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The man who killed Google Search?

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Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#681

Post by uptownfunk »

sumanthvepa wrote: post #564
ryeights wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author called Sundar a McKinsey consultant, not Raghavan. >A quick note: I used “management consultant” there as a pejorative. While he exhibits all the same bean-counting, morally-unguided behaviors of a management consultant, from what I can tell Raghavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of the economy. It also seems like a stretch to say that Yahoo's former "Chief Strategy Officer" had no in…

So why needlessly call him a management consultant? Yes it is a stretch to say he had much influence. There reason is very simple. Yahoo! was in its death throes. The core products were not bringing in revenue, and it was in the middle of multiple hostile takeover attacks by various private equity players. First it was a hostile offer from Microsoft, a hostile take over effort by Carl Icahn, and then a finally yet an…

Is it that bad to have been a mgmt consultant? My goodness

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#682

Post by makeitdouble »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #678
makeitdouble wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft and Meta reinvented themselves a few times over. At this point Windows is just an legacy business unit for instance, and Meta literally changed name to mark the turn. Oracle, IBM and SAP have the advantage(?) of being heavily business focused from the start, and I don't see them ever die a natural death in our lifetimes. As long as they have the money to outbribe the competition they'll be there, and it wil…

The one thing that has kept Microsoft afloat is their business oriented part. They are deeply entrenched in any company that needs to use Office and only ever hires Windows admins who won't even look beyond Windows. That is pretty much every non tech small to medium company. When things were shifting to the cloud they were smart enough to make sure it would be their cloud, locking customers even deeper into their own…

To add to this, Microsoft is really really good at understanding businesses, in a way Google will probably never be I think.

Having on premise hosting options for Exchange and all their core services is an example of that, even as they're also pushing for 365 in the cloud. I remember them being earlier than GCP to deal with GDPR and the in EU requirements as well but my memory might be failing.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#684

Post by watwut »

barnabyjones wrote: post #529
AlexCoventry wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YT Shorts itself is kind of a mystery to me. It's an objective degradation of the interface; why on earth would I want to use it? It doesn't even allow adjustment of the playback speed or scrubbing!

I think there is a large demo of people now who actually prefer to watch videos in portrait.

I dont mind portrait. I mind inability to jump forward in the video.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#686

Post by farmdve »

15 years ago I could search and get relevant results.

There is so much information from older forums and obscure blogs that will never get reached now. I use whatever method I can, Google, Bing, Copilot and ChatGPT to fill in the blanks.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#688

Post by bhawks »

The author is going for an easy narrative (Gomes good / Prabhakar bad) but that is not reality.

The Search PA had numerous efforts in the air beyond the search results page (SRP) that were consuming eng resources, exec attention and cannibalizing SRP traffic. Assistant was probably the biggest but there were others as well. Why does this matter? Well Google IS the SRP for most users and most of the alternatives (especially assistant) had no clear monetization endgame. To top it off the core platform and infrastructure underneath most of the search/assistant products were legacy dungeons that was poorly invested in and in desperate need of accountable leadership.

Prabhakar was right to call out that things were not going well in Search and Gomes was right that Ads and Search orgs were working from two vastly different perspectives. It is nostalgic to say that 'there was a reason the founders kept ads and search separate' but that statement was made when google was ridiculously smaller and you could rely on both sides having a rough idea of the direction to push forward to. By 2019 the orgs were huge and there were clear gaps that cross functional leadership had failed to fill.

Having worked for both leaders they had tremendous strengths and were trying to do things right despite their blindspots. I don't think any person would have done much better and when I left Google one of the big reasons was the company had grown beyond the abilities for it to be managed efficiently.

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#689

Post by davidgerard »

b800h wrote: post #534

I'd be pretty upset if details about my career were documented so soon afterwards, probably while I was still in work. This seems like a really poor show to me. Describing someone as a "class traitor"? Seriously, what the heck?

Will no one think of the poor smol boy executive who makes eight figures and is being held responsible for his actions? The cruelty!

Re: The man who killed Google Search?

#690

Post by skybrian »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #347
iamthirsty wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was also way more pessimistic, figuring that they would be having company wide layoffs by 2015 to 2017 but they pushed that out by 5 years. Well in 2011 Google had just over 30k employees, and now they're doing "layoffs" with 180k+ in 2024. I don't think the layoffs mean much.

Did I mention I was more pessimistic? :-) I expect that today they could layoff 150k, keep the 30K that are involved with search and enough ads that are making business and that husk would do okay for a long time. I don't suppose you watched SGI die, that happened to them, kind of spiraled into a core that has some money making business and then lived on that. One of my observations between "early" Google and "late"…

Looking at financials, all metrics are improving. They haven’t even started to lose altitude - they’re still gaining.

We might not like what they’ve become, but the comparison to a plane that’s lost its engine seems rather odd. Why couldn’t they keep going indefinitely, without making the changes that some would like?

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