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Jobs Told Google's Page to Cut Bloat to Avoid Becoming Microsoft
- cpeterso 15y agoSteve's advice to Nike: "Nike makes some of the best products in the world. Products that you lust after. But you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff." Dropping products, even crappy ones, that produce revenue is difficult when investors demand non-stop growth, quarter after quarter, and your employees are afraid of losing their jobs or political fiefdoms.
- yuhong 15y agoFortunately, Google don't play the quarterly earnings game.
- hboon 15y agoHere's what Steve Job's verbal answer to this is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY#t=07m33s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY#t=07m33s till 9:20
- 6ren 15y agoBTW: In his answer 2 questions later, he presages iCloud ("NFS") and Apple Stores ("distribution") http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY&t=13m10s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY&t=13m10s (13:10-21:00) (And also demonstrates his reality distortion field, which his questioner heroically overcomes.)
- hboon 15y agoYou'd need to append #t=13m10s instead of ?t=13m10s (I have no idea why they did it this way). So this is the URL you want: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY#t=13m10s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY#t=13m10s. It doesn't work with the HTML5 version of YouTube though. Is it technically not possible?
- 6ren 15y agoDid you try my URL? Both forms work for most browsers, but only my variant (with "?...&") works for some - including my browser. Yeah, they're misusing the spec. If they wanted to be clever, and use "#" to index the video instead of the page, they should have omitted the "t=", to look like "#13m10s". At least that would make sense. But oh no, they had to bastardize it into some hideous hybrid chimera of crossed specs.</grump> BTW: it was a real question - did my variant work for your browser?
- hboon 15y agoYes, I tried yours and thought it didn't work in Chrome. I just tried again and yes it works :) So yours is definitely better for me. Both didn't work in Safari if it doesn't have Flash. I think it used to when I had Flash installed, so it's probably only the HTML 5 version that wouldn't work? Which browser are you using?
- 6ren 15y agoThanks! HN, where correcting someone can be educational ;-) Yeah, sounds like a HTML5 bug; they'll probably fix it soon. Flash is a well-established platform, so I'd be surprised if it didn't work in it. Does youtube's HTML5 version work in Chrome? FF2 in linux (long story for why I can't upgrade this machine)
- hboon 15y agoDidn't work for me on Chrome. Switched successfully to HTML5 though. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY&t=13m10s&html5=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY&t=13m10s&... After reading http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079, I always expect to be educated on HN :)
- 6ren 15y agoI'm surprised. Oh well. BTW: Awesome thread.
- queensnake 15y ago'just buy more stock'? Doesn't have much to say on the topic of keeping only the highest-quality products.
- hboon 15y agoIt's the part where you ignore the negative feedback from Wall Street and newspapers. This type of change takes time and during the process, outsiders and even insiders will be unlikely to agree with you. Let the results do the talking. Part of good leadership. The 'just buy more stock' was probably part joke and part personal gain. If you truly believe this is going to be good for the company, then you would believe the stock price will rise in the long term. Why not show your confidence to the insiders and make a buck out of it.
- danmaz74 15y agoInterestingly, this is something that Rockefeller did often with Standard Oil, as I read in a biography. And also interestingly, it looks like some people (partners) really resented when Rockefeller bought their stock when they lost confidence in his bold choices, which ended up earning him billions is today's currency - and them lose that opportunity.
- hboon 15y agoDo you remember why if it described why they felt that way, other than being poor losers?
- danmaz74 15y agoI guess they might have rationalized that were somehow cheated by Rockefeller; according to the biographer though the course he decided to follow was a very risky bet and nobody could have know for sure how it would have turned out.
- latch 15y agoForgive my denseness, but is "being larded with B players" a reference to employees? I'm not disagreeing, it just isn't clear to me if he's calling out Microsoft employees.
- ethank 15y agoI would have loved to see Jobs' comments about Yahoo. He likely would have been so apoplectic he wouldn't be able to speak. His meetings with record labels are kind of legendary for this very reason.
- abbott 15y agothe Google Labs shutdown, might be an echo of this.
- 5hoom 15y agoWith the changes occurring at Google right now, could we be feeling the impact of Page taking this advice to heart? It seems Google are pruning a lot of stuff they must see as external to their core business, and putting happy-safe bubble wrap around services like search (see todays story about the + operator being depreciated to the dismay of advanced users). I suppose this is Google trying to improve themselves, lets just hope they can execute as well as Apple when it comes to making super simplified products that people want.
- lacker 15y agoI doubt the + thing is "happy-safe bubble wrap" - more likely they are deprecating the previous functionality in preparation for more Google+ integration into search.
- Joakal 15y agoI think Google will attempt +<person> to make it easier to search G+ for them.
