, but with interactive shows based on google platform, editorialized part of google news, etc... only then will users start to feel google is something they can empathize with and concentrate around it vs only using their services and go away. tl;dr; humanize google, bring human element to it. Actual humans into their services.
  - daniel1980fl 16y ago
    humanize google -- that will NEVER happen for pure economical reason. you are not talking here about hiring a customer team of 50 folks answering the phone. you talking about half a million team of humans sticked to the phone 24/7 in order to accomplish that and succeed. I dont think AdSense revenue would cover the payroll and still keep GOOG stock going up. here is the blueprint as of HOW google can win social: take me as an example: I am a web programmer, mostly php and mysql. google can determine that from my searches I am sure. but no matter how much I google I am still getting pages of C++ and Oracle results to my php/mysql problems. To win social they should let webadmins of all sort of websites and all subjects (not only programming but anything else there is) implement more narrowed down system that would let them talk back to Google spider (sort of key tagging or GQL some sort of Google Query Language that would let admins describe what google boot see in more mechanical/technical language), and this way Google search results will be more precise, near to perfection! who goes beyond second results page?? I only found garbage after that! All I need is an answer to my question, not 50 pages of results. Accomplish that, Google, and I am stick to your search for next 10 years at least!

yanw 16y ago

I wish people would keep some of their opinions to themselves, classifying something as a 'blunder' because you don't agree with it is just bad reporting. You wanted a startup and there you have it, with startups there is a certain amount of risk involved which galvanises people to succeed.

ivoflipse 16y ago
Actually his suggestion at the end of grouping all the different features together on one cohesive page would be an improvement over being spread out over all the separate products. But whether the decision is a blunder remains to be seen... We'll see in a couple of months if its for better or worse.
- yanw 16y ago
  They might just do that, he doesn't know and that's my point, he's quick to judge.
jbooth 16y ago
It's opinion, so it's not bad reporting. But, yeah.. he's just a hater. Whatever Page does there'll be some joker with an op-ed calling it a huge blunder, so who cares.
- brown9-2 16y ago
  It's not even reporting, it's just commentary - speculation on the success or failure of something that hasn't come to pass yet.
  - jbooth 16y ago
    Yeah, that's what I said.
    - brown9-2 16y ago
      Oops, read that as "in my opinion it's not bad reporting.."

kunjaan 16y ago

I wish Google continued to being an awesome Information Retrieval company that they always were. I loved Google's original mission, the automation and the algorithms.

arctangent 16y ago
I don't have a source for Google's original mission, but I think it is fair to say that their current mission is to collect as much information of all kinds as they can, make it findable by people, and make money by selling targeted advertising accordingly. If Google make their products more social then their is a clear value-add for the consumer of the data, and also a value-add for advertisers. I don't think Page is making a mistake here at all.
waqf 16y ago
Google's original mission was predicated on the existence of Web as it was in the late '90s. Doing just what they did then is not an option, and it's not merely because they've grown.

raju 16y ago

Interesting article. I agree - Google is now singing FaceBook's mantra and potentially losing sight of their own. Today, Google knows who I email most often, who my contacts are, what's happening in my life (via my Calendar), what I like to read and bookmart (via Reader), what I like to talk about (via Google AdSense/Analytics on my blog and via Search), even places I tend to go often or plan to go (via GMaps). The list goes on. That is a huge piece of the puzzle. They need to figure out a way to put all of that together rather than push (and potentially fail) new "social" incentives. There are two parts to this that escape me - 1. Whatever happened of "Google Me"? How is it that no one ever mentions that anymore? 2. Google has (IMO) always been a company that places emphasis on being algorithmic than having humans do the work for them (if that even makes sense). It's part of their DNA. That's hard to change. Finally, this is Google chasing the current fad, and forgetting to focus on what's the next thing. [Edit - Formatting]

stevenj 16y ago

To get me to change social networks, Google will have to convince my friends to switch; especially my close ones, as using Facebook to communicate with many of them has replaced email.

pdaviesa 16y ago
That's really the heart of the issue - no matter how good your social product is, people are only going to make the switch from facebook if a significant number of their "social network" switch as well. I wonder if the next big social site needs to incentivize entire groups to switch rather than just individuals, e.g. promotions that only go into effect after x number of your friends sign up.

