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Seems like Google leadership is freaking out. Also sounds like they really believe the whole founder-hero mythology if they think that Page-Brin can save the c

• cjbgkagh 4y ago
  They don’t need to believe it, they just need to believe that other people will believe in it. Even CEOs can get a lot of pushback and since they’re looking to do drastic changes it helps to get as much buy in as possible.
  • SQueeeeeL 4y ago
    Simon Sinek has a really great point about companies endlessly pandering to shareholders, basically being equivalent to sports teams endlessly pandering to fans. The objective of a truly good coach/leader should be to successfully accomplish a goal, and often that will require making some portion of your "fans" unhappy. If coaches acted the way modern CEOs do, they'd only ever run one play
    • hef19898 4y ago
      Simon Sinek is a LinkedIn influencer with very limited insight into anything beyond sounding smart and sellong self-improvement books.
      • dylan604 4y ago
        >is a LinkedIn influencer the fact that this is a thing just makes me sad
        • gremlinsinc 4y ago
          I didn't even know this WAS a thing, I could probably do this between myself and ChatGPT and make millions. ;)
          • hgsgm 4y ago
            Are you prettiet then Simon and a smoother talker? It's a crowded competitive market. The content has always been the easiest part.
            • shapefrog 4y ago
              You also have to have no shame or dignity.
    • arnvald 4y ago
      I blame the short-term thinking for this. Everyone wants to see constant progress, there has to be growth every quarter, otherwise the stock goes down, investors are unhappy, CEO has to explain himself and promise quick recovery. It happens in sports, too - a new coach is hired, and they get kicked out after a year, because the team didn't show much progress. But often it just time to work on fundamentals, build something new under the hood, maybe introduce changes in training/org structure/hiring, and only once it's done the progress can be visible. But fans/investors/owners always want it NOW. What are examples of large companies that said "if we want to be on top in 10 years, we have to undergo a transformation, and stop thinking of short-term gains"? Meta is the only example that comes to my mind (though I believe their strategy won't really work, so not the best example).
    • hgsgm 4y ago
      Google only has 2 shareholders to pander to. Everyone just gets to sit and watch unless he's unambiguously destroying huge amounts of value.
• trentnix 4y ago
  They should be freaking out. Google is overwhelmingly dependent on a single revenue stream and AI like ChatGPT is a serious threat to their dominant position. Not to mention, Google has spent a decade using their defacto monopoly as leverage and optimizing for ads and clicks, often exploiting their own users in the process. The bar for better was lower than it should have been, and the market is hungry for an alternative. Google has some real challenging times ahead.
  • jossclimb 4y ago
    I honestly think this is the start of a long demise and one day we will look back and marvel at how big they used to be. It's not something I look forward to though considering the masses of personal private data they have amassed from their users.
  • steveBK123 4y ago
    Yes this is the most insane thing about GOOG to me. Yes, search is basically monopoly moat of recurring growing revenue. On the other hand, they've spent not a decade, but about 25 years betting this would remain the case! I've met a lot of people who work at GOOG, and yet none of them could explain to me how the thing they work on makes any money for GOOG. In fact, most went out of their way to volunteer to me that they only work on R&D/moonshot/non-revenue generating activities.. proudly. Quite a large subset of them showed almost an embarrassment of the single revenue stream (tricking old people to click on Pharma ads instead of genuine search results), and actively distanced themselves from it as some sort of moral shield. It is amazing to have that many smart people working for that long and not bother to find some other ways to make money. Just complete lack of focus.
    • rapsey 4y ago
      I guess they were counting on one of the moonshots to work out.
      • deleted 4y ago
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• sangnoir 4y ago
  > Also sounds like they really believe the whole founder-hero mythology if they think that Page-Brin can save the company Maybe I'm overly cynical, but don't they hold > 50% of voting shares? It may just be C-suite CYA action: by ensuring Brin & Page's buy-in on counter-ChatGPT strategy this early, who would blame the current CEO if it doesn't pan out? It won't be "Sundar Pichai's plan" that's at fault
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    Why would the owners pay a man $200M/yr of their hard earned money, if he comes to them to say he doesn't know how to do his job?
    • snotrockets 4y ago
      Their money isn't hard earned.
• AlbertCory 4y ago
  Former Googler here. 20% Time is a myth and always was. Yes, occasionally someone would talk about "their 20% time" but it was rare, and usually just meant "spending a few hours on something else." Admittedly, once in a while someone really did spend 20% of their time on something else, and management was not allowed to complain. Once, in about 2006-07, I was at a table with about 8 software engineers and asked for a show of hands, "How many have a 20% project?" There was one hand. What it WAS useful for was checking out a project you might want to transfer to.
