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What is particularly puzzling to me about the decline of Google is that the founders are still alive and active. It's not strange to me to hear that IBM is in d

What is particularly puzzling to me about the decline of Google is that the founders are still alive and active. It's not strange to me to hear that IBM is in decline: it's just too old, the founders are long-dead, etc. Why don't Page and Brin step in to revive the once-magical company they built?

Solvency 3y ago
Imagine you're incredibly wealthy. You have access to all the finest things in the entire world. You have access to the most elite, exclusive, desirable places and people in the world. Do you want to go back to work to make the worlds most profitable ad tech company "cool" again?
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  I think this might be the most notable thing about Elon Musk. He's made it, but he hasn't turned to politics or investing or behind the scenes activities. He seems very drawn to a crazy lifestyle.
  - prepend 3y ago
    Musk has said he has a goal of going to Mars and getting humanity off fossil fuels. Maybe that’s true, maybe not, but he has a mission. Page and Brin wanted to organize the world’s info. I think they accomplished that and I suspect the googleplex can answer all their questions.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > He's made it, but he hasn't turned to politics or investing or behind the scenes activities. Of course he has turned to politics, just not in the conventional way - he's not a native US citizen, so he can't do a Trump and run for President. Instead he's messing around with Twitter by allowing the far-right to run completely rampant on it.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      I don't think he's turned to it, though. He certainly seems keen on speech, but that's not his only thing he's got going on by any stretch.
    - KptMarchewa 3y ago
      Not only allowing, massively boosting.
  - consumer451 3y ago
    > I think this might be the most notable thing about Elon Musk. He's made it, but he hasn't turned to politics It appears to me that he has absolutely turned to politics, if you look at his tweets, they are almost entirely political these days. He wanted to buy Twitter purely for political reasons, and said as much.
  - cromwellian 3y ago
    He’s not running for office but he sure does seem to waste a ton of time arguing politics on Twitter and getting into public battles with people. I’d also argue he technically is investing, given all of the companies he’s starting, even OpenAI started from his investment. There’s Neuralink, Boring Company, and probably others. Though in Musk’s case it might be his autism/adhd.
  - 10xDev 3y ago
    Musk literally bought Twitter mostly for political reasons. Why else do you think?
- hyperbovine 3y ago
  This. The founders are not hungry, and "running the world's largest advertising firm" is a far, far cry from the "don't be evil" and "make all the world's information free" ethos that they espoused in their 20s. I honestly wonder what Sergey and Larry think of what their creation has become.
  - Freak_NL 3y ago
    “Huh. It's funny how you stop caring about these things when you can afford to jet off to Saint Tropez for the weekend just because you have a hankering for bouillabaisse.”
- mschuster91 3y ago
  >Do you want to go back to work to make the worlds most profitable ad tech company "cool" again? Elon Musk fits that to a T: he was the richest dude on the planet by far, with not just one but three wildly successful companies under his belt as either founder or at least very significant investor (I'm not interested in the usual "Musk didn't found Tesla" debate), more women, wives, affairs and kids than most people will ever have had, being wildly beloved by progressives for kicking the legacy car industry so hard in their butts that they haven't recovered to this date, and being beloved by the "fiscal conservative" crowd as well for pulverizing the Boeing/ULA monopoly on spaceflight. Normal wealthy people would be perfectly content at that point - they'd live out their days on some yacht with a better wine chamber than many 5-star restaurants, do a bit of gambling here, a bit of charity fundraising there, that kind of stuff. But not Elon Musk, he goes and blows dozens of billions of dollars of his own and Saudi oil sheikh money to buy Twitter, a failing social media platform. Just WTF?
- sircastor 3y ago
  And more so, you’re not digging in to work on cool technology. You’re likely just fighting board members and investors to do something that’s not immediately or obviously “make more money.”
- ThrowawayB7 3y ago
  Much as he was criticized, a fair bit of which was deserved, the one thing that you could say about Steve Ballmer is that he was still very, very passionate about making Microsoft succeed right up until he was ousted. Being some kind of passionless drone that can't imagine anything greater in life than some kind of decadent "access to all the finest things in the world" is really not aligned with the hacker mindset. I think I speak for many here when I say that if I were fabulously wealthy, I'd just be hacking things on a much larger scale.
  - Solvency 3y ago
    "I speak for many here when I say that if I were fabulously wealthy, I'd just be hacking things on a much larger scale." No one can possibly say this with full absolute certainty, the same way no one truly knows how they'll act in the face of (or aftermath of) parenthood, poverty, war, death, illness, etc. One doesn't end up at Brin levels of wealth without some part of their psyche changing.
