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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

#331

Post by sjg007 »

bitL wrote: post #239
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…

Long before Eric, the SUN's CEO (Eric's previous employer) made a remark that privacy is an illusion and we need to get over it: https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/ This stuff was going on for a long time, FAANG just perfected it.

There's privacy between people but not between people and corporation or people and the government.

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

#332

Post by sjg007 »

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.

I am surprised that the Feds didn't go after them or take an interest.

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

#333

Post by mises »

throwaway6497 wrote: post #249
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…

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…

If Google and other companies did this, the employees ought to unionize. Normally I am not in favor of that, but Google et al. were colluding to gain an unfair advantage on their side; that invited the same on the labor side. Companies colluding to keep wages low means workers ought to collude to make them higher and counterbalance the companies.

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

#334

Post by futterz »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #272
jeffdavis wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy is usually not about things you don't want anyone to know. It's about things you don't want everyone to know.

Privacy is also about solidarity with those who do have something to hide. We want to create a society with herd immunity for dissidents, free thinkers, and even the less controversial yet somehow still controversial; fetishists, (closet) non-traditional-sexuals, or simply those who engage in behaviour that we have only learned to condone, not yet accept. Even if you are not any of those, it is our duty to provide a…

> We want to create a society with herd immunity for dissidents, free thinkers, and even the less controversial yet somehow still controversial

And yet y'all can't even do that on HN. Downvote, dead, flag, toe the line.

I've got this feeling that before we all codified "free speech" as a "right", people in very "backward" places were doing it and getting along. Different opinions, different ideas, and people are friendly, for eons in Morocco, in Egypt.

Maybe white Western culture had to put it into "law" because for whatever reason we weren't so good at doing it naturally.

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

#335

Post by dekhn »

lapnitnelav wrote: post #237
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…

I for one would like to thank Larry for messing this up. While current situation is far from perfect (looking at you Mark Z), I don't think having the Borg being the top dog on both Search and Social would have been a great thing at all.

Yes, but imagine what could have happened if Google had gone all-in on cloud instead of social in 2011. Instead of seeing some lackluster earnings from a still totally dominated-by-ads-revenue Google, we would have seen a roaring revenue engine fuelled by cloud growth. TBH that was really Google's market to win because they had all the infrastructure to do it in 2011, but didn't want to expand in cloud because it was perceived as low-profit-margin compared to ads.

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

#336

Post by linuxftw »

sneak wrote: post #303
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?"

To me, the big story is not so much that he attempted it, or that he tried to cover it up, or that he got busted doing something totally illegal, or that he was never prosecuted criminally, or that the judge threw out the initial settlement for being hilariously low, or that the revised settlement was still a small fraction of the billions estimated that the conspirators cheated away from staff... It is that all of t…

Obviously it was A-OK. Nothing bad seemed to happen, stocks are up from that time period.

If you can start a company that breaks the law, the only punishment is a $0 fine, your competitors don't do it, and doing it brings you large financial rewards, many would do it 10/10 times.

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

#337

Post by flipflopsrawr »

Teever wrote: post #279
ok-repl wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those poor underpaid Googlers

Collusion like that puts a downward pressure on the wages of all workers. It also normalizes that behavior and makes it more likely that other employers will take similar steps.

It’s happens a lot more than it’s talked about. When a few people left the company I worked at for Rackspace who was paying a lot more the CEO of my company talked with Rackspace into agreeing to stop interviewing people from my company. I moved on from that company after the CEO admitted to the agreement.

It’s a practice older than IT. Hard to judge the man on that alone.

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

#338

Post by barbecue_sauce »

throwaway_9168 wrote: post #316
patrec wrote: post #313

Earlier 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…

Well, that just doesn't rhyme at all.

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

#339

Post by codemac »

throwaway6497 wrote: post #249
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…

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…

He's still going to serve on the "compensation committee"..

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

#340

Post by martin_henk »

beenBoutIT wrote: post #108
martin_henk wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting. Social media today is a much more refined offering than google+. Google feels like microsoft nowadays. It’s something for adults to get things done. Your personal stuff happens on DM’s, instagram, snapchat, tiktok... much more so for young people. Therefore keeping search and social separated was a good thing.

Reductio ad Microsoftium.

In some ways, ms is more progressive than the goog at the moment. Office 365 is pretty good imho. Win 10 feels flakey though.
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