  • fragmede 4y ago
    By your own story, it's not a myth. Not everyone has one, and your boss had to be supportive of you working on it, but there are a bunch of internal systems that are supported by 20% time. It might be more appropriate to frame that 20% as giving 120% (aka working on it on Saturday instead of Friday) for some of the things, but it's a real thing that exists. Just because not everybody has such a project doesn't make it a myth.
    • pwdisswordfishc 4y ago
      Just because something vaguely resembling the popular story seems to exist doesn’t make it not a myth.
    • AlbertCory 4y ago
      The "myth" is that everyone has a 20% project. We could find lots of people and stories in the press who really believe that.
  • therealdrag0 4y ago
    How much of that is googles fault and how much of that is that it’s hard to have a good idea for a personal project and follow through with it? When I was in my 20s all my friends (young single kid less, so plenty of free time) would often TALK about wanting to do a project but few ever did. I wouldn’t be surprised if for most people the marginal sense of accomplishment and meaning is just higher by working on their day job (which is already cush) than trying to hack a random idea together.
• deleted 4y ago
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• zxcvbn4038 4y ago
  I think this goes back to Google’s decision to be evil. Being evil has a lot of overhead where you have to invest significant time into researching grey areas to exploit and then crafting your product or service not step over the line. Then it falls apart when you get to Europe and they are happy to call you on being evil and fine you billions of euros for doing evil things. Google should go back to not being evil, that worked a lot better for them, and just focus on making cutting edge products. It would also be great if they answered the phone on occasion, and did more to listen to their users. Community support is an obvious cop-out, and nobody wants be dismissed without warning or explanation when it involves something they care about.
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    "Being evil", as you say, means saving money by leveraging synergies between products. If it wasn't a successful strategy, it wouldn't matter.
  • kmeisthax 4y ago
    Google was always "evil"[0]. They've never done support; the entire business model was "automate everything at scale". The "don't be evil" thing, aside from being a jab at Microsoft, was backed up mostly with talk about short-term vs long-term profits, rather than not taking all the cake on the table for themselves. [0] Assuming your definition of "evil" includes "don't answer support calls to save a buck".
• kerpotgh 4y ago
  Google already has lambda. I bet they’re full steam ahead on making that work with search. As a side note, I think Sundar is a perfect CEO for a time like this. He’ll do whatever it takes to get the future lined up without injecting a lot of ego into it.
• oh_sigh 4y ago
  It's not like they're going to sit down and write some new AI algo to put Google back on top. What they are doing is just cutting the Gordian knot of management traffic jams. They can come in and say "this is what we're doing, and this is who is doing it". Even for Sundar to try that would require months of wrangling and deal making. But Larry and Sergey can come in and force their will on the company.
• hintymad 4y ago
  > I don’t know how Google could be saved but perhaps having grateful and happy employees that would just build things in their 20% time might have been a better strategy. I'm not sure 20%-time is a better strategy. At least it was not proven yet. For starters, which successful products were initially Google employees' 20% projects? Google Search was certainly not. Google Search Ads was not per the book In the Plex. The product went through multiple iterations, and a math whiz from u of waterloo conceived the idea of using second-price auction system. Google Maps was not, per the book Never Lost Again. It was developed by the Lars project initially at Where 2. GSuite was not. It was from the startup Writely. Google Adsense was not. I was from DoubleClick. Google Chrome was not. It was a strategic product that multiple people drove, including the current Google CEO. Google's self-driving car was not. Page personally drove the project by working with leaders like Thrun. On the other hand, breakthroughs like ChatGPT can't be from a 20% project. It requires full-time dedication of multiple world-class researchers and engineers to develop a series of models, to set up a massive infrastructure for training and data processing, to implement an efficient process for human input, and to invest many millions of dollars to buy GPU time and crawler time.
  • fragmede 4y ago
    Gmail is the breakout hit that came from a 20% time project.
    • hintymad 4y ago
      Oh yeah, you're right. How could I forget gmail. The value of the 20% of project, in my experience, is not giving employee additional time, as Googlers can find time easily given the company's lax'd culture of enforcing deadlines. Instead, the value is that such projects do not need coordinations, or approvals from dozens of committee members.
  • dekhn 4y ago
    (for those curious about Google Ads history, Eric Veach is the one who proposed second-price; I believe he was unaware of its previous existence when he did). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Veach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Veach
• varelse 4y ago
  [dead]
• belter 4y ago
  Well, they should not count on the founders "vision", as they tried to sell Google for $1 million, and after a little bargaining even went as low as $750,000... https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/4/20994361/google-alphabet-larry-page-sergey-brin-sundar-pichai-co-founders-ceo-timeline https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/4/20994361/google-alphabet-...
