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Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

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Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#61

Post by fjsolwmv »

vl wrote: post #53
neves wrote: post #41

I'm starting to read "When Google Met WikiLeaks" by Assange. In this book Schmidt is the villain. It will be nice to match Assange's point of view with all the eulogies that we will read about Schmidt now.

Schmidt's involvement with US's politics is strange, especially for the business leader: he met with Assange, he went to North Korea. There was a hilarious moment at the company meeting when rank-and-file learned from the news that Eric and Larry met with Trump. Somebody demanded explanation, as if it is something strange that business leaders meet with the president. Sundar mumbled something like "yes, I didn't know…

Schmidt is like Bloomberg. They aspired to geopolitical power as their ambition exceeded what was available in the business world. Bloomberg had the weird twist of trying to buy his way into British royalty, while Schmidt wants to be "in the room where it happens" from USA to North Korea.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#62

Post by itsaidpens »

mancerayder wrote: post #58

Google seems to be falling flat on its face growth-wise. Its ad revenue is down, its Pixel 3 platform fell completely flat, it shuttered Google + and had a security breach? How can you have a large scale security breach with a brutal tech hiring process, sky high salaries and a whitepaper-producing workforce? Hell, when you interview at much smaller firms, the tech groups copycat the Google hiring techniques, that's…

Complete aside: all of my friends/acquaintances who work for Google (and in full disclosure, they're generally not engineers) unequivocally agree that Google could fire 30% of their workforce with no disruption in service/revenue.

They've become bloated.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#63

Post by sdenton4 »

nostrademons wrote: post #38
sanderjd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting point: is it innovative to jump into any new thing regardless of its actual potential? You could claim that yes, it is. I would argue that it actually isn't. The key to innovation is to be able to correctly evaluate where there are real opportunities for innovative technologies. It's possible "the cryptoverse" will eventually show that it has such potential, but it has stubbornly refused to do…

Jumping into a new thing regardless of its potential is a necessary, not sufficient, component of innovation. If you wait until it's obvious to everyone that something's a good idea, you're not being innovative, you're just an opportunist. Similarly, if it turns out that it's not actually a good idea, you're not being innovative, you've just wasted a whole lot of time. Innovation happens at the intersection of contra…

a) Opportunism is good business.

b) 'Wasting time' is a part of research. If you never fail, you're missing opportunities. That said, you pick your failures with the hope of getting the right kinds of wins... which brings us to...

c) Giant centralized cloud-based businesses have giant centralized and for-the-most-part trusted datastores. There's no reason to use a blockchain if a standard distributed database suits your needs. From where I sit, blockchains are mainly a solution in search of a problem.

(and just imagine the press cycles if a FAANG company rolled out a blockchain, and thus burnt god-knows how much coal bringing it mainstream...)

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#64

Post by inlined »

fyoving wrote: post #34
anyfoo wrote: post #5

This is of course extremely subjective, and I have no knowledge of what Google was and is on the inside except for a short internship almost 10 years ago: I somehow always felt that Google with Eric Schmidt as a CEO was a much different Google than later on. Under Eric Schmidt, Google seemed like this extremely innovative company with the brightest minds in the industry. Afterwards, it seemed to instead grow into jus…

What's the evidence to any of that? What's with the persistent narrative of google not being "just another company" and then (sadly?) becoming one? that's some fairytale nonsense.

There’s plenty of anecdata from the employees. When I first joined Google 9 years ago I was terrified of not being as good to google as google was to me. I bled the google colors.

The last time someone asked me what it’s like to work there, I said “it’s just a job” on instinct.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#65

Post by inlined »

krm01 wrote: post #14

Does anyone inside Google care to share how Eric is perceived among fellow engineers?. From the outside, it seems many of the great innovations came when he wS CEO and Larry + Sergey were building the company culture.

I greatly miss his leadership. There was a sense that he knew how to steer the ship.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#66

Post by mancerayder »

itsaidpens wrote: post #62
mancerayder wrote: post #58

Google seems to be falling flat on its face growth-wise. Its ad revenue is down, its Pixel 3 platform fell completely flat, it shuttered Google + and had a security breach? How can you have a large scale security breach with a brutal tech hiring process, sky high salaries and a whitepaper-producing workforce? Hell, when you interview at much smaller firms, the tech groups copycat the Google hiring techniques, that's…

Complete aside: all of my friends/acquaintances who work for Google (and in full disclosure, they're generally not engineers) unequivocally agree that Google could fire 30% of their workforce with no disruption in service/revenue. They've become bloated.

Ironically they just purchased last year a huge block of Manhattan - presumably for even more employees[1].

1 - https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/google-bought-manhattans-c...

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#67

Post by omarchowdhury »

trophycase wrote: post #60
omarchowdhury wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that an "in browser tipping system" is a viable hedge to the also assumed downfall of their ad based revenue.

Well Patreon is proving to be somewhat successful, I don't see why something similar, or donation/tipping shouldn't be easy to incorporate.

Patreon launched in 2013 and estimates $1 billion in total payments to creators by the end of 2019. That averages out to $166M/year. Google reported $30 billion in ad revenue for Q1 2019, that's 6 years of Patreon transaction activity compressed into 3 days (or their entire 2019 activity of $500M in payments in less than 2 days).

Can you still extrapolate from this that the tipping model is even anywhere near a threat to Google's ad based business model that they should be incorporating it? And is it even an apples to apples comparison? Many creators don't use Patreon in spite of or to replace ads, they use it as a supplement.

Moreover, just because something is technically simple to integrate, doesn't automatically make it the correct business decision to do so.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#68

Post by avar »

vkou wrote: post #43
zavi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Larry hasn't been the Google CEO for some time now. I do think the company got caught up in incremental goals and internal PC struggles during Sundar's time, making it feel like yet another large company rather than a powerful disruptor it used to be.

> internal PC struggles There's plenty of reasons for why they started taking place, that have nothing to do with who is CEO. Societal expectations have changed, formerly unpopular ideas gained both a voice, and mindshare, and Google's influence over the Internet has grown - and with it, expectations that that influence should be wielded responsibly. Intelligent people strongly disagree as to what 'responsibly' means…

Do you think Oracle encourages the sort of open internal debate culture that precipitated that well-known incident?

The responsibility for corporate culture is ultimately with the CEO and the board.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#69

Post by stanleydrew »

ForHackernews wrote: post #25
manigandham wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cryptoverse What exactly is this and what business is doing well in it?

I assume this refers to cyptocurrency-related businesses. ICOs ('initial coin offerings') collected around $5.6 billion and most of them never delivered any real product: https://www.coinwire.com/ey-report-finds-most-2017-icos-fail... One could argue that getting enormous amounts of money without needing to produce any results for it is the very definition of "doing well".

I hope there aren't too many people who define "doing well" that way. Seems like it would lead to a total breakdown of the social fabric.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#70

Post by bdamm »

trophycase wrote: post #60
omarchowdhury wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that an "in browser tipping system" is a viable hedge to the also assumed downfall of their ad based revenue.

Well Patreon is proving to be somewhat successful, I don't see why something similar, or donation/tipping shouldn't be easy to incorporate.

Then they should just buy Patreon like they bought YouTube. Why risk failure if that’s actually a good hedge? A: It probably isn’t a good hedge because they know Patreon can’t even remotely scale to the size of the AdWords business. People just generally don’t want to pay much for content. Better would be leveraging subscriptions and then developing a money distribution process to support the content people will come for. I think they are trying with YouTube TV and Red.
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