spinchange 16y ago

My comment there seems to have been immediately flagged as spam, so I'll say it here. I think it must be much, much easier to write articles like this about managing Google than it is to actually manage Google. We're talking about tying a portion of bonuses to performance in an area that is crucial to the success of this company! What a blunder, indeed.

vixen99 16y ago
Much easier to write the article, yes (of course) but why make the point? It's utterly irrelevant to whether the author has a valid criticism or not.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  I think it's implied the article author has to deal with a much simpler analysis than whatever is needed to manage Google. It's therefore implied the article is based on faulty/incomplete information.
- abbasmehdi 16y ago
  Agree vix.
- spinchange 16y ago
  My point is that there is little empirical basis for these criticisms. In the absence of this, what basis do I have to trust this author's intuition? His experience running enterprises like Google? His experience managing some of the brightest engineers in the world? Or his experience chasing an ephemeral position on Techmeme?
dangero 16y ago
"I think it must be much, much easier to write articles like this about managing Google than it is to actually manage Google." Based on comments like this getting so many votes, I'm starting to wonder how many Google fanboys use this site. This is true for any critic in any industry. If you have to be the de-facto source of information on something before you can comment on it, then nobody would ever be able to comment on anything. "It's much easier to eat food from a restaurant and pick it apart, then actually go in the kitchen and cook it yourself." True, the critic doesn't risk much. Motivation is when you give someone an incentive to work hard. As mentioned in the article, if I work on search algorithms, how is a bonus contingent on social networking going to motivate me? I think it's a valid question, and if that's really what's happening at Google, then I would agree, it's a blunder.

AlexC04 16y ago

I completely disagree with the article. The 25% bonus is not a blunder at all. It's a big shake-up that's certain, but based on what I've been reading about Google recently, I think it's actually quite a visionary move. If you've been reading Hacker News for the last few months you'l' probably have read two major complaints about the company. 1) their search results are getting spammier 2) if you're an employee on the inside, there's more politicking than engineering going on. The +1 bonus addresses both. In terms of spammy results, if millions of people are applying upvotes to good results every day, true human-eyeball search QA will be working at massive scale. And YES the spammers botnets have probably already started +1'ing their spammy links, but hey, answering that is part of the bonus. (I can think of a few algorithms already that might actually further identify spam by finding 'unnaturally correlated voting blocks) +1 directly improves Google's core business, which is finding good results in web search. Having 25% of your bonus tied to the success of Google's core business is appropriate. The second major issue I've read about (nearing the point of deluge) is the problem with 'internal politicking'. It happens at all mega-corporations I'm sure, but how in the hell do you address it? Individual departments work against certain other departments, they willfully work a little slower or protest a little too much and some projects that didn't deserve to die do. The complaints about Google's ability to innovate are evidence of this stuff. The internal middle managers' squabbles. Well what better way to ensure that you cut through the corporate squabbles than by looking at all the projects you've got going on, picking the one that you think has the best chance of helping the bottom line and saying to everyone in the company "you can either help or get the fuck out of the way. 25% of your bonus is tied to this project" If morale is going to be take a hit if this project fails, then the answer is don't fail.

bostonscott 16y ago
I agree that rallying their entire company around a key strategic initiative like this is not a blunder. It's an act of transparency that clearly communicates Google's direction both internally and externally. There are many different perspectives at Google, and by focusing the entire organization on "social," he attempts to tap into the creativity of individuals throughout the entire organization. That type of engagement leads to unexpected benefits. There are some good ideas in the article, like, "People want to isolate social from nonsocial aspects of their lives." I suspect there is something to that, although there is also another factor the author may want to consider... the how much better are you than the current leader factor? If a great new search engine launched tomorrow, that was a little better than Google, would it beat Google? No. Years ago at a Kelsey Group conference (2004ish) an executive at Google talked about the 50% rule. She said that for a search engine to beat Google, it had to be 50% better. The point is that it is very difficult to persuade humans to change their behavior, and they will only do so when there is a huge benefit.

zokiboy 16y ago

Imagine one central place where all Google products would be conneced. It would look like an improved Facebook main page: stream of information from gmail, reader, picasa, groups, docs, news, link recomends (+1) from friends, ORDER BY important; with search bar at top and gmail chat at the bottom. Fail or win?

