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Eric Schmidt to become technical advisor to Alphabet

abc.xyz

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Re: Eric Schmidt to become technical advisor to Alphabet

#21

Post by notatoad »

jtchang wrote: post #7

Investors are seeing this as a non-event. He's still going to be around, just a much more limited capacity. More interesting is who they decide to appoint.

Who they decide to appoint will only be interesting if they appoint somebody interesting, which seems unlikely. Larry Page is still running the show, and moving from an executive chairman to a non-executive chairman will probably only mean that the board has less power than they did before.

Odds are they appoint somebody politically well-connected, and that person then gets to use the "chairman of the board at alphabet" title to lobby various governments in Google's favour, rather than they appoint somebody who is going to do any serious oversight of alphabet's executives.

Re: Eric Schmidt to become technical advisor to Alphabet

#23

Post by eanzenberg »

bertil wrote: post #17
prepend wrote: post #9

Is this related to #metoo?

For anyone wondering: there have been some rumours that Eric Schmidt has been indiscrete in the past, more specifically that he described that he had an “open marriage” and that he had relations with “exotic dancers”. As far as I can tell, there is no reason to think that his close collaborators at Google didn’t know about and discovered something unsavoury recently. More to the point, there is no reason to think his…

Cool, I always wanted our sexual culture to revert back to the puritan 1600's.

Re: Eric Schmidt to become technical advisor to Alphabet

#24

Post by puzzle »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

Schmidt will still be on the board. IR release: https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2017/1221.html

When he was hired, there was a pact with Larry and Sergey that the three would run the company for 20 years: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-executives/top-goo...

Re: Eric Schmidt to become technical advisor to Alphabet

#27

Post by forgotpassagan »

samfisher83 wrote: post #26

https://www.recode.net/2017/6/13/15788892/alphabet-sharehold... Larry and Sergey have special voting shares so its their company. In this case how much does the board really matter. Sergey and Larry can do what they want.

Didn't Larry and Sergey always dislike Schmidt and consider him 'adult supervision'? I remember them being quite overt about how happy they were when 'adult supervision is no longer needed' years back

Re: Eric Schmidt to become technical advisor to Alphabet

#28

Post by rayiner »

eanzenberg wrote: post #23
bertil wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone wondering: there have been some rumours that Eric Schmidt has been indiscrete in the past, more specifically that he described that he had an “open marriage” and that he had relations with “exotic dancers”. As far as I can tell, there is no reason to think that his close collaborators at Google didn’t know about and discovered something unsavoury recently. More to the point, there is no reason to think his…

Cool, I always wanted our sexual culture to revert back to the puritan 1600's.

It's not a reversion, it's a continued evolution. As Dworkin noted:

> Empirically speaking, sexual liberation was practiced by women on a wide scale in the sixties and it did not work: that is, it did not free women. Its purpose—it turned out—was to free men to use women without bourgeois constraints, and in that it was successful.

The hippies became Reaganites and women were allowed to participate in the economy to some extent, but that freedom also came with the expectation of sexual availability. You see it even now: suggest that maybe we should prohibit relationships between coworkers, and men flip out. The idea that we might categorically close off some spheres of life to sexual advances, so that women can work in peace and build their careers, induces apoplexy.

Re: Eric Schmidt to become technical advisor to Alphabet

#29

Post by burkaman »

eanzenberg wrote: post #23
bertil wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone wondering: there have been some rumours that Eric Schmidt has been indiscrete in the past, more specifically that he described that he had an “open marriage” and that he had relations with “exotic dancers”. As far as I can tell, there is no reason to think that his close collaborators at Google didn’t know about and discovered something unsavoury recently. More to the point, there is no reason to think his…

Cool, I always wanted our sexual culture to revert back to the puritan 1600's.

I think you misread that comment.

Re: Eric Schmidt to become technical advisor to Alphabet

#30

Post by telltruth »

samfisher83 wrote: post #26

https://www.recode.net/2017/6/13/15788892/alphabet-sharehold... Larry and Sergey have special voting shares so its their company. In this case how much does the board really matter. Sergey and Larry can do what they want.

Have you looked at Alphabet or other big company board? One thing you will notice is that lot of board members are actually from giant investment funds (3 in case of Google, much worse for companies like Microsoft). Regardless of who owns voting shares, these investors have huge say on how things gets done.

For example, they can threaten to dump their stock or not buy in anymore. Because of small daily volumes relative to market cap even small dumping can have huge price swings in stock. For public companies, their stock is literally a currency. They use it for acquisitions, hiring and so on. These investors can reject motions in board voting and usually always want to tighten screws for short term gains.

Now you should have more understanding on why Google was forced to hire people like Ruth Porat as CFOs and why she can cut down on so many projects for "more business focus" and increase "shareholder value". Owning majority voting shares are not that useful as they were hyped up to be.

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