Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 12:51 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #280

matwood wrote: post #68

Earlier 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.

It's very tempting to look at successful companies and identify their traits as key success factors. There was a very popular business book in this vein in the eighties called In Search of Excellence. The problem is that for every success characteristic you can usually find another successful company with a diametrically opposite approach or a company with a similar approach that's going bankrupt.

Post by patrickk » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 1:15 PM UTC

mkl wrote: post #392

patrickk wrote: post #388

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> A front page item on HN a few days ago asked what people would pay $1000 per month for Somewhat meta, but I cannot find this item on https://hn.algolia.com or using a Google search ("site: news.ycombinator.com $1000 for") can you post a link if you have it?

I found it with Algolia using [ask hn pay]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13114954

Post by blub » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 2:11 PM UTC

ianderf wrote: post #379

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #16

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The problem is that Google's target market is largely people who are unaware of what the risks are, unaware of the extent of what Google does with their data. It's up to us in the tech community to protect people from companies that use dark pattern behavior like Google. yuhong: Responding to your question as an edit to my own comment since two -4 comments is probably enough for one day. Silently implementing opt-out…

Even if you know that, you don't really have an option to stop it. You can buy a smartphone with either Android or iOS - and both are spying on the user heavily.

Post by blub » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 2:16 PM UTC

psbp wrote: post #10

michaelvoz wrote: post #8

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You must be a joy at parties. How is any of the data private when you willingly use their tools, sites, servers, etc? You open up google.com and type things in, what privacy do you expect? Or am I missing something you are referring to?

ocdtrekkie is infamous for having endless anti-Google arguments on Google+ for the past 5 years. Trust me, you're not going to have a fruitful discussion.

Post by bbctol » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 2:41 PM UTC

digi_owl wrote: post #49

espadrine wrote: post #37

Contrast 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…

Also, Glass was Brin going off script. I wonder if he bought into the press likening him to Tony Stark...