10 ms·

When I was an intern at Google circa 2010, there was a guest lecture from a business professor who described exactly this process. At the end of it, he made a c

When I was an intern at Google circa 2010, there was a guest lecture from a business professor who described exactly this process. At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." But literally every single prediction of his came true, and I witnessed some of them happening in front of my own eyes even in just the months that I was there (and certainly in the years that followed, though I was no longer with the company).

cbsmith 3y ago
"Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." I would have had a hard time hearing that as anything other than sarcasm.
- capableweb 3y ago
  Absolutely. And I'm sure the talker had a "<wait for laugh>" in their transcript, which they had to quickly skip since people were taking it seriously.
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    I can see this happening. Same as how "don't be evil" was a joke outside the company (cause obviously an evil company would say this) but taken seriously by some inside.
    - EdiX 3y ago
      To be honest Google scrapping the "don't be evil" mantra was quickly followed by Google beginning to behave substantially less ethically. In retrospect it's hard for me to argue that it didn't work.
- tobinfricke 3y ago
  "Present company excluded" It's a polite fiction.
  - cbsmith 3y ago
    Exactly.
hinkley 3y ago
I once noted that several of my coworkers and I had created a silent conspiracy to get a certain manager to clearly and concisely state her very bad ideas in front of the entire staff. This was not news to one of the other two people. He confessed he was doing it “for sport” and thought we were in on it. Only sort of. I think this statement might have been his little way to entertain himself.
- pas 3y ago
  can you give a few examples of what kind of bad ideas? like everyone should do all nighters or let's use email as the only login, no need for password for the first iteration, we will fix it later, or ... ?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - hinkley 3y ago
    It’s been long enough that I’ve successfully blocked a lot out, but it all kind of started because she put some terrible bullshit velocity graph up in a staff meeting that made our good weeks look like bad weeks and bad weeks look good. Derailed the whole meeting as people explained project management to a project manager. Then the next staff meeting she put up the same graph. We explained five better ways to display the data. All summer long, same graph, every meeting. At some point the relationship died.
    - pas 3y ago
      oh, that seems like a rare breed. (at least in my comfy bubble.) thanks!
      - hinkley 3y ago
        She seemed like a nice person one on one, at least as far as I could manage to connect, but something happened when she got into a room of people, and we didn't have enough rapport for me to influence her to be more on-message with the lead devs in private. Mostly we talked about her marathons. As an ex-endurance athlete I could at least live vicariously and get her animated.
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
> At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." Yes, but how did everyone listening fail to notice that he winked 3 times in a row, paused silently for 30 seconds and looked disappointed when no one seemed to catch on?
- praptak 3y ago
  The drummer in the background forgot to do the "ba-dum tsss"
  - hyperliner 3y ago
    [dead]
- fabhrowaway7 3y ago
  [dead]
benvolio 3y ago
Seems like this is referring to Clayton Christensen’s Where Does Growth Come From? talk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rHdS_4GsKmg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rHdS_4GsKmg
- w4yai 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing ! Spent the last hour watching it, it was illuminating.
miohtama 3y ago
This is called Scumpeter's creative destruction (to be distinguished from other creative destruction) and why large companies may lose the ability to be innovative and compete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction However. it's hard to see Google's core business dominance, search and ad, to be destroyed very easily. It's also super confusing that no other entity has been able to create a matching service and we do not have search duopoly similar to Visa Mastercard.
- antupis 3y ago
  5 years ago it was hard to see , now I ampersonally using more chatgpt than Google.
  - danielmarkbruce 3y ago
    Hard agree. Sold Google stock after realizing I'd more or less replaced Google Search with chatgpt...
  - lifeisstillgood 3y ago
    Is that because ChatGPT returns better results, or because when it returns results, it wraps them in words that make you feel more comfortable accepting them as better
    - janalsncm 3y ago
      Personally it’s because there’s no ads. Google’s UX is to choke the user half to death with cookies, popups, reminders to use their app, login screens, and banner ads. And that’s before we even get to the content, which is padded with SEO and filler, dancing around the point before finally giving an answer written by who-knows-whom. (And yes I feel justified in calling these SEO sites part of Google’s UX because this is exactly the behavior their algorithm and business model are encouraging.)
    - whstl 3y ago
      For me it's because ChatGPT ignores less of what I type than Google currently does, plus it doesn't return spammy SEO results. Google has become a search engine for advertisements, "People also ask" snippets, shopping listings and SEO spam, in that order. The rest of results is just a bonus. Even stupid things like searching for the Wikipedia entry of a movie or TV show has become super difficult with Google lately, because Wikipedia is often buried. Apple's Spotlight is better for that.
Mistletoe 3y ago
