71–80 of 366 posts
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…
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…
The other big thing was Larry pushed social on the company without really understanding social as a product, and was absolutely unable to handle the huge negative response both internally and externally to that push. This all happened at the same time Microsoft and Amazon committed to Cloud (which Google has only tepidly adopted). The one time I met with Schmidt to explain my cloud project, he was delighted and encou…
I think they had a similar idea after Apple's iPhone started gaining traction, it's only that in the case of Android Google's execution was an order of magnitude better compared to what they did with Google+. I wouldn't put the blame for the failure of Google+ on Page only, I'd also assign it to Gundotra, after all he was the man directly in charge of it all, Page's fault is that he chose and supported the wrong man for the job.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember that Larry was CEO twice: 1998-2001 and 2011-2015. During the first period Google was exceptionally innovative. During the second, Google attempted to be exceptionally innovative but largely fell flat on its face. I'd blame size and market position more. Google was left as one of very few profitable giants standing when the dot-com crash hit, and yet they were young enough to not have the institutional inert…
> cryptoverse What exactly is this and what business is doing well in it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember that Larry was CEO twice: 1998-2001 and 2011-2015. During the first period Google was exceptionally innovative. During the second, Google attempted to be exceptionally innovative but largely fell flat on its face. I'd blame size and market position more. Google was left as one of very few profitable giants standing when the dot-com crash hit, and yet they were young enough to not have the institutional inert…
Yes it is quite amazing how they have almost complete browser dominance and video content creation/hosting dominance as well as search dominance but are unable to come up with even a simple in browser tipping system to hedge against the downfall of their almost entirely ad based revenue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 y…
I'm equally convinced - and I suspect I disagree with most HNers here - that there are also some problems for which blockchains are the only solution - they just don't work with centralized data stores, mostly because nobody would trust a single entity to manage that data store. Google isn't even looking for those problems. In general, Google does not look for problems, it takes problems that everybody knows about and looks for solutions. There are thousands of entrepreneurs in the cryptoverse who are looking for those problems.
There was a time, early in its history, where Google was willing to take a solution - download the web and keep only the links - and then find the problem (search) for which it was the solution. And then they leveraged that solution into all sorts of other problems - webmail, navigation & directions, news, academic papers, video, etc. But the thing is that this is a risky business: most solutions in search of a problem don't actually solve anything, so the time spent solving them is wasted.
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.
Isn't that true for a large amount of large tech companies?
I was under the impression that a large amount of the workers are working on incremental improvements to existing services or working on new features/services entirely. If those people stop working that shouldn't disrupt the service and you shouldn't see the revenue fall until a competitor catches up & out innovates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other big thing was Larry pushed social on the company without really understanding social as a product, and was absolutely unable to handle the huge negative response both internally and externally to that push. This all happened at the same time Microsoft and Amazon committed to Cloud (which Google has only tepidly adopted). The one time I met with Schmidt to explain my cloud project, he was delighted and encou…
I think Page had the right idea, because if you look nowadays at people under 30 for them the Internet is represented by social networks, be it Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or even Snapchat, the internet/web represented by the browser and by visiting different websites via Google is no longer that important. I think Page realized that if Google doesn't hop on the social train they'll end up looking from the outside…
I don't think it was super-obvious 10 years ago, but social has turned out to be a growth product that led to a minefield for the successful companies (look at Twitter and Facebook now) because the growth strategies were so sketchy that people and the government ultimately had to reject them.
Ultimately, it's on Page, though. He stood up at TGIF and told all the player to "get along" when Search had made a coherent argument that coupling the Social brand with search was brand suicide. I think Google could have made a much less obnoxious social network, maybe it would have been good, but without aggressive growth strategies, it wouldn't have been popular (a lot changed since the Orkut days, most people forget Google had a social network with half a billion users at one point!)
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…
Remember that Larry was CEO twice: 1998-2001 and 2011-2015. During the first period Google was exceptionally innovative. During the second, Google attempted to be exceptionally innovative but largely fell flat on its face. I'd blame size and market position more. Google was left as one of very few profitable giants standing when the dot-com crash hit, and yet they were young enough to not have the institutional inert…
Which is a good thing considering how much of the population's life is already intertwined with and recorded by Google. I can't imagine anything more dystopian than a Google issued currency.