- yowzadave 3y ago
  The weird thing to me is that this hasn't happened to Zuckerberg—despite having more money than anyone can imagine, he's still plugging away, showing up to work, trying to juice the stock price of his corrosive adware company. Amazing how he can have those kinds of resources, that insane drive...and such a pedestrian imagination.
NikolaNovak 3y ago
There are a LOT of assumptions in that question. That there's something wrong with Google that needs fixing. that its founders are,or feel, responsible for fixing it. That they are allowed or capable of fixing it. That they can or should be bothered. That a large company of 175k people can be "magical". That any two hacker news folks will agree on what "magical" is or feels like :-)
andsoitis 3y ago
Your question implies that you think Page and/or Brin think the company is moving in the wrong direction AND Sundar Pichai is not the right leader. Together, Page and Brin own about 14% of the publicly-listed shares and control 56% of the stockholder voting power through super-voting stock. If anything they are supporters (and more likely, originators) of some of the changes that have been occurring over the last couple of years, including layoffs and other things people describe as “decline”.
- johannes1234321 3y ago
  > If anything they are supporters Or they decided that they don't care too much and focus on their fun projects. Or something in between.
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    You can also influence without needing to be in the spotlight. From a governance point of view, they’re both on the Board of Directors: http://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance http://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance
exmadscientist 3y ago
Because they don't know how to. They hired Eric Schmidt for a reason, and then stopped worrying about business things. It's about time they stepped back up, but are they even able to?
- rezonant 3y ago
  Larry Page (the cofounder) took over after Eric Schmidt. And that was a long, long time ago. Read up on the History section of Google's wikipedia page for more ancient history.
  - exmadscientist 3y ago
    And Larry's term as CEO following Eric's departure is one of the main reasons why I say he doesn't know how to fix this. I lived through it, I don't need to read the history books. Larry didn't seem to have any ability to keep the ship on course in mild conditions, nor the inclination to learn, so why would he have the ability to get out of a major storm? (And to be clear, I don't think that's a personal failing. I don't think I'd do any better in his place! But I think knowing your own limits is very important, and knowing that I'd be a terrible megacorp CEO is part of that.)
MadnessASAP 3y ago
I don't know much about Brin, but from what I know about Page his management is probably a big aspect of Alphabets problems. The idea that the company should be all engineers, all the time, and nobody can tell them no or delegate a task to them probably doesn't create the most coherent and stable product development environment.
- johnasmith 3y ago
  Google is no such place. I've worked in several product areas, and while there is no formal one-size-fits-all process, generally engineers build products specified by PM written PRDs, often informed by UXR, designed by UX. At least for the last 12 years, it's not been a wild west of rogue engineers.
- rezonant 3y ago
  Google is far from an engineering led company today. It is the same product management situation as at any other company. That engineering led vision for the company is what produced their early successes. Their later failures aren't because of being an engineering led company... I think the turning point was the Google+ failure. It was perhaps the first major initiative at Google that was not engineering led, and when it failed, it seems like the shift began in earnest to restructure the company for top down initiatives, led by business instead of engineering. Google+ indeed happened under Page's leadership, so I agree with you that this is where it fell off the rails, but I think you have the reason backwards.
filoleg 3y ago
> Why don't Page and Brin step in to revive the once-magical company they built? They achieved what they initially wanted, and left Google closer to its peak. At some point, you want to move on. Especially when you quit as a winner, and now you can relax or deal with more fun and interesting ventures. Coming in to save a company in a decline is not as fun and satisfying as creating something new and awesome from scratch. Especially when you’ve made enough to not have to worry about it ever, so that you can afford to only pursue things that are fun for you. Plus, “decline” of Google is relative. Sure, they have not a good reputation anymore, and they do not push out new and exciting products that kill it in the market. But guess what? The share price isn’t tanking, so from the perspective of Sergei and Larry (who are still significant shareholders), that decline isn’t hitting them much. Look at IBM. They’ve been dead in the eyes of the tech industry as an innovator and a success story for the longest time. Their Watson for medical applications is mostly considered to be somewhere between a failure and a scam. However, their share price is doing just fine.

