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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

#111

Post by nostrademons »

UncleMeat wrote: post #90
nostrademons wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 then get skewered left and right for shutting down products? You can't have it both ways.

Exactly. I don't think Google is making the wrong choice, given their size and prominence. I do think that making the right choice means that they inevitably lose their ability to innovate, and hence miss out on the next technology choice.

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

#113

Post by otakucode »

I do hope that his notions about Google's place in society goes with him. The things he wrote in 'A New Digital Age' were terrifying. Simply because they made a great amount of money, he viewed Google as the clearest guide for societies future. He advocated for Google taking an active role in attempting to shape social thinking. That might sound good to some, but I know too much history to be willing to support it. The unintended consequences that come from any attempted society-wide engineering are universally horrific.

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

#115

Post by manigandham »

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.

Youtube is their content business division and already has tipping, superchat, subscriptions, ecommerce and premium channels. It also has ads and is highly profitable.

You're vastly overestimating what people will actually pay for and underestimating how big and critical the ads industry is.

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

#116

Post by ehsankia »

UncleMeat wrote: post #94
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…

> Its ad revenue is down Ad revenue is not down. Ad revenue is growing slower than in the past. > How can you have a large scale security breach with a brutal tech hiring process, sky high salaries and a whitepaper-producing workforce? Security is stupendously hard. It is also not a stable state. Software engineering as a discipline does not have methods of turning dollars into security with confidence. There is no c…

> Ad revenue is growing slower than in the past.

It's also a second degree derivative, which is inherently noisy. A single data point isn't enough to show a trend.

> Security is stupendously hard.

It also wasn't a breach. Breach implies it was exploited. They actually found the bug and fixed it, and there was as far as they could there no signs that it was abused.

Google has some of the best security security researchers out there. Look at Project Zero, they've found the majority of the largest zero days in the past few years.

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

#117

Post by icedchai »

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.

That's probably true of most large companies.

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

#118

Post by otakucode »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #83

Good riddance. Among other problems, Schmidt was one of the organizers of the "no poaching" scandals: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Role_in_illegal... He also wrote this, to make it clear that he knew he was doing wrong: [let's share this with competitors] "verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?"

"No poaching" is underselling it. It was wage fixing plain and simple.

He was also the one who, with a straight face, said "if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to fear" in response to widespread surveillance. Of course, he would not then open himself up to any scrutiny.

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

#120

Post by kermitismyhero »

vkou wrote: post #46
human20190310 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understood that, I just don't understand why Bismarck is considered a diplomatic genius instead of reviled as the architect of a dangerously fragile diplomatic situation.

That's because the pointlessness of the butchery of WWI has largely been white-washed, and stripped of all context. Every year, the British commonwealth celebrates the end of that war. Every year, I ask why after the war, the public didn't string up every one of the leaders that was responsible for plunging the world into that pointless, industrial bloodbath. The silence I hear is, sadly, deafening. Nobody cares to a…

Having been raised in a Commonwealth nation (Canada), I've come to realize how dreadful our education system is in teaching about WW1. That war, the events leading to it, and the events resulting from it are absolutely critical to understanding why the world is the way it is today. Everything from the Russian Revolution to the modern-day borders in the middle east to Irish independence to the reason why New York City became the financial capital of the world are a direct result of that war.

And all that schoolkids here are taught is "The noble British Empire led the glorious allied fight against some bad German people because reasons, here's some pictures of trenches, sometimes soldiers played soccer, now shut up and don't ask any more uncomfortable questions."

I also find it truly repulsive that so many people in this country keep repeating the lie that Canada was "born on Vimy Ridge", as if sending wave after wave of terrified and browbeaten conscripts to die in some shell-blasted hellhole is what "made" us. I'd argue that the true birth of Canada was the Suez Canal crisis, when we openly defied the motherland on the world stage and instead spearheaded a peaceful solution to the mess via an international consensus.

Fun fact: the Canadian politician who led that peaceful solution to the Suez crisis and would later keep Canada out of the Vietnam War, Lester Pearson, volunteered as a field medic for most of WW1. I can't think of any job more likely to permanently rewire one's brain into a "Never again!" orientation.

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