16 ms·

Few people remember it, but the same thing happened at HP. It used to be that HP engineers were expressly given Friday afternoons and full access to company res

by donw 13y ago

Few people remember it, but the same thing happened at HP. It used to be that HP engineers were expressly given Friday afternoons and full access to company resources to just play with new ideas. Among other things, this led to HP owning the printer market. Then "professional" management came in and killed the proverbial goose. They had to focus more on the "bottom line". To do what was easy to measure and track, rather than what was necessary for the next step of the company, and now HP is a mere shadow of its former glory -- directionless and bleeding. 3M and Corning have largely avoided this fate, but it seems that Google won't. This should make a lot of entrepreneurs happy, as there will continue to be a lot of top-down management-driven products that, if history shows, will continue to be market failures. Yet somehow, I'm incredibly sad, as it seems that too many companies go down this road.

api 13y ago
It boggles my mind, given the big money involved, why so many people continue to bet huge sums of cash on the proven short-term penny-wise/pound-foolish idiocy of MBA-think. I mean sure-- if your company is under cash flow pressure you have to pinch pennies. You have no choice. Spreadsheet says so, and spreadsheet's the boss. But if you're not, you should be investing and thinking long term cause the other guys probably aren't. I've seen a related phenomenon in the startup world. Watched it, front row seat. I did a stint in startup-tech-focused business consulting. If you have a top-ten MBA and connections you can raise millions of dollars, set fire to it like the Joker in Batman Begins, and then raise millions of dollars again, serially. They were basically cargo cultists, mindlessly imitating the words, phrases, and superficial behaviors of supposedly-successful people and businesses. But there was no higher-order conceptual thinking beneath the surface-- no "there" there. They had no plan and no plan on how to acquire a plan. They got the money and then did a kind of mindless MBA rain dance until the money was gone. Then they'd raise more. I watched them do shit like destroy products that big customers had money in hand ready to pay for when they were inches away from release. I mean a done product, ready to go, and better than anything else in its market. A product that they owned and had already paid to develop. The rationale was always some kind of MBA newspeak blather. I can't even remember it since my mind filters out sounds that imitate language but lack conceptual content. Otherwise I risk wasting a synapse. But what do I know? I went to a po-dunk Midwestern state school, so what looks obviously stupid to me is maybe genius. I'm not saying I definitely could have done better, but I do think my probability of failure would have been <= to theirs. But there is no way in hell I could get what they got. Not a chance. I saw people try with better credentials than me and who were probably much smarter, but they lacked whatever special magic blessing the cargo cult guys had. I'm convinced its pure cronyism and ass-covering. I guess nobody ever got fired for losing their clients' money to a Harvard or MIT Sloan MBA. Nobody with a degree like that could be at fault. It has to be the employees (I've seen really good people get blamed for following stupid orders several times), bad market timing, etc.
- threeseed 13y ago
  > I'm convinced its pure cronyism and ass-covering. I'm convinced it's not. Betting on the long term at the expense of the short term is incredibly hard. Even the smartest people in the world will panic (and in some cases pivot) when doubts start to creep into their mind. I am sure all of us have been in a similar situation. It's always easy to judge from the outside but on the inside those decisions are tough, lonely, scary and rarely to do with just covering your own ass.
  - api 13y ago
    I'd believe you if the folks I'm recalling had a good track record of having built successful businesses, or if their thinking struck me as... well... thinking, rather than cargo cultism. I know what it looks like when a person is thinking -- even fallaciously or sloppily, but still rubbing neurons together -- and I know what it looks like when a person is bullshitting to give the appearance of thought when they really have nothing at all going on upstairs. Buzzwords divorced from meaning and used without proper context are a dead giveaway for cargo-cult thinking. Now granted, I know far more about programming than business. I can spot a cargo cult programmer after three sentences. In business it takes me a lot longer, maybe 6-12 months of working with someone. But by then if I've watched the cargo cultism long enough I can be pretty sure that's what I'm seeing, and I stop giving the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes when someone repeatedly seems like an intellectual impostor, it's because they are. "Even the smartest people in the world will panic (and in some cases pivot) when doubts start to creep into their mind." I think that's a lame excuse. Maybe my expectations are irrational, but I expect the kind of people who get millions or tens of millions of dollars to experiment with to be fighter pilots, not bus drivers. And if you wreck the ten million dollar plane, you don't get to fly another right away. Someone else gets a turn. I also expect them to be smarter than me. When I talk to them I should have the feeling I've talked to an intellectual superior, not an impostoring dumbass. It downright offends me to see the American middle class collapsing and people with no jobs while this shit goes on. If you're an entrepreneur, you're a working stiff too. Your job is to create value, and probably jobs, by building new businesses. When ordinary working stiffs screw up they get passed over or fired. When these guys screw up they get promoted -- or at least endless second chances. I think what it boils down to is credentialism and cronyism rather than performance-based investing. If I were an investor I would split my odds between two areas: taking a chance on newbies, and investing in people with proven track records. But I would not repeatedly invest in people with poor track records just because their resume says "MIT Sloan School of Business." Yeah, it's a rant. You're talking to a war veteran here. I also earned these war stories in the Boston metro area, and have heard a fair number from a friend in New York. I've been told that this problem is worse on the East Coast due to the absolute worship of ivy league degrees and in-group connections there. The West Coast is more meritocratically-focused. Never lived or worked there, but the culture I've seen in the West supports that notion.
