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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

#101

Post by fyoving »

inlined wrote: post #64
fyoving wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is nothing wrong with being "just a job", it most likely always was, the rest was just in your head.

It's better for the company to help the delusional embrace the "it's just a job" mentality ASAP so that they and the rest of us might be spared the weekly public hissy fit.

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

#102

Post by rattlesnakedave »

meh206 wrote: post #72

Google is an internet monopoly with data and information. I think the only reason they've come this far without being exposed as such was cooperating with the government (learning from Microsoft's mistakes when they were exposed)

What do they have a monopoly on? The claim that Google, or any FAANG company is a monopoly is absurd. A monopoly is the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service. Google definitionally doesn’t have that, because competitors exist.

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

#103

Post by m0zg »

dekhn wrote: post #79
paganel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

None of G+ was Page's idea. There was a product manager (who left for facebook!) who did the big pitch deck that got it rolling. Then they put Vic Gundotra in charge and gave him carte blanche to modify multiple products. I agree that was the wrong person for the job. But you can't even imagine the amount of groupthink and ego that Vic surrounded himself with. I don't think it was super-obvious 10 years ago, but soci…

Nah. Larry doesn't get a pass on this one. I was there at the time, and this (unlike, say, Cloud) clearly was one of "his" projects, something he pushed relentlessly and cared about a lot. That's why G+ was where you went if you wanted a quick and easy promo: you could launch a total embarrassing turd and just because Larry liked G+ that turd would be promotion worthy nevertheless.

Seeing the FB revenue figures today I can see why he cared, but I think he undermined the long term prospects of the company with this shit quite a bit, and distracted it from more valuable pursuits as well. That's all on him, not on Gundotra.

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

#104

Post by b_tterc_p »

nostrademons wrote: post #59
patejam wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused by all the assumptions in this thread, including 1. That Google didn't research crypto internally and purposely decide not to pursue it. 2. That crypto is worth staking Google's time, energy, and ego on. 3. That crypto involvement is a direct reason a company is or is not innovative.

Hard lesson learned from a couple of research projects within Google and then again from my first couple years as an entrepreneur: Internal research is useless. The only way to know whether a new idea will work is to try it: put some minimal form of it in front of people and see if they actually get use it. People are complex; sometimes they do things that all rational thought says they shouldn't (buying Bitcoin and…

> Internal research is useless.

> The only way to know whether a new idea will work is to try it: put some minimal form of it in front of people and see if they actually get use it.

And in the face of a universe of potential ideas how do you determine whether you invest time into prototyping pre-sneezed tissues? Internal research. You’ve just moved the goal post.

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

#105

Post by on_and_off »

repsilat wrote: post #85
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…

> a security breach Wasn't it a security vulnerability? IIRC they were returning data they shouldn't have for some calls, but didn't have conclusive evidence that anyone had ever made those calls because of log rotation policies. (Maybe I misremembered, or maybe you're talking about a different issue?)

yup that's how I remember it as well

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

#107

Post by beenBoutIT »

ssambros wrote: post #86
dekhn wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of G+ was Page's idea. There was a product manager (who left for facebook!) who did the big pitch deck that got it rolling. Then they put Vic Gundotra in charge and gave him carte blanche to modify multiple products. I agree that was the wrong person for the job. But you can't even imagine the amount of groupthink and ego that Vic surrounded himself with. I don't think it was super-obvious 10 years ago, but soci…

> Google could have made a much less obnoxious social network Even today, I think YouTube has a great potential for becoming a better social network, than G+ ever was.

YouTube has been a bustling social network for years. Not everyone gets involved with the social part of it, but it's there.

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

#108

Post by beenBoutIT »

martin_henk wrote: post #88
dekhn wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of G+ was Page's idea. There was a product manager (who left for facebook!) who did the big pitch deck that got it rolling. Then they put Vic Gundotra in charge and gave him carte blanche to modify multiple products. I agree that was the wrong person for the job. But you can't even imagine the amount of groupthink and ego that Vic surrounded himself with. I don't think it was super-obvious 10 years ago, but soci…

Very interesting. Social media today is a much more refined offering than google+. Google feels like microsoft nowadays. It’s something for adults to get things done. Your personal stuff happens on DM’s, instagram, snapchat, tiktok... much more so for young people. Therefore keeping search and social separated was a good thing.

Reductio ad Microsoftium.

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

#109

Post by martinpw »

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.

> 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.

Do all your friends who work there include themselves in the 30% by any chance? I assume not. And I also assume whoever you ask they will also say 30% could be fired, but they will then also all say it should not of course be themselves...

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

#110

Post by trophycase »

omarchowdhury wrote: post #67
trophycase wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 threa…

First of all, I guarantee a native Youtube donation/subscription/tipping service would already have far more users than Patreon even does currently (see twitch.tv for a great model) due the enormous network effect Youtube already has. Second of all, $1 billion and growing rapidly for a third party service. Nearly every quality Youtube channel I am subscribed to has a patreon at this point, and I can only imagine it increasing as a percentage of income the content creator generates.

> 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?

No, but we can extrapolate from twitch, and guess that it probably would be.

> Many creators don't use Patreon in spite of or to replace ads, they use it as a supplement.

Because it is a third party site, there is no such option. It would be trivial to incorporate an ad-free experience for donations/subscriptions similar to how twitch does.

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