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Sounds like yet another variant of Upton Sinclair's Law: "When a man's paycheck depends on his not understanding something, you can depend upon his not understanding it."
...the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had.
Is Apple a big winner, like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (the other companies he mentions repeatedly)? Bigger. (Check the last 1, 5 or 10 years on Google finance for the GOOG or MSFT comparison. FB is not public, but...) Do they have this obnoxiously elitist focus? No. They still manage to hire great engineers, though.
So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture?... any company that needs to have good software.
I wouldn't say that Apple is dominated by a hacker culture at all. It's dominated by Steve Jobs and a focus on design and attention to detail. Yet that seems to produce much better software than Google or Microsoft, IMHO. That's very subjective, I realize, but the market seems to agree. At any rate, Apple does produce good software.
So are the hacker culture and the elitist focus really necessary for a technology company to succeed? Is Apple a complete anomaly while Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are typical? What say you, pg?
I realize it's borderline suicidal to post an HN comment that simultaneously calls out pg and lauds Apple, but it's criminal to completely leave the best (imho) technology company out of a discussion about attributes of great technology companies.
EDIT: Most importantly they had just witnessed the spectacle of Netscape, a company that seemed unstoppable, just completely buried by MS.
Rich Google in 2004 overlooked the value of social networking (both their in-house hit Orkut and outside services).
I heared that when one of the large investment banks (forgot which one) got a new CEO, the first thing he did was stopping all IT outsourcing projects. He did realize a modern bank is, in fact, a software company, and you shouldn't outsource your core activity.
In contrast, Google was concerned about perfecting its search product, and therefore was focusing on what would help in that regard (hackers), which helped sustain its hacker culture.
I really don't get these Yahoo is dead stories. It's still the biggest site in the world if all it's properties are put together.
Saying "Yahoo is dead" (pg didn't, btw) is a sensationalist way of saying "Yahoo is in a slow, steady decline."
To predict this, look at the leading indicators:
- new products
- strategic acquisitions
- flow of talent
- company morale
- growth relative to competition
- positions in key emerging markets
Also, using "biggest site" as a metric is one of the problems with Yahoo that pg mentions in this article.
Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article. ...the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had. Is Apple a big winner, like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (the other companies he mentions repeatedly)? Bigger. (Check the last 1, 5 or 10 years on Google finance for the GOOG or MSFT comparison. FB is not public, but...) Do they have this…
The article is about Yahoo and in a round about way the move of internet marketing focus from 90s banner advertising to search marketing in 00s. I didn't find Apple Computers Inc. (as it was) to be missing, indeed I'm kinda at a loss where you think Apple fit in to this article.
There are already plenty of articles about Apple.
Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article. ...the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had. Is Apple a big winner, like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (the other companies he mentions repeatedly)? Bigger. (Check the last 1, 5 or 10 years on Google finance for the GOOG or MSFT comparison. FB is not public, but...) Do they have this…
It's a mistake to say that. All the work that went into the LLVM/Clang, low-level development that's done OS X and iOS isn't something that you can do without hackers; neither are the algorithms used by Aperture or even iPhoto.
Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article. ...the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had. Is Apple a big winner, like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (the other companies he mentions repeatedly)? Bigger. (Check the last 1, 5 or 10 years on Google finance for the GOOG or MSFT comparison. FB is not public, but...) Do they have this…