Brilliant article. Larry Page isn't impressed with Fiber because "it wasn’t game-changing enough,” and that “There’s no flying-saucer shit in laying fiber.” Definitely gives you a peak into the thought process of this giant.
Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline
321–330 of 463 posts
Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline
#322[deleted]
Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me of Valve's no manager management style: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-04-27/why-there... When you have a lot of money, a lot of things work because you have a lot of money. You often see the same thing with people trying to emulate pro-athletes training methods. A genetically gifted pro-athlete can often succeed in spite of their training, and not necessarily because of their training.
The endless spigot of cash from Steam is something that does enable Valve to take some very experimental leaps (VR, Steam machines, SteamOS, etc.) In my opinion, Valve also has the same shortcomings as google: practically zero customer support, and an un-curated app platform full of shovelware (finding gems on the Steam and the Google Play & Chrome Web Stores can be tricky). But there is still a ton to admire in both…
One person's shovel of shit is another's gem in the rough; and Valve wins because it accepts this.
I have paid for, and not returned, numerous bizarre or niche indie games that are slayed in their reviews; whereas I've returned more than a few Overwhelmingly Positives heaping shovelfulls of mainstream schlock.
It's part of growing your userbase; you lose its initial narrow focus of taste.
Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline
#324Big companies seem to step in the same puddle, every time they try to set up one of these "breakthrough incubator" projects. They pick fascinating projects. They hire lots of smart people and give them great autonomy. But they inadvertently set up incentives that lead to the repeated creation of LINS (lavishly impractical non-solutions). And then the plug gets pulled. I think the key problem is that the research team…
I don't think it's a particularly wise idea for big companies to try to emulate startups or startup incubators.
A key thing about startups is that they don't have much riding on them. If they fail, you can just dissolve the company, and the worst thing that happens is that people lose money and people lose jobs.
If a big corporation tries to do the same thing, there are a lot more encumbrances that elevate the risk levels quite a bit. There's a mothership that wants to protect its reputation, there are internal social pressures to start throwing money at problems, there is risk of tort situations that originated in the "startup" having wide-ranging repercussions throughout the company. No sane company is going to look at that minefield and conclude that it really is safe to sit back and let people do the "move fast and break things" thing without having to worry about meddling suits. The risk/reward for shareholders just isn't there.
Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline
#325Google has a fundamental problem with solving challenging issues, especially those in the realm of physical "meat-space". Really hard problems, problems that might reveal that Google is not omnipotent, where Google might not succeed, Google pulls back from. In areas where Google is, Google dominates the landscape. In all others, Google does not deign to participate. If Google can't dominate a market, it is not intere…
I think a counter example would be Google Streeview.
I remember when Apple launched their own Map service I was thinking that there is no way they were going to tackle something in the real-world "meat-space" the same way Google did to produce Streetview and gather improved map data.
They literally put a fleet of cars on the street and drove down a majority of the roads, big and small, in the United States and then in many other countries.
Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline
#326Big companies seem to step in the same puddle, every time they try to set up one of these "breakthrough incubator" projects. They pick fascinating projects. They hire lots of smart people and give them great autonomy. But they inadvertently set up incentives that lead to the repeated creation of LINS (lavishly impractical non-solutions). And then the plug gets pulled. I think the key problem is that the research team…
Brilliant internals? Maybe (never checked). Worthless product that solves nothing? Definitely.
Developing great systems or internals, then trying to find a use for them is one thing. Google Glass was a crap product without a purpose (from the beginning).
That aside, Google doesn't know what to do with clever, ingenious, or well-Engineered systems/tools/libraries/components/etc. They'll wrap them in sh-t, then use them to try to promote it.
Even the way they try to promote their products is laughable. It sounds like poorly done attempts to spin absolute crap to make it seem as though it's something else. Why don't you just have what you're pushing not be absolute crap? Can't do that? Don't know how?
I fail to see what was innovative or groundbreaking about Google Glass and the other crap they pitch as being such. Driverless cars? Is the driving of a car the real problem, or even a problem?
Driverless cars sound cool in a way (would grab my attention), but the technology has long been created. What's on display now is a lack of ability to think about or come up with ways to take such technology and put it to use.
What they're also making clear is that they're investing not because they see the many potential future applications, but because they don't know and are just picking something to try to say "me too," or to have its failure clearly demonstrate the pointlessness of trying to innovate, or because this or that name is associated with it, etc.
They have no real idea what they are doing. They just do stuff.
Also, the moonshots are strange, because while they like making themselves seem progressive or innovative, they don't do anything without a "business reason."
Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline
#327Contrast Google's old way of managing bets with Tesla. When Google started working on self-driving cars, they went about it academically. They did not plan a sequence of stepping stones that they could sell. They meant to have a product in an indeterminate future which should be immediately perfect and better than a human, essentially not needing a wheel. Tesla went about it with an engineering perspective. First, ca…
Having a car drive itself was more tough/challenging than big or worth doing. Why didn't they try for something like teleportation? That's tough/challenging, big, and worth doing, though I bet some idiot would say, "no, because it would wreck the economy" or "no, because it would put people out of work."
Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline
#328So many companies try to emulate how Google works. There are multiple books, hundreds or thousands of articles. People speculate on the perks, the review structure, the hierarchy, the autonomy. However, when other companies try to imitate Google they always fail because they're missing a crucial piece: Billions of dollars in ad revenue Google doesn't work the way it does to be successful. It works that way because it…
The interesting thing about Google though, is their seemingly humble roots and how quickly they rose to billions in ad revenue. I still remember when they didn't exist. I believe that kind of quick, meteoric rise is a relatively new phenomena. A company of Google's scale would've taken 100 years to build, 50 years ago.
Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline
#329Google has a fundamental problem with solving challenging issues, especially those in the realm of physical "meat-space". Really hard problems, problems that might reveal that Google is not omnipotent, where Google might not succeed, Google pulls back from. In areas where Google is, Google dominates the landscape. In all others, Google does not deign to participate. If Google can't dominate a market, it is not intere…
The speed increase from Fiber is cool. Brute forcing things by digging up streets and laying tons of Fiber seems like a lot of work for incremental gain.
Streetview seemed like an excellent idea to me and is a Maps feature I like using (which would be even better if the pictures were more detailed and VR-/life- like). Buying or renting a bunch of cars/planes to manually take those pictures, however, seemed like a stupid idea (dumb way to do it), like another brute force approach, and like them trying to grunt their way through the problem using large amounts of cash.
Some may like such approaches, but I'd see them as inelegant and a waste of money (how it's implemented, not the actual idea).
Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
> After a while someone realised that a group of engineers were consistently booking shitty travel around the same time, and then travelling first class the rest of the year. How's that different than having an annual travel budget? Sounds like they sacrificed to feast later instead of holding accommodations constant at "above average." I think you did a good job telling the story, but maybe I'm missing how gaming tr…
Crucial point which I didn't communicate properly: they were block booking spurious/unnecessary travel well in advance (by years).
How can you even book flights years in advance when airlines only publish schedules 330 days in advance?