Solvency 3y ago

Imagine you're incredibly wealthy. You have access to all the finest things in the entire world. You have access to the most elite, exclusive, desirable places and people in the world. Do you want to go back to work to make the worlds most profitable ad tech company "cool" again?

robertlagrant 3y ago
I think this might be the most notable thing about Elon Musk. He's made it, but he hasn't turned to politics or investing or behind the scenes activities. He seems very drawn to a crazy lifestyle.
- prepend 3y ago
  Musk has said he has a goal of going to Mars and getting humanity off fossil fuels. Maybe that’s true, maybe not, but he has a mission. Page and Brin wanted to organize the world’s info. I think they accomplished that and I suspect the googleplex can answer all their questions.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > He's made it, but he hasn't turned to politics or investing or behind the scenes activities. Of course he has turned to politics, just not in the conventional way - he's not a native US citizen, so he can't do a Trump and run for President. Instead he's messing around with Twitter by allowing the far-right to run completely rampant on it.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    I don't think he's turned to it, though. He certainly seems keen on speech, but that's not his only thing he's got going on by any stretch.
  - KptMarchewa 3y ago
    Not only allowing, massively boosting.
- consumer451 3y ago
  > I think this might be the most notable thing about Elon Musk. He's made it, but he hasn't turned to politics It appears to me that he has absolutely turned to politics, if you look at his tweets, they are almost entirely political these days. He wanted to buy Twitter purely for political reasons, and said as much.
- cromwellian 3y ago
  He’s not running for office but he sure does seem to waste a ton of time arguing politics on Twitter and getting into public battles with people. I’d also argue he technically is investing, given all of the companies he’s starting, even OpenAI started from his investment. There’s Neuralink, Boring Company, and probably others. Though in Musk’s case it might be his autism/adhd.
- 10xDev 3y ago
  Musk literally bought Twitter mostly for political reasons. Why else do you think?
hyperbovine 3y ago
This. The founders are not hungry, and "running the world's largest advertising firm" is a far, far cry from the "don't be evil" and "make all the world's information free" ethos that they espoused in their 20s. I honestly wonder what Sergey and Larry think of what their creation has become.
- Freak_NL 3y ago
  “Huh. It's funny how you stop caring about these things when you can afford to jet off to Saint Tropez for the weekend just because you have a hankering for bouillabaisse.”
mschuster91 3y ago
>Do you want to go back to work to make the worlds most profitable ad tech company "cool" again? Elon Musk fits that to a T: he was the richest dude on the planet by far, with not just one but three wildly successful companies under his belt as either founder or at least very significant investor (I'm not interested in the usual "Musk didn't found Tesla" debate), more women, wives, affairs and kids than most people will ever have had, being wildly beloved by progressives for kicking the legacy car industry so hard in their butts that they haven't recovered to this date, and being beloved by the "fiscal conservative" crowd as well for pulverizing the Boeing/ULA monopoly on spaceflight. Normal wealthy people would be perfectly content at that point - they'd live out their days on some yacht with a better wine chamber than many 5-star restaurants, do a bit of gambling here, a bit of charity fundraising there, that kind of stuff. But not Elon Musk, he goes and blows dozens of billions of dollars of his own and Saudi oil sheikh money to buy Twitter, a failing social media platform. Just WTF?
sircastor 3y ago
And more so, you’re not digging in to work on cool technology. You’re likely just fighting board members and investors to do something that’s not immediately or obviously “make more money.”
ThrowawayB7 3y ago
Much as he was criticized, a fair bit of which was deserved, the one thing that you could say about Steve Ballmer is that he was still very, very passionate about making Microsoft succeed right up until he was ousted. Being some kind of passionless drone that can't imagine anything greater in life than some kind of decadent "access to all the finest things in the world" is really not aligned with the hacker mindset. I think I speak for many here when I say that if I were fabulously wealthy, I'd just be hacking things on a much larger scale.
- Solvency 3y ago
  "I speak for many here when I say that if I were fabulously wealthy, I'd just be hacking things on a much larger scale." No one can possibly say this with full absolute certainty, the same way no one truly knows how they'll act in the face of (or aftermath of) parenthood, poverty, war, death, illness, etc. One doesn't end up at Brin levels of wealth without some part of their psyche changing.
yowzadave 3y ago
The weird thing to me is that this hasn't happened to Zuckerberg—despite having more money than anyone can imagine, he's still plugging away, showing up to work, trying to juice the stock price of his corrosive adware company. Amazing how he can have those kinds of resources, that insane drive...and such a pedestrian imagination.

