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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

#151

Post by yeahitslikethat »

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.

And yet they still don't have enough employees to enable them to follow the law, like for example not earning ad money on pirated content.

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

#152

Post by aceofspades19 »

otakucode wrote: post #118
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.

That's not what he said at all, even remotely. He said "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place" and that was largely in the context that no matter what Google does, the American government can come in and take any information they want that is stored on Google's servers with very little recourse.

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

#153

Post by golergka »

KeenFox wrote: post #145
sumeno wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 lea…

I'd say it's 80% woo, 1% of what you call interesting and 19% is solving real user problems with breaking the law. Mostly transactions that you can't depend on banks for - like buying drugs.

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

#154

Post by plorkyeran »

UncleMeat wrote: post #87
mrb wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrencies. For example Coinbase is doing well—raised $300M on a $8B valuation: http://fortune.com/2018/10/30/coinbase-series-e-funding/

Google's market cap is 850B. The existence of some very successful companies in crypto does not mean that Google made a mistake by not jumping on that train.

Raising a bunch of money at a high valuation isn't enough to make a company "very successful" either.

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

#155

Post by streblo »

heymijo wrote: post #48
shutton wrote: post #10

Really enjoyed listening to this recent interview with Eric Schmidt. I’d never heard of Bill Campbell before, seems like he was a huge influence around Silicon Valley. https://tim.blog/guest/eric-schmidt/

For a counterpoint on Campbell as a terrific business coach read "Hatching Twitter" [1]. He was hired as Ev Williams' coach and the picture the book paints is bad. Working more for the board of directors instead the person he was hired to help. Telling Williams he was doing great then reporting to the board he was doing terrible. The book is also a great way to understand why Twitter is such a shit show of an organiz…

It's really hard to tell what in this book is based in fact. It's almost entirely based off of hearsay and gossip. There are interviews with people recalling minute details of conversations they had ~5 years in the past. You can call bullshit on a lot of it.

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

#156

Post by joshuamorton »

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.

Do you think Google would have attracted the talent it did with a culture like oracle's?

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

#157

Post by minwcnt5 »

perl4ever wrote: post #124
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…

"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.

Why did you cut off the quote there? OP also mentioned Instagram and WhatsApp. Most people under 30 are on Instagram.

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

#158

Post by dekhn »

bouncing wrote: post #132
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'm sure Larry Page is a smart guy, and Page Rank was clever, but I'm not really sure there's any particular reason to believe he knows where any industry is moving. Schmidt could predict technology trends well, while Page seems to just throw acquisitions at a wall, see what sticks, then sunset anything that doesn't.

most of pagerank predates larry; several people were already looking at using centrality measures for page ranking before him. And I think Brin contributed a lot more of the math and theory than Page ever did.

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

#159

Post by drak0n1c »

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…

Alphabet's CFO blamed the ad revenue drop primarily on Youtube and specifically recent changes in their Youtube algorithm (which paradoxically now favors advertiser-friendly, sanitized mainstream media channels). Apparently "cleaning things up for advertisers" leads to less money from advertisers.

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

#160

Post by basetop »

Eric Schmidt was the anti-privacy leader who dismissed privacy concerns.

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...

Keep in mind this is the same guy who blackballed CNET reporters for finding personal information on him through google search.

https://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology/google_cnet/

The guy represents every wrong with tech. Privacy for him, but none for thee. And that's not even including on his shady ties to government.

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