171–180 of 197 posts
To listen to Googlers, Google is the frakking Chuck Norris of tech companies.
More about him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris
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I normally don't do that. However for perspective I really wanted to give an idea of how intelligent I consider myself to be, and giving that relatively objective number sounded like the least assholish way I had to convey that to people who don't know me. You'll note that immediately upon giving the number I pointed out that there are issues with that method of measurement and gave an honest self-assessment whose up…
While I don't doubt your smart, I distrust the use of GRE scores for that. I got a 2280 on mine, which isn't too bad, but I had a lot of friends who were significantly smarter than me but didn't do quite as well on the test. At that point, I realized, it was dangerous to correlate GRE (or SAT for that matter) scores with IQ.
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I think that you can. To date, Google really only has one successful product (success meaning "makes money for Google") and that's Ad-sense. Sure it's wildly successful. But if that stopped making money for Google tomorrow (for example, I automatically mentally filter out all advertisements in my search results, how long before everybody does that), what would their revenue and profitability picture look like? In alm…
This is correct, but it's not that the other ventures are all losers. It's that AdWords is this supernova that outshines the entire galaxy. Gmail, Google Enterprise, Google Docs, Google Apps, Google Checkout, Google Earth, Google Maps -- these would all be highly interesting startups, some of them profitable, were they not inside Google. As it is, now they are more part of Google's long-term strategic plans.
And as I posted in another comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1093455), outside of Apps for business, really don't make any money for anybody. A quick analysis shows that subtract search/ad revenue and Google Apps for business, and all other offerings have to fit within about $100mil/yr revenue stream. This makes me think that most of the acquisitions have failed to grow much since being purchased.
Again, Google may be full of smart people, and I love using Google products, but money makers they are not.
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Interesting, thanks! I'd still like to someday understand what makes Google qualitatively different from other companies. Because I don't think 20k smart engineers necessarily yields a functional company nor is immediate access to the top levels always a good thing (for obvious reasons).
I was at Google in 2007, here's my take on it. The people that are working there aren't just the most brilliant in the world, they literally invented a good portion of the internet, computers, computer science, and programming as we know it. They have "the father of the internet" (Vint Cerf), the creator of Vim (Moolenaar), the creator of Python (Guido), the lead developer of Firefox (Goodger), several of the lead Li…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that you can. To date, Google really only has one successful product (success meaning "makes money for Google") and that's Ad-sense. Sure it's wildly successful. But if that stopped making money for Google tomorrow (for example, I automatically mentally filter out all advertisements in my search results, how long before everybody does that), what would their revenue and profitability picture look like? In alm…
Although I mentioned business strategy, by 'blown away' I mostly mean engineering enginuity. But as far as business is concerned, they are still in a good spot, what with basically owning the internet, even though they haven't monetized it much. It is fairly obvious that they care more about engineering solutions, with monetization as an afterthought. This means their solutions are extremely dominant in many fields (…
A true statement, they at least have the foundational technologies for doing better, but so far all of the profitable business ideas seem to center around advertising (youtube anyone?). I'm just not sure how much further that idea can stretch...do I really want to see advertisements while building my house in Sketchup?
I only ever hear about the intense scrutiny engineers have to go through (and various quasi-discriminatory practices regarding school pedigree), but say I'm past the "I want to be an engineer" phase of my life and now work squarely in management.
What's the process for that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I normally don't do that. However for perspective I really wanted to give an idea of how intelligent I consider myself to be, and giving that relatively objective number sounded like the least assholish way I had to convey that to people who don't know me. You'll note that immediately upon giving the number I pointed out that there are issues with that method of measurement and gave an honest self-assessment whose up…
While I don't doubt your smart, I distrust the use of GRE scores for that. I got a 2280 on mine, which isn't too bad, but I had a lot of friends who were significantly smarter than me but didn't do quite as well on the test. At that point, I realized, it was dangerous to correlate GRE (or SAT for that matter) scores with IQ.
Actually thinking of intelligence as a one-dimensional thing is dangerous in and of itself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is correct, but it's not that the other ventures are all losers. It's that AdWords is this supernova that outshines the entire galaxy. Gmail, Google Enterprise, Google Docs, Google Apps, Google Checkout, Google Earth, Google Maps -- these would all be highly interesting startups, some of them profitable, were they not inside Google. As it is, now they are more part of Google's long-term strategic plans.
I think one thing that people definitely forget is that many of those were startups at one time. Lots of the peripheral technology offerings Google has were not developed originally in-house -- they were acquired with ad-revenue from their flagship. And as I posted in another comment ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1093455 ), outside of Apps for business, really don't make any money for anybody. A quick analysi…