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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

#141

Post by systemBuilder »

m0zg wrote: post #103
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…

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…

Google is not going to sell every g*damn email you ever sent for $$$, but Facebook will and does. So there was never as much profit there for Google as for Facebook because Google was run more ethically.

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

#142

Post by manigandham »

trophycase wrote: post #110
omarchowdhury wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> native Youtube donation/subscription/tipping service

This exists, already competes with Twitch, and is part of an even bigger portfolio of media services from Google. You're arguing for Google to do something they have been doing for years.

https://www.youtube.com/premium

https://support.google.com/youtubegaming/answer/6304294

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7277005

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

#143

Post by blitmap »

bouncing wrote: post #129
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.

Okay - good riddance to him and the rest of the valley :-)

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

#144

Post by DeonPenny »

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…

Waymo is looking like it took the wrong direction too. So bad news all around

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

#145

Post by KeenFox »

sumeno wrote: post #37
nostrademons wrote: post #13

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…

> they're not even attempting to play in the cryptoverse. They aren't even attempting to play in snake oil or astrology either

Crypto is 99% woo, but the 1% is interesting. The interesting stuff isn't world-stompingly amazing, so it gets less press. I like the idea of someday being able to take pennies worth of payments from places where transaction fees alone at traditional payment processors represent a huge % of income. Bitcoin won't be the one to do it, but some of the coins that depend on something other than proof of work might.

At least I hope it's not Bitcoin. The power use is obscene.

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

#146

Post by pmart123 »

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…

That’s interesting. I think Google would have been better aiming for something closer to Twitter instead of trying to copy and mimic Facebook with Google+. Google’s core strength has been organizing information as a data first company versus facilating social connections.

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

#147

Post by tsimionescu »

nostrademons wrote: post #77
sdenton4 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, I totally agree that for the sort of problems that Google or Amazon faces , blockchains are a terrible solution. There are well-known best practices for scalable distributed computing, and blockchains are not them. 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 stor…

It's just so hard to imagine, at least in the current version of the world, a problem for which a distributed trust algorithm is the right solution, instead of a centralized one, probably state-owned if high levels of trust are needed. This is especially true given the advantages that a trusted authority has over blind consensus (e.g. the ability to revert fraudulent transactions).

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

#148

Post by groby_b »

DonHopkins wrote: post #56
gen220 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever since I've first learned about his story in-depth, this idea has also fascinated me – but I've never seen anybody else raise it unprompted! The analogy with software is right-on, in my view. He crated a system that was complex, sure, but very manageable and powerful if you understood it in sufficient detail. For a fast-and-loose comparison, he was running foreign policy in Vim/Emacs, while his contemporaries wer…

Fascinating analogy, but you're being intriguingly vague. Come on, be honest, take your comparison one step further, a little faster and looser, and tell us what you REALLY think: do you believe Eric Schmidt is more like a Vim user or an Emacs user? And which text editor would Bismarck have used? ;)

Clearly, Bismarck would use 𝖛𝖎𝖒

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

#149

Post by romwell »

z92 wrote: post #127
philsnow wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Facebook was the first social network where you can actually go and signup an account on your own.

That's doubly false :)

First, all social networks that preceded it (LiveJournal and MySpace were big amongst my peers) had open sign-ups.

Second, Facebook became popular because the sign-up was not open. You needed to have an .edu email address to sign up. This was a feature, as it kept parents and younger siblings off the networks. Having a FB account was a literal right of passage, something you can only get once you go to college. It spread because of that; those were the great days of FB.

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

#150

Post by yeahitslikethat »

ehsankia wrote: post #116
UncleMeat wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 researc…

> there was as far as they could there no signs that it was abused

As would be expected from the class of hackers that would be able to exploit it.

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