Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet • Hacker News Board

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

#561

Post by naniwaduni » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 2:27 PM UTC

linza wrote: post #533

zaarn wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except Google doesn't respect privacy.

I doubt think this is accurate. Google might not respect the desire for an open internet without ads and no single large player. But i believe they fully respect their users privacy, comply with most of the law around privacy already, and have the strong desire to fully comply with it in the future. Maybe I'm naive that way. But painting them as not respecting privacy at all is a bit blunt and not nuanced enough.

Compliance with privacy law is not a good indicator of respect for users' privacy when you're in a position to nudge privacy legislation to limit its impact on you.

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

#562

Post by linza » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 2:28 PM UTC

sbarre wrote: post #538

linza wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt think this is accurate. Google might not respect the desire for an open internet without ads and no single large player. But i believe they fully respect their users privacy, comply with most of the law around privacy already, and have the strong desire to fully comply with it in the future. Maybe I'm naive that way. But painting them as not respecting privacy at all is a bit blunt and not nuanced enough.

Saying "they fully respect their users privacy" is also blunt and not nuanced. They are a huge company with thousands of teams pursuing their own agendas and made up of people of varying degree of scruples and viewpoints with regards to privacy. I've worked for large companies that handle sensitive user data, and they all have at least some teams of people trying to figure out how they can respect the letter of priva…

What i meant was that i believe they try to follow the law around privacy. The law might not be "good enough", but that's in us not them (modulo the lobbying).

I'm not trying to say larger companies are innocent. Saying they don't respect privacy insinuates to me that they intentionally violate the law, and i don't think that that's true.

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

#563

Post by derp_dee_derp » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 2:29 PM UTC

auiya wrote: post #560

koheripbal wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a semantic distinction. All major corporations have highly speculative projects that they aren't certain will succeed. With (relatively) minor investments most don't form an umbrella corporation to distinguish them. In this case, I dont see anything else coming out of non-Google alphabet of meaningful significance, and this org change kind of highlights that. In my personal opinion, the Google founders probabl…

> I dont see anything else coming out of non-Google alphabet of meaningful significance YouTube. But in general I agree with you.

YouTube was pre alphabet, was a purchased acquisition under the Google umbrella, and didn't "come out of non-google alphabet"

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

#564

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 2:30 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #540

dragonwriter wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea behind that originally was that all of these other projects were going to become so significant that it wouldn't make sense to have them or their management coupled with Google. No, the idea was that they were high risk speculative efforts and that it didn't make sense to have their branding mixed up with Google, which is a stable, established industry leader.

That's a semantic distinction. All major corporations have highly speculative projects that they aren't certain will succeed. With (relatively) minor investments most don't form an umbrella corporation to distinguish them. In this case, I dont see anything else coming out of non-Google alphabet of meaningful significance, and this org change kind of highlights that. In my personal opinion, the Google founders probabl…

> That's a semantic distinction.

No, separating branding and separating management are substantively different ideas, not a matter of semantics.

> All major corporations have highly speculative projects that they aren't certain will succeed. With (relatively) minor investments most don't form an umbrella corporation to distinguish them.

That doesn't support your argument that it's a semantic distinction, it instead seems to be an unrelated argument with some implicit premises that argues that most corporations wouldn't have done what Google did to separate Alphabet in similar circumstances, which may or may not be true but is irrelevant to what the point was of Google doing it.

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

#565

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 2:32 PM UTC

auiya wrote: post #560

koheripbal wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a semantic distinction. All major corporations have highly speculative projects that they aren't certain will succeed. With (relatively) minor investments most don't form an umbrella corporation to distinguish them. In this case, I dont see anything else coming out of non-Google alphabet of meaningful significance, and this org change kind of highlights that. In my personal opinion, the Google founders probabl…

> I dont see anything else coming out of non-Google alphabet of meaningful significance YouTube. But in general I agree with you.

[deleted]

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

#566

Post by jbms » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 2:39 PM UTC

auiya wrote: post #560

koheripbal wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a semantic distinction. All major corporations have highly speculative projects that they aren't certain will succeed. With (relatively) minor investments most don't form an umbrella corporation to distinguish them. In this case, I dont see anything else coming out of non-Google alphabet of meaningful significance, and this org change kind of highlights that. In my personal opinion, the Google founders probabl…

> I dont see anything else coming out of non-Google alphabet of meaningful significance YouTube. But in general I agree with you.

YouTube is part of the Google division of Alphabet as it makes money primarily from advertising.

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

#567

Post by narrator » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 2:44 PM UTC

fjrufjfjfu wrote: post #447

Mikeb85 wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an admission of failure. Two businessmen created one of the most successful, influencial businesses ever and are passing the torch. They're rich AF and probably want to retire.

I don't know man. Doesn't that sound a little bit suspicious? If you were to create Google why would you just peace out? Look at Bill Gates. He still wants to do things but the google founders are all MIA. How do guys like that just lose all ambition and disappear?

Move along, nothing to see here.

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

#568

Post by SuoDuanDao » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 2:56 PM UTC

sverhagen wrote: post #488

jacquesm wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know any other company that people love to hate. A large number of those will flee Google in droves when/if a viable alternative presents itself. Their lock-in on email and dominance in search may be enough of a moat to last forever but if your users (paying and free) hate you then you are on borrowed time.

Facebook too. I hate both with a similar passion. But I'm in tech and thanks to HN I have a vague idea how the sausage is made. Do regular users share our dislike of these companies? If not, which is what I suspect, this fleeing will be mostly nonexistent.

I think generally, people do hate both, though neither as much as Twitter.

Personally I feel most strongly about Google, because I really believed the marketing back in the day. Took me a long time to get disillusioned, and when I did I felt all the worse for having been a supporter for so long.

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

#569

Post by basch » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 3:01 PM UTC

backpropaganda wrote: post #506

theferalrobot wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to water down the definition beyond recognition then snail mail is a social network.

It's in the nature of social networks that new social networks don't look like old ones. Youtube is definitely a social network, and so is Twitch, Discord, TikTok, etc. Youtube has the additional advantage of having persistent count, so I would count on Youtube lasting much longer than any other social network whose popularity changes generation to generation.

It is interesting that the part of "social network" that now defines something as a social network is really the feed. Its a neverending not-river of more. Chatrooms notwithstanding, a newsfeed a la facebook/youtube/reddit/, it's a mix of professional content and user generated. The actual messaging with each other, and sharing with each other is tangent to what they do. Social network is almost a misnomer because most of the interaction is person->ai. For a lurker who doesnt have friends, doesnt comment, and doesnt share; youtube and tumblr are closer to netflix than they are to anything "social." That grouping should be called something like an Autofeed Broadcaster, of which gmail is tangentially like, because people use it to consume mass marketing and newsletters.

Discord feels more like the odd one out because it is a realtime river, not sorted or ranked like reddit. That sort of content rearranging is what makes modern social networks different from forms and chat.

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

#570

Post by jhanschoo » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 3:05 PM UTC

jeremyfranco wrote: post #510

jhanschoo wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to give "straight dope" on a controversial issue, you don't do it by caricature without evidence. Instead you present incontrovertible evidence that proves your point.

Evidence wasn't hard to find though... https://www.wired.com/story/the-dirty-war-over-diversity-ins...

Then this should have been the comment.

But this article isn't evidence of Google having a liberal orthodoxy. It supports instead the claim that Google is a politically charged workplace, and that diversity advocates working at Google were facing harassment.