officemonkey 13y ago
Businesses that make material goods like 3M and Corning _have_ to innovate. If you don't keep innovating, you're going to lose your lead in established products (post-it notes, corningware) to China or WallMart. Apple has a similar story with Android phones. Keep innovating or get your low-end eaten. Google doesn't have to innovate. They're already China. If somebody makes something they like, they'll buy it. Or make a knock-off.
- david927 13y ago
  That's what Yahoo thought, 15 years ago.
  - lmm 13y ago
    Yahoo has been, on the whole, an astonishingly successful company; they may not have been as sexy as those we cover here, but they've kept plodding along. Stuff like this is why I think Yahoo will outlast Google in the long run.
    - notacoward 13y ago
      Exactly. If Yahoo was such a failure, we wouldn't be talking about them. There were many other very similar companies that were founded about the same time as Yahoo. Some got acquired (including some by Google or Yahoo) and more just died, but all essentially lost the race and even those of us who were around at the time barely remember them any more. Yahoo has survived, and made a lot of money for a lot of stakeholders over the years. I would also say that they have a better record than Google when it comes to privacy, legal entanglements, and general good open-source citizenship. Yahoo is a success story. Anyone who presents it otherwise is just putting their own lack of perspective and/or business sense on display.
- tylermauthe 13y ago
  While Google does have a Borg-like aspect, I think they do still need to innovate. What is more, it's clear the founders are still very keen to push the limits of innovation. Maybe, as has been said by others, they are not shutting this down but restricting it. In effect, they're replacing most of the 20% time with acquisitions but they do still have the process alive to enable some internal innovation.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
FedRegister 13y ago
>It used to be that HP engineers were expressly given Friday afternoons and full access to company resources to just play with new ideas. Among other things, this led to HP owning the printer market. And arguably enabling the Apple I.
digitalsushi 13y ago
A team of HP managers walks into the Svalbard global seed vault a week after the bombs went off. They smile contently as they sit down to their first meal of popcorn, to which they will survive for literally weeks longer than everyone else.
shin_lao 13y ago
Apple would be a good counter-example to your: This should make a lot of entrepreneurs happy, as there will continue to be a lot of top-down management-driven products that, if history shows, will continue to be market failures. There's no rule to success.
- zeckalpha 13y ago
  Actually, Apple (1988-1998) is a perfect example.
- Dogamondo 13y ago
  > There's no rule to success. Amen. I think as HN readers we suck up so much info on a daily basis (I would guess so much more than the everyday public) and get confused so many ways on what is 'The right way' to do thing, 'The wrong ways to do things' and the '5n lessons you should learn to do things right'. But really, all that will change and become irrelevant when company x does things in way y. Then all the armchair experts and runaway copiers will wax philosophical, and no-one will know any better until the daring party actually does it, or completely bucks it.
arcosdev 13y ago
Shareholder primacy trumps all
jacquesm 13y ago
The same thing may have happened at HP, but at Google is isn't happening (yet). It may happen but to claim that 20% time is gone is simply false.
- mcherm 13y ago
  Do you have information that contradicts the description in the article? Because the article claims that the 20% time is still "official policy", but that employees are expected to still put in 100% time on their normal project (and measured on doing so) and that they also need permission to start a "20% time" project and finally that management has been instructed to be parsimonious in granting this permission. The article claims that "20% time" at Google is no longer real; do you dispute this?
  - jacquesm 13y ago
    Plenty of googlers on the record in this thread that this is bs, I don't see what my anecdotes relating friends' experience would add to that.
cenhyperion 13y ago
It really seems to be the life cycle of a lot of companies. Be small, lightweight and flexible, come up with great ideas that are able to quickly rise to the top. Those ideas make you tons of money and cause you to grow to be massive. But then you're crushed under your own weight. We've seen Microsoft do it, I'd argue that Apple is well down that road, as you said we've seen HP do it, Google may be headed in that direction.
agumonkey 13y ago
How frequent was this scheme ? I bet all giants had this, Bell, Kodak ... Disregard towards little creativity bubbles can be harmful.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
YZF 13y ago
To be honest the world has also changed while this was happening. HP used to make quality stuff that people would pay more for. Today for the most part they have succumbed to commoditization where it's a race to the bottom. When people (for the most part) put price ahead of quality there's less value for things that create quality. That said there's lot of penny wise pound foolish style thinking everywhere. That also tends to relate to the growth of the business to the point where management can't really figure out what going on any more (assuming they could at some point).