stevenj 16y ago
For the average user, that seems like an overly complicated thing.
- zokiboy 16y ago
  Facebook is complicated for the average user. At least based on questions I get about it.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
riffraff 16y ago
wasn't this the Buzz mission? It also has gmail chat and search :)

chmike 16y ago

My impression is that the fundamental factor in play is catching eye balls. Social networking like facebook is a success on this perspective. But facebook can't be the end of the story, I hope not. Stop aping existing social networking services. Make something people want, something that provides a new dimension to human interaction. Smart phones is a disruptive technology change which should provide opportunities for new usage and applications which would be disruptive too. This "market" opportunity emerged post facebook and because of Android, google has a significant advantage over competitors it could and should leverage. The wise points at the moon and the fool looks at the finger. Social networking is the finger. Look where it points to and target this. Restore the initiative of creativity and invention. Reconsider google wave for instance.

maverhick 16y ago

In a sales organization you can tie people upto a similar performance incentive structure, because everyone (the majority) sell. The key being, the people you are incentivizing should have the ability to move the story forward. I find it odd about the entire co's bonus being attached to social, when the entire co is not allowed/designed to 'do social'. What is the point of incentivizing gmail/maps/apps/search to do social? (some social widgets make not a coherent social strategy). Its a textbook wrong move. May be implementation details differ - but that info is available in the article

hieronymusN 16y ago

Personally, few things rile me up like a manager giving me directives to 'evangelize' products to my family & friends on my personal social accounts. I am currently in this situation. I have no problem evangelizing on social accounts tied to the company (the company's official twitter, facebook, etc.) or writing posts on the company blog, but I do not use my personal social accounts for company business and don't plan on doing so in the future. Maybe I'm just old, but I need a separation between my business and personal life on the web. I'm sure the techs who keep the servers running in the Google data centers love having 25% of their bonuses tied to social products they may truly dislike, don't use, etc.

frossie 16y ago
"few things rile me up like a manager giving me directives to 'evangelize' products to my family" Few things make me worry more about the product too. If it was good, you wouldn't need to order people to evangelize it. They would be doing it because showing off something cool is fun, doubly so if you had a hand in it.

millerc 16y ago

How is the incentive a blunder? Google employees can voluntarily devote a large portion of their paid time to any project of their choosing. By announcing this incentive, Larry is actually focusing the efforts of whole company into the market he thinks they need to grab. I say the move is genious. There might be a little fewer tomato gardens on the campus at the end of the year, but he'll be leveraging the ideas and strength of the whole workforce into that single market. Zuck might very well have something to worry about now.

daniel1980fl 16y ago
I agree with your first sentence and strongly disagree with second. I think its the dumbest move on Page part. Let Google be AND REMAIN the best what it is the best SIMPLE SEARCH. if not, then Page may wake up in 5 years with half of Goog valuation as a zombie-lunatic who still tries to create a Social network when his main money making machine is broken dues to poor maintenance.

NathanKP 16y ago

I don't necessarily agree that social is a blunder, but I do agree with the analogy of comparing social to a party. Just like having a party everywhere, all the time is not appropriate, so having social elements everywhere can quickly get old. I go to Facebook when I want to see what my friends are doing, but I don't necessarily want to see what they are doing all the time. Imagine if social elements were deeply integrated into Google search, distracting you with stuff from friends every time you tried to do a Google search on a programming topic. The challenge I think will be to see if Google can properly integrate social aspects where people will appreciate them, and leave them out of places where they will just be a distraction or a frustration.

ajays 16y ago

These are all just cheap shots. If something goes wrong down the road, the writer can crow "I told you so" and strut around like a rooster. If nothing goes wrong, then who remembers some unknown writer in some forgotten rag? The beauty of these naysayers is that, like a broken clock (or a stuck display ;) ), they're right about the outcome (and not the cause) once in a while by sheer chance.

Confusion 16y ago
I could make the exact same argument about any criticism of any random thing, because it does not address the correctness of the criticism at all. If I made this argument against some criticism you fully agree with, you would probably lash out against me for not addressing the issues raised. I haven't even read the article and yet I can safely judge your comment to be completely irrelevant.
- waqf 16y ago
  I think that's a fair criticism of all of GP's post except the first sentence, "These are all just cheap shots." That single assertion is a meaningful one, albeit one with which I totally disagree.

divtxt 16y ago

I found the article pretty good. It states clearly the issue: Google need to be clear to their employees what the definition of success in social and they should define it based on their strengths rather than the competition's product. I believe Google is very close to getting there: they need to deliver a great ChromeOS experience and they improve their apps. I wait impatiently to give Google 2 photo-sharing customers who won't make it to facebook: my parents.