There’s a great book by the guy that wrote The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel that is out right now and I’m really enjoying it. It’s called Same as Ever. Because what never changes is humans and our source code, our DNA. Expecting Google to not turn into IBM is like expecting wings to sprout from our back. The great delusion we tell ourselves is that each business is different, but each business is powered by the same human engine. That engine evolves at a glacial pace on an evolutionary time scale. When I read about the Dutch East Indian company or a guy in Mesopotamia that can’t get good quality copper from his suppliers and his servant was treated rudely, it’s all the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir
- anonacct37 3y ago
  I don't think it's literally impossible to avoid the same mistakes as our predecessors. But I do think that the default position that "oh we modern innovative companies won't end up like those stodgy old companies" is a recipe for repeating history. As they say in AA: the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have it. Because yes by default you will absolutely repeat history unless you acknowledge that those old timey crazy people were fundamentally no different than you.
  - efitz 3y ago
    > I don't think it's literally impossible to avoid the same mistakes as our predecessors. Our predecessors didn’t make mistakes; they made rational choices that led to outcomes we don’t like. We (for some subset of us that become business leaders) will make similar choices that those who come after us will view as mistakes. They will rightfully think that we made the “same” “mistakes” because our rational decisions will be made in response to similar pressures. For example, we are going to make short term optimal/long term detrimental decisions, just like our predecessors, because we are subject to the same demands from investors for short term gains and from our leadership to hit short term goals in exchange for increased compensation. Don’t hate the players, hate the game.
- concordDance 3y ago
e_y_ 3y ago
On paper, Google's throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks strategy (that has lead to a substantial Google Graveyard) seems like it was intended to allow for some parts of the company to innovate while keeping the core products stable and boring. In practice, many of those innovations (Google Inbox, anyone?) were not deemed profitable enough to keep around. Others were never given the resources to grow beyond an experiment. And even with a long leash, a big company project is never going to innovate as quickly as a startup. This year, however, with the extremely deep cuts to Google's internal incubator (Area 120), it seems pretty clear that they've given up on this strategy, at least for anything that isn't somehow AI-related.
- teen 3y ago
  I mean that incubator was a total waste of money. No one did anything, everyone was a bser from the top, and 95% of the projects were total failures. I think there were maybe 3 "successful" projects.
  - compiler-guy 3y ago
    Pretty standard rate of failure for early stage startups.
  - 121789 3y ago
    I think this is why these teams are really hard to have in a mature org. In reality maybe 5% of projects in one of these innovation orgs is actually great! But it’s impossible to evaluate and everyone else is thinking some variant of “this team is able to bs and show no value, while I have to hit real goals or risk being fired?” I think the incentives would have to be much different for it to work (e.g. much lower base pay + higher rewards for success)…..but at that point just join a startup
    - seraphsf 3y ago
      Which 5% of projects are really great? In my experience, presuming you have tight filters such that all of your projects are plausibly potentially great, you really don’t know until you try. That’s the point of an incubator. It’s not that hard to evaluate when something is working (ie the hard part in evaluation is false negatives, not false positives). In Area 120’s case there was no coasting - if anything there was a hair-trigger standard to shut down underperforming projects.
al_be_back 3y ago
>> at Google circa 2010 ... a business professor... sounds like Clayton Christensen
- esafak 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
somenameforme 3y ago
There was a really interesting interview [1] with Astro Teller, the head of Google's moonshot 'x division', in 2016. In terms of project selection, he focuses on trying to dismiss projects early on, by looking for reasons that a project might fail. And even rewarding employees for scrapping things early on. That doesn't sound particularly unreasonable, but it largely just amounts to a conservative planning process. So then what exactly is the difference between a 'moonshot' and a regular new project? And so when you look at this sort of selection process it ends up being unsurprising that Google's 'moonshots' ended up being things like Waymo, Google watches, glasses, drone delivery, and so on. One of the largest companies in the world, with some of the deepest pockets in the world, and their 'moonshots' are things dozens of other companies are building as well. It seemed quite telling of the present and future of Google. [1] - https://spectrum.ieee.org/astro-teller-captain-of-moonshots-at-x https://spectrum.ieee.org/astro-teller-captain-of-moonshots-...
- konschubert 3y ago
  Building the best self driving car in the world is amazing , come on!
- bobviolier 3y ago
  At that time, others companies were not building most of those things though.
  - LeonB 3y ago
    And those that were building were basically doing research, not refining a product that had achieved product market fit. The gp makes it sound like they were manufacturing widgets. The existence of others in the market is better described as “other people were also able to attract funding for the potential payoffs in that field.” It demands that google’s mopnshots need to be something no other investor has considered. The same comment translated to 1965 — “The US is trying to get to the moon? Well Russia is trying too. So I’d hardly call it a “moonshot” “ (Edited to change typo of “potential layoffs” to “potential payoffs”, possibly more fitting though)
- 3y ago

cbsmith 3y ago

"Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." I would have had a hard time hearing that as anything other than sarcasm.

