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Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

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Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#361

Post by kyrra »

hanse00 wrote: post #330
kyrra wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About "don't be evil": It's still very much in there. From: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/ > And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up! The problem was that it was moved from near the top to being near the bottom (though it's own paragraph). Sadly there were lots of very inaccurate headlines like this: > Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause Fr…

It's there on paper, but is is really still there?

I am a Googler, opinions on my own.

The problem with the phrase is that it is very relative depending on your meaning of evil. It's a shifting over time and varies by person.

At the same time it provides a good guiding principle for Google as a whole. You need to think about users in different parts of the world with different ideas of what is good and evil, and try to cater to all of them. It's a really hard problem.

That code have conduct I linked tries to explain how evil is defined and give more concrete principles to follow.

From my experience, no one tries to be evil within Google, and we try to do right by our users. But when you're dealing with products like YouTube and Search with massive amounts of user-generated data, suggesting good answers that satisfy everyone and doesn't generate news headlines is impossible. We do what we can, but when you have billion user products, some people are always going to be pissed at you.

Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#362

Post by basch »

smt88 wrote: post #327
m0zg wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the first initiatives Larry undertook when he became a CEO is to "put more wood behind fewer arrows" by canceling a ton of bullshit projects that _haven't_ yet been released to the public, and some that have, as well. So if you're going to blame Larry for anything, this is not it.

I'm sure his intentions were good. It doesn't mean he followed through or succeeded. If they canceled a "ton of bullshit projects" and still ended up with a time when Hangouts, Hangouts Chat, Hangouts Meet, Allo, Duo, Messages, and Voice are all actively used but somehow still missing important fixes/features, then he utterly failed. No one gets credit for the things they didn't release when the things they did relea…

Plus ChromeOS, chrome browser, Android, Android TV, Google TV, fuscia. They just can't seem to figure out how to own the set top box (which is obviously hard, it took Microsoft forever too and it's still too expensive, where is the $30 Xbox).

Chrome OS and Android are a worse version of ios and macos.

Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#363

Post by [deleted] »

prepend wrote: post #351
summerlight wrote: post #161

There are some ongoing theory-crafting in this thread, but the real reason seems pretty simple; Larry and Sergey obviously don't want to deal with all the management and operational stuffs, but only "moonshots" like autonomous vehicles or quantum computing. Yeah, this was the whole purpose of establishing a holding company, but Alphabet has grown by 2 times (both in employee count and revenue) and probably they're no…

> I think Sundar has been a pretty good CEO and probably a better businessman Has he though? I get the sense that he’s really Balmering it up in that he inherited a super successful company, and didn’t do much with it except not screw up. The two big growth areas- social and cloud- are dead or a distant and growing third. Google hasn’t done much new or exciting through his whole term. So no new products, the 2016 ele…

[deleted]

Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#364

Post by mark_l_watson »

lacker wrote: post #67
nvrspyx wrote: post #25

I see a few comments praising Sundar. As someone who doesn’t follow closely, but feels that Google has deteriorated dramatically under his watch, does someone mind explaining the reasoning for said praise?

Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO. That's the simplest reason. Personally I think a lot of their products have gotten better recently, like the experience of using voice-controlled Google Maps in my car, and Google Cloud is superior to AWS in many ways, but the company really offers so many different product lines that it's hard for personal experience to be a great represent…

Doubling their market share is big.

I have also been appreciating their products lately: Play Books and Movies, the Google iOS app that does a good job of showing my article that interests me, and until I retired (just writing now) I really always preferred Google Cloud over AWS. Even with potential privacy issues, YouTube, GMail, and Calendar are also good.

In the past have been I have been a vocal supporter of FSF (still am, but...) but I look at the world situation now with people in China quickly losing freedoms but excelling in AI and other tech, here in the USA corporate fascism is unstoppable. With the political problems around the globe getting crazier and with chaotic climate change, I think now that people in different countries should do two things: embrace their own culture and values, and to do what they can to make their countries competitive in AI and other tech, especially tech that will help with climate change and generally increase productivity. Those on top will get bigger and bigger pieces of the pie, so we better grow the pie rapidly so regular peoples’ share is sufficient for a good life.

Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#365

Post by basch »

prepend wrote: post #351
summerlight wrote: post #161

There are some ongoing theory-crafting in this thread, but the real reason seems pretty simple; Larry and Sergey obviously don't want to deal with all the management and operational stuffs, but only "moonshots" like autonomous vehicles or quantum computing. Yeah, this was the whole purpose of establishing a holding company, but Alphabet has grown by 2 times (both in employee count and revenue) and probably they're no…

> I think Sundar has been a pretty good CEO and probably a better businessman Has he though? I get the sense that he’s really Balmering it up in that he inherited a super successful company, and didn’t do much with it except not screw up. The two big growth areas- social and cloud- are dead or a distant and growing third. Google hasn’t done much new or exciting through his whole term. So no new products, the 2016 ele…

YouTube and Gmail are massive social networks.

Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#366

Post by alecbenzer »

smt88 wrote: post #163
beaned wrote: post #99

One thing I really like about Larry Page is that it's obvious he never really wanted to be a manager. He's a real nerd at heart who likes technology. But he also realized the value of what he created and acted as a good steward for 20 years. He took the reigns when he needed to, and let others take over when the time was right. He's still one of the people I look up to most.

> He took the reigns when he needed to I strongly disagree. Alphabet is an unfocused company which seems to treat product releases as experiments that can be killed at any time without warning. There's a culture that incentivizes more experiments rather than better products. The aimlessness is obvious in the frequent and baffling product renaming, reorganizations (like Nest joining Google), duplicated/overlapping pro…

Yeah from my limited view when I was there as an L4, Google felt very much run by a weird network of politics and some bureaucracy. Mid-high level VPs seemed like they controlled things a lot more than real higher-ups.

I think this can be... interesting? Trying to give more power and autonomy to individual teams is nice (there were some efforts that tried explicitly to map things to some kind of free market model). Sometimes higher-ups would be like "hey we're all gonna migrate to technology X" but individual teams were like "lol nah the new thing sucks" and keep using it and nothing really ever happened. But I think that attitude also kinda opened the door for a large political/influence market. And there's not _real_ market pressures on individual teams that I think tend to keep the actual free market a little closer to ground truth.

This all reminds me of a critique I'd heard of flat organizations, which is that all groups of people are going to have power structures, and by not formalizing them, all you're doing is allowing them to opaquely evolve in strange ways on their own.

I really wish that someone could study internal Google politics and actually understand it and map it all out.

Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#367

Post by danso »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #338
summerlight wrote: post #161

There are some ongoing theory-crafting in this thread, but the real reason seems pretty simple; Larry and Sergey obviously don't want to deal with all the management and operational stuffs, but only "moonshots" like autonomous vehicles or quantum computing. Yeah, this was the whole purpose of establishing a holding company, but Alphabet has grown by 2 times (both in employee count and revenue) and probably they're no…

Sundar made a mistake in wading into politics after the 2016 elections. A good business leader knows to stay out of the forbidden topics of politics and religion; unite the troops, don't divide them. I don't think he realized how much impact his words would have on conservatives once the TGIF video got out. Anyway let's hope they learned something about remaining neutral in public, as the company "grows up".

None of the big tech companies have avoided "wading into politics" since 2016. Tech is far too big and inextricable a part of society for any competent CEO to think they could hide on the sidelines.

Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#368

Post by mark_l_watson »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #143
nemothekid wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO. It’s hard for me to say that this is because of Sundar and not just because the whole market has grown size and google already had a massive moat to capture it. Apple, MS, Facebook, Amazon all have grown massively in the past 5 years. However Google seems to continue to be a one trick pony - GCP lags behind the competition despite the fact…

I see this meme all the time. What does GCP lag on? What is it missing? I see a proliferation of AWS services, yes, but many seem to be replicating things that GCP has had since the start, in multiple different formats without clear direction. Bigquery covers most of the use cases of Redshift, Kineseis, Athena, EMR, and others. It is at once decoupled from and well integrated with their object storage, allowing reads…

I think that GCP is obviously better for people working inside Google. I was amazed when on my third day I took the all day end to end class and was blown away by how “not difficult” it was to use Borg, the global file system, web based dev tools, etc.

But, I have always enjoyed using public GCP more that AWS.

Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#369

Post by s1k3b8 »

nostromo wrote: post #221
footpath wrote: post #84

https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2019/1203/ Slightly more organized info in the intro bullets. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the CEO and President, respectively, of Alphabet, have decided to leave these roles. They will continue their involvement as co-founders, shareholders and members of Alphabet’s Board of Directors.

I'm curious what their continued involvement will look like. For a while after Bill Gates stepped down as CEO, there was this awkward tension where Steve Balmer was CEO, but people still treated Bill like he was the one in control -- because he was.

> I'm curious what their continued involvement will look like.

Page and Brin, combined, are currently the majority shareholders of alphabet. Each controls 27% of the voting power ( 54% combined ). They are still in charge. They just won't be involved in the day-to-day operation of the company. Sundar will still report to Page/Brin and the board of directors.

Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#370

Post by p1esk »

wsy wrote: post #335
p1esk wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, let's talk about specific issues that cause complaints. Google is a for-profit company, and it answers to shareholders who want to make money. Why would Google not engage in those practices you deem immoral if that's what the shareholders want? I use Google products daily. So for me the question is - does Google need to engage in "partnership with distasteful foreign governments and other corporate immoralities",…

I would hope that every single person - including shareholders, managers, and employees - holds our fundamental values like peace, freedom, or justice higher than their desire to maximise profits. The top question is not: will it hurt the company. The top question is: will it hurt humanity. We liked Google because their founders did the right thing for a long time, and fended off profit-maximizing shareholders.

Sure we can hope, but in reality if Google is not profitable someone else will take its place. If Google does not cooperate with Chinese government someone else will take its place.

Will humanity benefit if, say, Comcast buys the morally pure but financially struggling Google, or if no one is challenging Baidu in China?

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