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Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors
321–330 of 366 posts
Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
pushing adds is a service that means it is a 'product' that advertisers are buying. Of course google is also buying our data: its the price for using free products such as search, android and gmail; google is then reselling this data; this takes place either by reselling it directly or by using it as part of their service .
If a fast food chain recorded all customer conversations at its tables and then mined that information for profit, most people would consider that unconscionable - even if the conversations were anonymised. Similarly most people wouldn't be too happy about a physical newspaper or a TV that tracked their eyeballs as they read/watched it - at least not without an opt-out option. And yet this is very close to what Googl…
I don't like Google. Possibly I'd prefer to live in a world without a Google.
That said, your comparison strikes me as rather reductive. Google Search, Maps, Chrome, YouTube, Android, and so on, are all things that have had a measurable impact on my life, and quite a bit of it positive.
I'd like to think these things could've happened without all the bad stuff that funds it, but at the very least I can't just dismiss all of it.
Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s been over 15 years and their net income was down year over year, their traffic acquisition costs were up and their margins were down. The “eyeballs” they are creating are less valuable and are more expensive to acquire. Isn’t that the same business plan of every startup? Get “eyeballs” and worry about profit later? What’s going to happen as more people start using ad blockers? They are still just a one trick pon…
>> They are still just a one trick pony. Nothing wrong with that when it got them to a trillion dollar valuation. And Google Cloud has the potential to be even bigger than their entire ad business.
Regarding Google Cloud, that may be true but 1) they took way too long to figure out what an opportunity it represents and 2) in terms of internal culture and external reputation they are not well suited to take advantage of the opportunity.
The former includes things like not being good at enterprise sales, the history of allowing employees to veto customers, and ADD induced by the wacky promotion system. The latter includes a legion of techies burned product shutdowns and abandonments that will never, ever believe that google really cares about back compat and long term support no matter what kind of contract language it puts out.
Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors
#324Eric 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…
I will always remember him as the guy who would willingly collude with other mentees of Bill Campbell to not hire engineers from each others companies. Willingly trying to keep the salaries of engineers low is pure evil. They even tried to rope-in Zuckerberg into this gentleman's agreement. Zuck asked them to buzz off. When Eric is involved in shady practices like these, how do all other leaders on twitterverse who a…
Pure evil lmao
Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors
#325This is what happens when your drops 8% and they move your stock to hold.
Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Therefore it spread in regions where people knew one another, instead of spreading smoothly. I laughed far harder than I should have.
They are beautiful regions. Have you had the chance to visit?
Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
More likely Zuck correctly saw that Google as the incumbent had much more to gain from such a scheme. Facebook wouldn't be where it is today without aggressively poaching employees from Google, in their early acquiring tech chops phase they were basically the inofficial open source arm of Google because they hired so many googlers who wrote near 1-to-1 clones of internal Google tech and later also released them as op…
Apparently FB hyper-targeted Google employees with ads based on the profile these employees had happily volunteered when creating their FB profile. (Wish I had a reference link). Also, from what I understand (again, only hearsay, I don't have any proof for this), there were many employees at Google who thought "Don't be evil" was a joke. And so they decided they will go to Facebook, which was more closely aligned wit…
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Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
As an Australian, your story rings particularly true - simply replace Vimy Ridge with Gallipoli. We even celebrate our (arguably) most important national holiday on the day of the first landing. It took listening to Dan Carlin's podcast [1], which I couldn't recommend more, for me to learn much of what I know and pique my interest to read further. [1] https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-bluepr...
I work with many recent grads in tech and I can tell you firsthand that very few know much about history. They didn't study history in college at all. Their literary background is sorely lacking as well.
Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors
#329He's lucky he ruled when he did. Nowadays he'd have been exposed and destroyed for his sexual harrassment (which is why he stepped down originally) and other horrible behavior.
Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Google could fire 30% of their workforce with no disruption in service/revenue. Isn't that true for a large amount of large tech companies? I was under the impression that a large amount of the workers are working on incremental improvements to existing services or working on new features/services entirely. If those people stop working that shouldn't disrupt the service and you shouldn't see the revenue fall until…
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…
> "...if you make every project way more complex than it needs to be by scheduling lots of meetings that end up mostly involving bike shedding, publishing lots of design docs and spreadsheets to gain visibility, submitting mediocre code so that you can subsequently submit lots of cleanup CLs, and so on. The game is easier to play these days because the company is so large that entire teams can go off the radar and not have to be accountable.."
This is a lot of work just to appear "busy"... are you saying they shouldn't be documenting?