Cossolus 16y ago

It's only a blunder if it doesn't work. And that depends not on the bonus but whether there's a clear top-down plan for a well-defined social product. Bottom-up development, where each team figures out whether/how to integrate into +1... that will probably amount to nothing revolutionary. If social "features" are just spread like jam around all of Google's offerings, the result will be a sticky mess that nobody wants to touch. But Google has a good fall-back position with +1, since the worst case scenario is that it simply evolves into a global digg/reddit-style thumb's up signal for the relevancy of a search result (which alone would be a great result). Beyond that, success in "social" will depend on having a well-defined product that's good enough to sell itself, so I basically agree with the article.

ScottBurson 16y ago

Huh, interesting that people here don't seem to be getting this article. Every organization has a culture, and every culture has blind spots: things that it doesn't value and is not good at. Because it doesn't value them, it doesn't bring in people who are good at them. Because it doesn't have people who know about them to remind everybody else about them, it continues not to value them. The only way out of this is for senior management to realize that their beliefs about how to build a company -- the very foundation of their success to this point -- are now what is limiting them. In this case, Google has gone massively overboard on hiring engineers, and has neglected designers, UX experts, human factors experts, people who understand the "soft side" of computing. What they need to do is to bring a bunch of such people in and give them power. But their whole hiring process is built around finding the very best engineers; they have no process for hiring "soft side" experts. Worse, they have nobody who even knows how to evaluate such people. Now if Page realized all this, he could do something about it. But to realize it he has to see the limitations in his existing beliefs about who he wants working at Google, about what skills are important. He has to realize he needs people unlike himself. And he has to make a fundamental change in his vision of what kind of company Google is and how it can be most successful. It is very rare to see a CEO with the level of self-reflection to be able to make changes like that.

jdp23 16y ago
It's very analogous to Microsoft's situation earlier this decade: the hiring process, power structure, and rewards have been optimized for years around a certain kind of person with certain skills. Now, other people with different skills are just as important -- but the people in power have blind spots about what will motivate or attract that kind of person, or make them effective once they're there.
- earl 16y ago
  Dennis Crowley has to be one of the single best examples of jdp23's point. Google bought 4square v1 nee Dodgeball, and had one of the people with what seems to be the best insights into social / gamification / local in house. That he left so pissed at Google really understates how hostile Google is to people who aren't amazing technologists. Social seems to require a different type of person / knowledge / skills, and Google seems incapable of hiring, promoting, and supporting anything but technologists. Letting dodgeball languish and pushing Crowley out of Google really ought to be the subject of a bunch of management self reflection and probably even some firings, all the way up to the CEO level.

melling 16y ago

How do you know it was an "accident?" He wants the entire company to think about integrating social into their products. He wants people to be thinking about how to accomplish this. Android, Chrome, Ads, Docs, etc. By the end of 2011, a lot of "social" is going to appear in places you didn't expect.

digitalvisions 16y ago

I'm actually surprised Google is trying to compete with Facebook. Their whole premise is they develop products outside the realm of chasing someone else's product or service. This is what separates them from every other company out there. To me, this decision is WAY too late, as the article points out. You can't win the game when you haven't even been on the field for the majority of the match. This is going to be a HUGE blunder and cost them dearly. Dropping a ton of cash and effort into chasing a dead horse is going to come back and haunt them. I give Page about 2 years tops before they pull the plug on him.

