Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 366 posts

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

#121

Post by Aeolun »

nostrademons wrote: post #23
manigandham wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The set of companies & foundations centered around blockchain, cryptocurrency, distributed ledgers, and related technologies. Coinbase, Binance, CoinMarketCap are doing great, Bitmain would be doing great except they made a terrible bet on Bitcoin Cash, a number of other organizations (VeChain, IOTA, Ripple, Stellar, Ethereum) are doing "we'll see", and still others (Bitfinex, Tether, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV) are im…

Looks like the only ones doing well are the traders.

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

#122

Post by patejam »

sanderjd wrote: post #95
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.

Who is making those assumptions? My comment assumed the opposite of #2 and #3.

Most people, not you :P

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

#123

Post by rusk »

philsnow wrote: post #82
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…

The "trouble" with Orkut was the large majority of those users were outside the United States. Brazil and later India made up the majority. Those eyeballs weren't worth as much to advertisers, and I don't think Google valued the product highly because of it.

> Those eyeballs weren't worth as much to intelligence agencies

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

#124

Post by perl4ever »

paganel wrote: post #73
dekhn wrote: post #9

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…

"if you look nowadays at people under 30 for them the Internet is represented by social networks, be it Facebook"

I'm not under 30, and can't really say, but I've read frequently in the media that young people don't use Facebook. I use it to a limited extent, and I think everyone I know that uses it is 30-40ish.

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

#125

Post by JudgeWapner »

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.

I've heard they deliberate over-hire to capture talent, keeping them from winding up with competitors. Not sure if true, but sounds plausible. Or to be able to always have a reserve to tap if a project suddenly needs engineers.

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

#126

Post by [deleted] »

avar wrote: post #68
vkou wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#127

Post by z92 »

philsnow wrote: post #82
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…

The "trouble" with Orkut was the large majority of those users were outside the United States. Brazil and later India made up the majority. Those eyeballs weren't worth as much to advertisers, and I don't think Google valued the product highly because of it.

That was because you couldn't "sign up" for Orkut. You had to receive an invitation from someone who already has an account. Therefore it spread in regions where people knew one another, instead of spreading smoothly.

The reason why they kept it like that was because of the processing power that was needed to serve the pages. That was more than search. Every individual had to be served a different page. And computing at that time weren't as cheap.

Facebook was the first large practical social network among these where you can actually go and signup an account on your own when it was fully open. And they did it by heavily optimizing their code and hardware. That was a separate challenge, which seemed to me Google was unwilling to take for Orkut or anything social at that time.

That's what I felt was happening as an outsider.

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

#128

Post by beenBoutIT »

rattlesnakedave wrote: post #102
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.

It's clear that for some people Google has become synonymous with "the Internet".

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

#129

Post by bouncing »

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?"

That wasn't just him, it was the whole valley.

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

#130

Post by quixquaxqux »

beenBoutIT wrote: post #128
rattlesnakedave wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's clear that for some people Google has become synonymous with "the Internet".

Wouldn't it need to be "the internet" for _all_ people to be a monopoly?
Post reply on HN