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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

#161

Post by m0zg »

systemBuilder wrote: post #141
m0zg wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Never say never. Companies pretty routinely do surprisingly underhanded/unethical things once they begin to experience financial difficulties, if not on their own then under pressure from investors.

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

#162

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#163

Post by sara1231 »

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

#164

Post by minwcnt5 »

throwawaytoday5 wrote: post #135
minwcnt5 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more that there are a large number of employees who don't actually contribute much and treat it like a retirement gig. I've seen people who are only in the office from 10-5, take long breaks for lunches, socializing, working out, massages, etc. and regularly "WFH" one day a week on top of that, and clearly aren't very productive (note: there are people who keep that kind of schedule and do get a lot done…

Why is it hard to fire employees? Workers have extremely weak protections in the United States. I never buy this argument. If google wanted to clean shop they can, other tech companies do it regularly (IBM, Oracle, etc).

In addition to what vkou said, firing individuals for low performance in the US, as opposed to mass layoffs, typically requires putting them through the PIP process (performance improvement plan), which is onerous and stressful for the manager. My limited understanding is it involves the manager, HR, and employee agreeing on a project and timeline that would constitute satisfactory performance, then constantly checking in and documenting progress. The purpose is for the company to collect proof the employee can't perform their job to indemnify themselves.

But I've seen people just temporarily work really hard and/or get lots of help while they're on a PIP, succeed at it, and then revert to old habits. In a lot of cases rather than go through the trouble to put a report through a PIP, which may not have the desired outcome anyway, the manager will just put them off in a corner and give them unimportant tasks, making it that much easier for them to just coast.

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

#165

Post by lostlogin »

basetop wrote: post #160

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…

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

You mean anti-privacy I think? It took me way too long to get there.

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

#167

Post by vram11 »

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…

Yes, a Page fault.

;-)

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

#168

Post by dekhn »

pmart123 wrote: post #146
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…

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.

The original pitch deck for G+ (https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-presentation-that-...) really laid out a compelling view for a social network that worked well for people who had multiple distinct subnetworks ad they didn't want to cross the streams. Personally I thought the presentation was brilliant and I was behind the general strategy until Vic took over and started to wield the plus-hammer.

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

#169

Post by basetop »

lostlogin wrote: post #165
basetop wrote: post #160

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…

> Eric Schmidt was the anti-piracy leader who dismissed privacy concerns. You mean anti-privacy I think? It took me way too long to get there.

I fixed that. Thanks for pointing it out. Not sure how I managed to spell it incorrectly once and correctly once in the same sentence.

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

#170

Post by nkozyra »

scarface74 wrote: post #96
anyfoo wrote: post #5

This is of course extremely subjective, and I have no knowledge of what Google was and is on the inside except for a short internship almost 10 years ago: I somehow always felt that Google with Eric Schmidt as a CEO was a much different Google than later on. Under Eric Schmidt, Google seemed like this extremely innovative company with the brightest minds in the industry. Afterwards, it seemed to instead grow into jus…

Google has been an ad company from the time they IPO’d until today when 85% of their revenue is still from ads. From a business side, they really haven’t done too much.

> From a business side, they really haven’t done too much.

Myopic. They've greatly increased the eyeballs available to them through new products and business relationships

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