mixmax 16y ago

It seems that I'm one of the only people here who thinks the author of the article is on to something substantial. Here's why. First of all, wanting to get into social is accepting to play second fiddle to Facebook - google is not a leader but a follower in this game. They're known for innovating and this seems to be at odds with that. Second, as the author points out, Google is not very good when it comes to people and how they work play and interact. This is what social is all about, and it's very hard to put into an algorithm which is the Google way of doing things. Third, I agree that making all bonuses dependant on the success of their social endeavours is a huge mistake. What happens to the really good algorithmic search people at Google? Do they bust their ass of doing what they do best, or do they try to implement some kind of social search that they know nothing about because that's what their bonus depends on. What will happen to my search results because of this? Yes, it will get worse, and yes it will undermine Googles core product. What Larry has done is basically told everyone that they should start working on something Google is historically not very good at and not worry about their core business. Huge mistake. Fourth, this shows a poor understanding of the dynamics of incentives, which is something that a CEO of a company as large as Google should be very good at. Paying everyone a bonus based on how one division performs is at best disillusioning to the people who don't work in that division and have absolutely no control over their bonus. It doesn't matter how hard a division works if it doesn't have anything to do with social. What will this do to their morale? At best they'll just hum along, knowing there's not much they can do, at worst they'll start cannibalising their product to try and make it social.

AndyJPartridge 16y ago
I agree the author is onto something substantial. Google is a bunch of great add-ons without a message board. Facebook is a great message board with mediocre add-ons. Google needs a message board.
- maxwell 16y ago
  Buzz.
  - 16y ago

dstein 16y ago

When I heard that Eric Schmidt was stepping down I couldn't help but be reminded of the "free ice cream" video from a few months earlier (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbg8IOfdbA0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbg8IOfdbA0). I wonder if that video hit a nerve. It should have, because this is the way a lot of people are perceiving Google these days. And I think that perception is primarily the reason Google hasn't been very successful in their social offerings.

ryanhuff 16y ago
Considering that Facebook has comparable (potential) privacy issues, I don't think people are avoiding Google because of such concerns. Its simply a matter of superior execution from Facebook on social.

rbanffy 16y ago

I think there is plenty of space for Google to be more "social" without building a Facebook. FB is a form of aggregating and extracting value from tenuous social relationships that would be too much work otherwise. Google needs to make the same within their space - which is search, mail for end users and ads for content/service providers. Going head-on Facebook is stupid. The one who succeeds will not have invented a better Facebook - will have invented the next social thing, whatever that is.

tomx 16y ago

How much of an incentive is a 25% bonus modifier? I can imagine people (who presumably are already paid well) ignoring the incentive entirely, and continuing to work on more interesting projects. Additionally, many people will be in positions entirely irrelevant to social: This includes non-engineers, perhaps sales, and people working at lower levels of the engineering stack (i.e. people working on large scale filesystems, racking servers, the chef...). These people are more likely to be alienated or more simply confused, rather than encouraged in the long run.

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snissn 16y ago

It seems like the Page move is a step in the right direction. The article takes that premise as an assumption, and then goes on to argue that Page's first few leadership plays won't be a panacea against Google's problems, which I think is missing the point, that they're taking a good first step, at the cost of saying that it won't solve all of their problems.

gallerytungsten 16y ago

From the article: "Page wants employees to advocate Google's social networking features to family and friends." Sounds like the Amway approach.

abbasmehdi 16y ago

For everybody hating on the author, he is not just a nay sayer, he actually offered a valid solution. Also there is nothing that will disenfranchise employees faster than tying their income to something that they cannot control. Also, Google has dominated search, web mail, smartphones, this author is just lending advice on how to bring it all together for social. It might be just me but I would rather have friends tell me what's wrong with me than praise me all the time.

colinhowe 16y ago

It strikes me that Larry Page shouldn't be making this decision about bonuses at all. It should be up to the head of social to make the call about how he wants to motivate his folks. One of the biggest complaints you hear in large organisations is that they don't get to reward their people how and when they want to. Larry Page just made this a problem for Googlers, big time.

ChuckMcM 16y ago

I think large changes to complex systems are fraught with risks, and Larry's changes are quite large. But given how different Google is, as a company, than any other company out there, its not really possible to evaluate this change apriori as a 'win' or as a 'blunder.'. I've been out of the 'plex for a year. But when I worked there, every year things changed; from bonus plans, to quality of life 'perks', to who ran what. Google is good at change, they change things all the time. Google measures a lot. For some it seemed like extreme surveillance but it really was mostly about measuring effectiveness. Of course it also reduced the time to catch the contractor who helped his friends help themselves to some laptops to about 15 minutes after they were noted as being missing :-). They don't always interpret what they measure well. The feedback loop on that seems poor. From the outside it would seem that Larry is embracing one of the core Google beliefs which are "Change things to be what you think is the better way, measure what you change, fix what you break." Does that belief scale to the CEO's office? Guess we'll see. If its broken it won't stay broken since I'm sure there are a number of experiments in place to provide feedback on its effectiveness. The only danger to Google at that point is whether or not they can understand and internalize the feedback effectively. That was a skill I didn't see a lot of when I was there.