by donw 13y ago

api 13y ago

It boggles my mind, given the big money involved, why so many people continue to bet huge sums of cash on the proven short-term penny-wise/pound-foolish idiocy of MBA-think. I mean sure-- if your company is under cash flow pressure you have to pinch pennies. You have no choice. Spreadsheet says so, and spreadsheet's the boss. But if you're not, you should be investing and thinking long term cause the other guys probably aren't. I've seen a related phenomenon in the startup world. Watched it, front row seat. I did a stint in startup-tech-focused business consulting. If you have a top-ten MBA and connections you can raise millions of dollars, set fire to it like the Joker in Batman Begins, and then raise millions of dollars again, serially. They were basically cargo cultists, mindlessly imitating the words, phrases, and superficial behaviors of supposedly-successful people and businesses. But there was no higher-order conceptual thinking beneath the surface-- no "there" there. They had no plan and no plan on how to acquire a plan. They got the money and then did a kind of mindless MBA rain dance until the money was gone. Then they'd raise more. I watched them do shit like destroy products that big customers had money in hand ready to pay for when they were inches away from release. I mean a done product, ready to go, and better than anything else in its market. A product that they owned and had already paid to develop. The rationale was always some kind of MBA newspeak blather. I can't even remember it since my mind filters out sounds that imitate language but lack conceptual content. Otherwise I risk wasting a synapse. But what do I know? I went to a po-dunk Midwestern state school, so what looks obviously stupid to me is maybe genius. I'm not saying I definitely could have done better, but I do think my probability of failure would have been <= to theirs. But there is no way in hell I could get what they got. Not a chance. I saw people try with better credentials than me and who were probably much smarter, but they lacked whatever special magic blessing the cargo cult guys had. I'm convinced its pure cronyism and ass-covering. I guess nobody ever got fired for losing their clients' money to a Harvard or MIT Sloan MBA. Nobody with a degree like that could be at fault. It has to be the employees (I've seen really good people get blamed for following stupid orders several times), bad market timing, etc.

threeseed 13y ago
> I'm convinced its pure cronyism and ass-covering. I'm convinced it's not. Betting on the long term at the expense of the short term is incredibly hard. Even the smartest people in the world will panic (and in some cases pivot) when doubts start to creep into their mind. I am sure all of us have been in a similar situation. It's always easy to judge from the outside but on the inside those decisions are tough, lonely, scary and rarely to do with just covering your own ass.
- api 13y ago
  I'd believe you if the folks I'm recalling had a good track record of having built successful businesses, or if their thinking struck me as... well... thinking, rather than cargo cultism. I know what it looks like when a person is thinking -- even fallaciously or sloppily, but still rubbing neurons together -- and I know what it looks like when a person is bullshitting to give the appearance of thought when they really have nothing at all going on upstairs. Buzzwords divorced from meaning and used without proper context are a dead giveaway for cargo-cult thinking. Now granted, I know far more about programming than business. I can spot a cargo cult programmer after three sentences. In business it takes me a lot longer, maybe 6-12 months of working with someone. But by then if I've watched the cargo cultism long enough I can be pretty sure that's what I'm seeing, and I stop giving the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes when someone repeatedly seems like an intellectual impostor, it's because they are. "Even the smartest people in the world will panic (and in some cases pivot) when doubts start to creep into their mind." I think that's a lame excuse. Maybe my expectations are irrational, but I expect the kind of people who get millions or tens of millions of dollars to experiment with to be fighter pilots, not bus drivers. And if you wreck the ten million dollar plane, you don't get to fly another right away. Someone else gets a turn. I also expect them to be smarter than me. When I talk to them I should have the feeling I've talked to an intellectual superior, not an impostoring dumbass. It downright offends me to see the American middle class collapsing and people with no jobs while this shit goes on. If you're an entrepreneur, you're a working stiff too. Your job is to create value, and probably jobs, by building new businesses. When ordinary working stiffs screw up they get passed over or fired. When these guys screw up they get promoted -- or at least endless second chances. I think what it boils down to is credentialism and cronyism rather than performance-based investing. If I were an investor I would split my odds between two areas: taking a chance on newbies, and investing in people with proven track records. But I would not repeatedly invest in people with poor track records just because their resume says "MIT Sloan School of Business." Yeah, it's a rant. You're talking to a war veteran here. I also earned these war stories in the Boston metro area, and have heard a fair number from a friend in New York. I've been told that this problem is worse on the East Coast due to the absolute worship of ivy league degrees and in-group connections there. The West Coast is more meritocratically-focused. Never lived or worked there, but the culture I've seen in the West supports that notion.