• alberth 4y ago
  > Also sounds like they really believe the whole founder-hero mythology It’s not that at all. Given that Larry + Sergey still control Google (>50% shareholder votes), seem prudent to meet with who controls the company to debrief them on current events & action plan.
  • arcanus 4y ago
    ^ this is correct. As owners, they can provide cover for management to put more discretionary funding into combating this threat. I think Sundar has yet to prove himself as a great CEO, but this is good leadership.
• no_butterscotch 4y ago
  Does this not reflect badly on Sundar? To have this "surprise" freak-out catch them off guard? To bring in the old leadership so publicly?
  • echelon 4y ago
    In my frank opinion, Sundar is the worst performing of the FAANG leaders. He reminds me of Ballmer's flat growth, but perhaps much worse - we'll know the true scope of the damage soon. His leadership has put Google's single biggest revenue stream in the cross hairs of competitors, and Sundar should have seen it coming. He's done nothing to secure Google's future or broaden the company's revenue sources. Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that Google has been unable to move the needle on cloud. This despite the fact that Google had the best in the business once upon a time. There's no innovation out of this company - only vanity projects, product cancellations, and in-fighting. Google's sparkle is decades in the rear view mirror. I'd describe them as the Walmart of computing, but even Walmart is formidable. Google is paper thin. Microsoft's Nadella, by contrast, is a phenom. Developers (Github, VSCode), Cloud, and B2B (Office, LinkedIn) are kicking ass. I don't even think about their consumer-facing stuff much anymore, because the rest of their offerings are so good. Their choice to invest in OpenAI is really paying off too. Google is fat. Fat, lethargic, and dumb. It's not somewhere worth working at until they axe the incumbent leadership. Their stock option-based comp is going to take a rough tumble, especially if they don't show a willingness to reverse course immediately. Microsoft is going to eat Google's lunch.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• lumost 4y ago
  It’s easy to lead in good times. Your main goal is simply not to rock the boat. Maybe every now and then you do something flashy to avoid complacency. Google’s had enough capital to more or less do anything and everything the team wanted to do for the last 15 years.
• jkuria 4y ago
  “You're not a wartime consigliere, Tom. Things may get rough with the move we're trying.” --Michael Corleone, The Godfather Said to Tom Hagen when firing him.
• narrator 4y ago
  I think that Google has the ability to absolutely crush ChatGPT. Lambda is so far ahead that Google employees were raving that it was sentient. So they could disrupt everybody.. except for two things. First, the woke crowd deeply embedded all over Google will burn the whole place down if there is anything controversial that comes out of the AI. They have spent years slowly degrading YouTube and Google to prevent anything from showing up under an extremely broad definition of misinformation or anything that could be considered derogatory of any sensitive group. AI is like a Chernobyl of potential microaggressions and misinformation. Evidence of this fear of their own AI is that the deepmind guys said they wanted to even stop releasing research papers because they were worried about what bad people would do with AI research. Second, the innovators dilemma. How are they going to monetize AI and get people to click on ads? They need Larry, currently hiding out in Fiji, and Sergei, playing around in retirement, to come back and do the work of changing the culture to actually allow these two disruptive changes.
• havercosine 4y ago
  The fear is a lot deeper than quality of chat GPT's results for now. Google is afraid that ads driven business models might get dislodged for "give me a service and I will pay you money for that" model. That will be a nail in the coffin. Imagine someone brings a marginally better conversational search engine with a low enough subscription price that some people migrate to use it rather than ad infested, SEO driven web results. Also, with benefit of hindsight, Microsoft seems to be planning to attack Google from the flanks.. competition on a different business model than a better ad driven engine. Sundar isn't exceptionally promising is spot on. We have so many cases of small business people being locked out of their accounts etc. They seemed to have preferred being a cool engineering company, not a B2B product company that other businesses can trust. It is probably incorrect question to ask, but do some Google employees anonymously feel that lot of culture wars waged within company (Damore episode, the fights of ethics AI team with leadership) have caused the company to loose focus? I'm not disregarding moralities of the positions, just thinking if it was the case that many senior executives have to spend time firefighting company image in media due to these episodes.
• summerlight 4y ago
  > Also sounds like they really believe the whole founder-hero mythology if they think that Page-Brin can save the company. Sergey and Larry have the majority vote so if you want to significantly change the business strategy you need to get their sign-off. It's just a business as usual.
• cyanydeez 4y ago
  Looking busy is the most successful trait of these billion dollar companies