gcheong 16y ago

A bit of an aside from the assertions of the article, but there is some research to suggest tying anything that involves creative solutions to a bonus is actually a disincentive: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/opinion/20ariely.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/opinion/20ariely.html

Apocryphon 16y ago

It really seems to me that Google is failing to understand social media the same way Microsoft failed to understand the internet back in the '90s. So the question always is: what will Facebook fail to understand?

marshray 16y ago
"The Internet is hot. Let's wire a web browser deeply into our operating system and office suite people won't know if they're accessing trusted local data or untrusted internet data. What could possibly go wrong?" "Social media is hot. Let's wire social deeply into our successful search engine, web apps, and operating system. What could possibly go wrong?" It reminds me of the first part of the 20th century (well I'm not really that old :-) where every kind of business reacted to the disruptive change of the automobile by simply bolting on drive-through windows. It fundamentally misses the point and will seem silly in the long run.

pedalpete 16y ago

I think the author has seriously missed the mark in the comparison of Google vs. Facebook mission statements. Google's mission statement is to organize the worlds information. Facebook is organizing your personal/social information. That is all facebook really is, a good organization of your relationships, photos, things you like, etc. etc. This is directly inline with Google's mission.

philfreo 16y ago

I love this quote: It focuses Google on Facebook's mission. Google's mission is to "organize the world's information." Facebook's mission is to "give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." In a way, Page's edict tells employees: "Stop working on Google's mission and start working on Facebook's.

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SergeyHack 16y ago

> Google has a blind spot about the "human element" in usability I agree with that. I reported a problem with search localization 3 times for the last 2 years to my friend who is working at Google. And monthes after the last time I saw the bad localization behaviour in the search. I also had to involve my friend for this bug and a few gmail ones because I just could not find the feedback form. 1. That was a one-three years ago. 2. The bad behavior is that Google search invited a new user (without its cookie) with a locale based on geolocation instead of much better indicator - browser accepted languages. 3. This behavior is extremely annoying when you search from the Linux console in Links (or Lynx) that has no yet native language installed.

djcapelis 16y ago

I hate the writing of the article, but the point of having a 25% bonus tied to social being a dumb move I actually find myself agreeing with based on the information presented. (I'd love to read the full memo...) People should share social features because they want to, not because they're getting a bonus. Google is ignoring an intensely valuable internal feedback mechanism by re-aligning their employees to adopt new social features without skepticism. The other big problem I see is tying bonus compensation to an area where you are looking for passion and innovation is the easiest way to replace intrinsic motivation with external motivation, the latter having been proven ineffective in research over and over and over again. You can't incentivize passion, you can only create the environment for it. They will likely end up with products built for bonuses instead of products built out of passion as a result.

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jeffreyrusso 16y ago

Why does Google need to have some centralized social product? I think that the strongest thing about +1 is that it's totally built on top of their wildly successful core product. Its social, but it's more passive, and relevance remains at the core. I don't need another timeline of stuff that is relevant to people I know, but not necessarily me.

chrischen 16y ago

I'd say Facebook's party ended when peoples' moms and dads joined.

Metapony 16y ago

I agree that tying these bonuses for everyone's participation is Larry Page's first big blunder. I think there's two things that google can do to be a leader in the social space. Maybe you won't agree. First. Buy Reddit. Buy all of Conde Nast if you have to, Larry. Second. Given that search is an instant gratification thing (which google does so well) what would happen if, like in a subreddit, I wanted to be aware of goings on in a certain subject? Facebook is great for checking up on what a bunch of my friends are doing all over the world. But if I want a good daily overview of what's going on in a subject I'm interested in, with generally good coments, I go over to Reddit. Google could rule in this "automated newsgroup" space quite well. You would turn to this space to get commentary on articles all over the web. Google could keep it free from bots and not easily gamed. But Reddit's doing it right, and has the biggest userbase. (And yes, I find it pretty annoying most days, but now I filter out a lot of the subreddits I don't like.) My point here is that Google should look at and learn from Reddit's model so much that it'd be better if they just bought it outright.