- jsnell 15y agoHard to say, since the advice from Jobs was seemingly also to keep the number of employees down. It's been the reverse on Page's watch, with mad headcount growth.
- cmelbye 15y agoI think the wind down of Google Labs and several small Google products, APIs, etc is definitely reflective of that advice. Very cool to know where they might have gotten the inspiration to do that.
- chugger 15y agoMotorola's acquisition will go down in history as one of the top 5 dumbest business decisions of all time. I won't be surprised if Larry Page is replaced as CEO within 3-5 years.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ashishgandhi 15y agoDisclaimer: I'm not a business person or anything remote. I feel this is very important. Be a company that has an identity, stands for something. Speaking hyperbolically, if one could do everything well, there would be one company in the world doing everything. I can't say in a few words what Yahoo! does. Google is the search company. Microsoft is the enterprise (Windows and Office) company. But Yahoo! is what? There is not identity.
- Qz 15y agoI couldn't help noticing that more than 50% of the web page layout for this article is literally blank space.
- kristopolous 15y agoTo us unfiltered web viewers, they are actually advertisements.
- kevinalexbrown 15y agoSome simplified products are iPods. Some simplified products are Zunes. Just sayin'.
- eftpotrm 15y agoAnd I'd pay good money for a more complex iPod Classic. I need its space but the software is simple in ways that regularly annoys me; I believe there's significant room for improvement. Apple isn't perfect.
- cbs 15y agoLook into rockbox (rockbox.org). Its an opensource replacement firmware. I take listening to my music seriously enough that I need a dedicated device with good software. Since I found rockbox I haven't bought a mp3 player unless they were already on the supported hardware list. The rockbox UI structure can be a bit cumbersome to learn because there is a lot of functionality there, but I've never found anything else that comes close.
- eftpotrm 15y agoSadly it seems the iPod Classic isn't supported... Oh well. Honestly, if no-one beats me to it, one day I'll write my own Android music player that works the way I want. The spec's been solid in my head for years, it's just that's the first platform I've had which would make that a practical possibility. With falling smartphone and memory card prices and improving battery life, the days of the standalone MP3 player are severely numbered.
- kevinalexbrown 15y agoAgreed. In this sense I'm worried that google will lean more toward "Internet For Dummies"(e.g. losing the + feature in favor of double quotes to make way for G+), attempting to coral my internet use into certain patters the same way Apple seems to (like removing the "Reader" link from the google bar to showcase G+).
- 15y ago
- krosaen 15y agoThat's pretty cool that Jobs was willing to meet with Page, particularly given how miffed he was about android. One area where I hope Google doesn't follow Apple is in engineering culture. For instance, isn't it true that most of the engineers who worked on the original iphone literally never even saw one until it was unveiled to the public? Whether or not the "bottom up" opportunities for engineers to influence products at Google is as effective as a top down culture under the likes of Jobs and Ives is debatable, but it sure seems like working at Google is a lot more fun! (disclosure: I worked at Google, am basing my impressions on what it's like to work at Apple on anecdotes and only a couple of direct accounts from engineers who have worked there).
- wooster 15y ago"For instance, isn't it true that most of the engineers who worked on the original iphone literally never even saw one until it was unveiled to the public?" For the core team, my understanding is "no". The core team was very small, though (<50 software engineers).
- krosaen 15y agoCool, I hope so. An account I heard described the engineers having had access only to test boards, but perhaps that was earlier on before physical prototypes were made.
- chugger 15y agowrong.
- leejw00t354 15y ago'Avoid becoming Microsoft' I don't see how that's bad. Microsoft are the most successful software company ever.
- masklinn 15y agoIn Jobs's optics, Microsoft tasteless and became absolutely bloated and unworkable. In the last decade, it's become a replacement for what IBM was in the 80s. They seem to show some improvement lately, but Microsoft still looks very much like middle-management realms, a tentacular corporation with little movement and even less focus.
- justincormack 15y agoAlso he is saying Microsoft is outside the Silicon Valley culture, without the same values.
- brudgers 15y agoOne of the ways that Microsoft is outside Silicon Valley culture is the degree to which a founder and early employees maintain Ownership due to Microsoft's early profitability and decision to avoid significant outside capital and the share dilution which accompanies it. Quite simply Google could never could never replicate Microsoft's culture because there never was a time when when a large enough fraction of employees had fuck you money. Microsoft's culture is different by virtue of the fact that venture capital has never had much of a say. Hence a positive vision of "a computer on every desk" rather than a mere admonition to not "be evil".
- lurker14 15y agoI assure you that "Don't be evil" was not a VC concession. Google's stated mission is "organize all the world's information", considerably bolder than "a computer on every desk".
- anonLSD 15y ago