capableweb 3y ago
Absolutely. And I'm sure the talker had a "<wait for laugh>" in their transcript, which they had to quickly skip since people were taking it seriously.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  I can see this happening. Same as how "don't be evil" was a joke outside the company (cause obviously an evil company would say this) but taken seriously by some inside.
  - EdiX 3y ago
    To be honest Google scrapping the "don't be evil" mantra was quickly followed by Google beginning to behave substantially less ethically. In retrospect it's hard for me to argue that it didn't work.
tobinfricke 3y ago
"Present company excluded" It's a polite fiction.
- cbsmith 3y ago
  Exactly.

hinkley 3y ago

I once noted that several of my coworkers and I had created a silent conspiracy to get a certain manager to clearly and concisely state her very bad ideas in front of the entire staff. This was not news to one of the other two people. He confessed he was doing it “for sport” and thought we were in on it. Only sort of. I think this statement might have been his little way to entertain himself.

pas 3y ago
can you give a few examples of what kind of bad ideas? like everyone should do all nighters or let's use email as the only login, no need for password for the first iteration, we will fix it later, or ... ?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hinkley 3y ago
  It’s been long enough that I’ve successfully blocked a lot out, but it all kind of started because she put some terrible bullshit velocity graph up in a staff meeting that made our good weeks look like bad weeks and bad weeks look good. Derailed the whole meeting as people explained project management to a project manager. Then the next staff meeting she put up the same graph. We explained five better ways to display the data. All summer long, same graph, every meeting. At some point the relationship died.
  - pas 3y ago
    oh, that seems like a rare breed. (at least in my comfy bubble.) thanks!
    - hinkley 3y ago
      She seemed like a nice person one on one, at least as far as I could manage to connect, but something happened when she got into a room of people, and we didn't have enough rapport for me to influence her to be more on-message with the lead devs in private. Mostly we talked about her marathons. As an ex-endurance athlete I could at least live vicariously and get her animated.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

> At the end of it, he made a comment like, "Of course none of this will happen to Google. You're too innovative." Yes, but how did everyone listening fail to notice that he winked 3 times in a row, paused silently for 30 seconds and looked disappointed when no one seemed to catch on?

praptak 3y ago
The drummer in the background forgot to do the "ba-dum tsss"
- hyperliner 3y ago
  [dead]
fabhrowaway7 3y ago
[dead]

benvolio 3y ago

Seems like this is referring to Clayton Christensen’s Where Does Growth Come From? talk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rHdS_4GsKmg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rHdS_4GsKmg

w4yai 3y ago
Thanks for sharing ! Spent the last hour watching it, it was illuminating.

miohtama 3y ago

This is called Scumpeter's creative destruction (to be distinguished from other creative destruction) and why large companies may lose the ability to be innovative and compete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction However. it's hard to see Google's core business dominance, search and ad, to be destroyed very easily. It's also super confusing that no other entity has been able to create a matching service and we do not have search duopoly similar to Visa Mastercard.

antupis 3y ago
5 years ago it was hard to see , now I ampersonally using more chatgpt than Google.
- danielmarkbruce 3y ago
  Hard agree. Sold Google stock after realizing I'd more or less replaced Google Search with chatgpt...
- lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  Is that because ChatGPT returns better results, or because when it returns results, it wraps them in words that make you feel more comfortable accepting them as better
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    Personally it’s because there’s no ads. Google’s UX is to choke the user half to death with cookies, popups, reminders to use their app, login screens, and banner ads. And that’s before we even get to the content, which is padded with SEO and filler, dancing around the point before finally giving an answer written by who-knows-whom. (And yes I feel justified in calling these SEO sites part of Google’s UX because this is exactly the behavior their algorithm and business model are encouraging.)
  - whstl 3y ago
    For me it's because ChatGPT ignores less of what I type than Google currently does, plus it doesn't return spammy SEO results. Google has become a search engine for advertisements, "People also ask" snippets, shopping listings and SEO spam, in that order. The rest of results is just a bonus. Even stupid things like searching for the Wikipedia entry of a movie or TV show has become super difficult with Google lately, because Wikipedia is often buried. Apple's Spotlight is better for that.