officemonkey 13y ago

Businesses that make material goods like 3M and Corning _have_ to innovate. If you don't keep innovating, you're going to lose your lead in established products (post-it notes, corningware) to China or WallMart. Apple has a similar story with Android phones. Keep innovating or get your low-end eaten. Google doesn't have to innovate. They're already China. If somebody makes something they like, they'll buy it. Or make a knock-off.

david927 13y ago
That's what Yahoo thought, 15 years ago.
- lmm 13y ago
  Yahoo has been, on the whole, an astonishingly successful company; they may not have been as sexy as those we cover here, but they've kept plodding along. Stuff like this is why I think Yahoo will outlast Google in the long run.
  - notacoward 13y ago
    Exactly. If Yahoo was such a failure, we wouldn't be talking about them. There were many other very similar companies that were founded about the same time as Yahoo. Some got acquired (including some by Google or Yahoo) and more just died, but all essentially lost the race and even those of us who were around at the time barely remember them any more. Yahoo has survived, and made a lot of money for a lot of stakeholders over the years. I would also say that they have a better record than Google when it comes to privacy, legal entanglements, and general good open-source citizenship. Yahoo is a success story. Anyone who presents it otherwise is just putting their own lack of perspective and/or business sense on display.
tylermauthe 13y ago
While Google does have a Borg-like aspect, I think they do still need to innovate. What is more, it's clear the founders are still very keen to push the limits of innovation. Maybe, as has been said by others, they are not shutting this down but restricting it. In effect, they're replacing most of the 20% time with acquisitions but they do still have the process alive to enable some internal innovation.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

FedRegister 13y ago

>It used to be that HP engineers were expressly given Friday afternoons and full access to company resources to just play with new ideas. Among other things, this led to HP owning the printer market. And arguably enabling the Apple I.

digitalsushi 13y ago

A team of HP managers walks into the Svalbard global seed vault a week after the bombs went off. They smile contently as they sit down to their first meal of popcorn, to which they will survive for literally weeks longer than everyone else.

shin_lao 13y ago

Apple would be a good counter-example to your: This should make a lot of entrepreneurs happy, as there will continue to be a lot of top-down management-driven products that, if history shows, will continue to be market failures. There's no rule to success.

zeckalpha 13y ago
Actually, Apple (1988-1998) is a perfect example.
Dogamondo 13y ago
> There's no rule to success. Amen. I think as HN readers we suck up so much info on a daily basis (I would guess so much more than the everyday public) and get confused so many ways on what is 'The right way' to do thing, 'The wrong ways to do things' and the '5n lessons you should learn to do things right'. But really, all that will change and become irrelevant when company x does things in way y. Then all the armchair experts and runaway copiers will wax philosophical, and no-one will know any better until the daring party actually does it, or completely bucks it.

arcosdev 13y ago

Shareholder primacy trumps all

jacquesm 13y ago

The same thing may have happened at HP, but at Google is isn't happening (yet). It may happen but to claim that 20% time is gone is simply false.

mcherm 13y ago
Do you have information that contradicts the description in the article? Because the article claims that the 20% time is still "official policy", but that employees are expected to still put in 100% time on their normal project (and measured on doing so) and that they also need permission to start a "20% time" project and finally that management has been instructed to be parsimonious in granting this permission. The article claims that "20% time" at Google is no longer real; do you dispute this?
- jacquesm 13y ago
  Plenty of googlers on the record in this thread that this is bs, I don't see what my anecdotes relating friends' experience would add to that.

cenhyperion 13y ago

It really seems to be the life cycle of a lot of companies. Be small, lightweight and flexible, come up with great ideas that are able to quickly rise to the top. Those ideas make you tons of money and cause you to grow to be massive. But then you're crushed under your own weight. We've seen Microsoft do it, I'd argue that Apple is well down that road, as you said we've seen HP do it, Google may be headed in that direction.

agumonkey 13y ago

How frequent was this scheme ? I bet all giants had this, Bell, Kodak ... Disregard towards little creativity bubbles can be harmful.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

YZF 13y ago

To be honest the world has also changed while this was happening. HP used to make quality stuff that people would pay more for. Today for the most part they have succumbed to commoditization where it's a race to the bottom. When people (for the most part) put price ahead of quality there's less value for things that create quality. That said there's lot of penny wise pound foolish style thinking everywhere. That also tends to relate to the growth of the business to the point where management can't really figure out what going on any more (assuming they could at some point).