NikolaNovak 3y ago

There are a LOT of assumptions in that question. That there's something wrong with Google that needs fixing. that its founders are,or feel, responsible for fixing it. That they are allowed or capable of fixing it. That they can or should be bothered. That a large company of 175k people can be "magical". That any two hacker news folks will agree on what "magical" is or feels like :-)

andsoitis 3y ago

Your question implies that you think Page and/or Brin think the company is moving in the wrong direction AND Sundar Pichai is not the right leader. Together, Page and Brin own about 14% of the publicly-listed shares and control 56% of the stockholder voting power through super-voting stock. If anything they are supporters (and more likely, originators) of some of the changes that have been occurring over the last couple of years, including layoffs and other things people describe as “decline”.

johannes1234321 3y ago
> If anything they are supporters Or they decided that they don't care too much and focus on their fun projects. Or something in between.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  You can also influence without needing to be in the spotlight. From a governance point of view, they’re both on the Board of Directors: http://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance http://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance

exmadscientist 3y ago

Because they don't know how to. They hired Eric Schmidt for a reason, and then stopped worrying about business things. It's about time they stepped back up, but are they even able to?

rezonant 3y ago
Larry Page (the cofounder) took over after Eric Schmidt. And that was a long, long time ago. Read up on the History section of Google's wikipedia page for more ancient history.
- exmadscientist 3y ago
  And Larry's term as CEO following Eric's departure is one of the main reasons why I say he doesn't know how to fix this. I lived through it, I don't need to read the history books. Larry didn't seem to have any ability to keep the ship on course in mild conditions, nor the inclination to learn, so why would he have the ability to get out of a major storm? (And to be clear, I don't think that's a personal failing. I don't think I'd do any better in his place! But I think knowing your own limits is very important, and knowing that I'd be a terrible megacorp CEO is part of that.)

MadnessASAP 3y ago

I don't know much about Brin, but from what I know about Page his management is probably a big aspect of Alphabets problems. The idea that the company should be all engineers, all the time, and nobody can tell them no or delegate a task to them probably doesn't create the most coherent and stable product development environment.

johnasmith 3y ago
Google is no such place. I've worked in several product areas, and while there is no formal one-size-fits-all process, generally engineers build products specified by PM written PRDs, often informed by UXR, designed by UX. At least for the last 12 years, it's not been a wild west of rogue engineers.
rezonant 3y ago
Google is far from an engineering led company today. It is the same product management situation as at any other company. That engineering led vision for the company is what produced their early successes. Their later failures aren't because of being an engineering led company... I think the turning point was the Google+ failure. It was perhaps the first major initiative at Google that was not engineering led, and when it failed, it seems like the shift began in earnest to restructure the company for top down initiatives, led by business instead of engineering. Google+ indeed happened under Page's leadership, so I agree with you that this is where it fell off the rails, but I think you have the reason backwards.

filoleg 3y ago

> Why don't Page and Brin step in to revive the once-magical company they built? They achieved what they initially wanted, and left Google closer to its peak. At some point, you want to move on. Especially when you quit as a winner, and now you can relax or deal with more fun and interesting ventures. Coming in to save a company in a decline is not as fun and satisfying as creating something new and awesome from scratch. Especially when you’ve made enough to not have to worry about it ever, so that you can afford to only pursue things that are fun for you. Plus, “decline” of Google is relative. Sure, they have not a good reputation anymore, and they do not push out new and exciting products that kill it in the market. But guess what? The share price isn’t tanking, so from the perspective of Sergei and Larry (who are still significant shareholders), that decline isn’t hitting them much. Look at IBM. They’ve been dead in the eyes of the tech industry as an innovator and a success story for the longest time. Their Watson for medical applications is mostly considered to be somewhere between a failure and a scam. However, their share price is doing just fine.