Mistletoe 3y ago

There’s a great book by the guy that wrote The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel that is out right now and I’m really enjoying it. It’s called Same as Ever. Because what never changes is humans and our source code, our DNA. Expecting Google to not turn into IBM is like expecting wings to sprout from our back. The great delusion we tell ourselves is that each business is different, but each business is powered by the same human engine. That engine evolves at a glacial pace on an evolutionary time scale. When I read about the Dutch East Indian company or a guy in Mesopotamia that can’t get good quality copper from his suppliers and his servant was treated rudely, it’s all the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir

anonacct37 3y ago
I don't think it's literally impossible to avoid the same mistakes as our predecessors. But I do think that the default position that "oh we modern innovative companies won't end up like those stodgy old companies" is a recipe for repeating history. As they say in AA: the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have it. Because yes by default you will absolutely repeat history unless you acknowledge that those old timey crazy people were fundamentally no different than you.
- efitz 3y ago
  > I don't think it's literally impossible to avoid the same mistakes as our predecessors. Our predecessors didn’t make mistakes; they made rational choices that led to outcomes we don’t like. We (for some subset of us that become business leaders) will make similar choices that those who come after us will view as mistakes. They will rightfully think that we made the “same” “mistakes” because our rational decisions will be made in response to similar pressures. For example, we are going to make short term optimal/long term detrimental decisions, just like our predecessors, because we are subject to the same demands from investors for short term gains and from our leadership to hit short term goals in exchange for increased compensation. Don’t hate the players, hate the game.
concordDance 3y ago

e_y_ 3y ago

On paper, Google's throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks strategy (that has lead to a substantial Google Graveyard) seems like it was intended to allow for some parts of the company to innovate while keeping the core products stable and boring. In practice, many of those innovations (Google Inbox, anyone?) were not deemed profitable enough to keep around. Others were never given the resources to grow beyond an experiment. And even with a long leash, a big company project is never going to innovate as quickly as a startup. This year, however, with the extremely deep cuts to Google's internal incubator (Area 120), it seems pretty clear that they've given up on this strategy, at least for anything that isn't somehow AI-related.

teen 3y ago
I mean that incubator was a total waste of money. No one did anything, everyone was a bser from the top, and 95% of the projects were total failures. I think there were maybe 3 "successful" projects.
- compiler-guy 3y ago
  Pretty standard rate of failure for early stage startups.
- 121789 3y ago
  I think this is why these teams are really hard to have in a mature org. In reality maybe 5% of projects in one of these innovation orgs is actually great! But it’s impossible to evaluate and everyone else is thinking some variant of “this team is able to bs and show no value, while I have to hit real goals or risk being fired?” I think the incentives would have to be much different for it to work (e.g. much lower base pay + higher rewards for success)…..but at that point just join a startup
  - seraphsf 3y ago
    Which 5% of projects are really great? In my experience, presuming you have tight filters such that all of your projects are plausibly potentially great, you really don’t know until you try. That’s the point of an incubator. It’s not that hard to evaluate when something is working (ie the hard part in evaluation is false negatives, not false positives). In Area 120’s case there was no coasting - if anything there was a hair-trigger standard to shut down underperforming projects.

al_be_back 3y ago

>> at Google circa 2010 ... a business professor... sounds like Clayton Christensen

esafak 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

somenameforme 3y ago

There was a really interesting interview [1] with Astro Teller, the head of Google's moonshot 'x division', in 2016. In terms of project selection, he focuses on trying to dismiss projects early on, by looking for reasons that a project might fail. And even rewarding employees for scrapping things early on. That doesn't sound particularly unreasonable, but it largely just amounts to a conservative planning process. So then what exactly is the difference between a 'moonshot' and a regular new project? And so when you look at this sort of selection process it ends up being unsurprising that Google's 'moonshots' ended up being things like Waymo, Google watches, glasses, drone delivery, and so on. One of the largest companies in the world, with some of the deepest pockets in the world, and their 'moonshots' are things dozens of other companies are building as well. It seemed quite telling of the present and future of Google. [1] - https://spectrum.ieee.org/astro-teller-captain-of-moonshots-at-x https://spectrum.ieee.org/astro-teller-captain-of-moonshots-...

konschubert 3y ago
Building the best self driving car in the world is amazing , come on!
bobviolier 3y ago
At that time, others companies were not building most of those things though.
- LeonB 3y ago
  And those that were building were basically doing research, not refining a product that had achieved product market fit. The gp makes it sound like they were manufacturing widgets. The existence of others in the market is better described as “other people were also able to attract funding for the potential payoffs in that field.” It demands that google’s mopnshots need to be something no other investor has considered. The same comment translated to 1965 — “The US is trying to get to the moon? Well Russia is trying too. So I’d hardly call it a “moonshot” “ (Edited to change typo of “potential layoffs” to “potential payoffs”, possibly more fitting though)
3y ago