Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Secrets of success from Google co-founder Larry Page

ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 39 posts

Re: Secrets of success from Google co-founder Larry Page

#11

Post by prospero »

jorgeortiz85 wrote: post #8

# Part of our brand is that we're pretty understated in what we do. If you look at other technology companies, they might preannounce things, and it will be a couple years before they really happen, and they don't happen in the way they said they would. I miss this aspect of Google. Android and OpenSocial were announced months before they had an actual product.

Android and OpenSocial were platforms, and needed to attract developers to realize their full potential. Google leverages user data to improve their searches (and most of their other products), but there's not really a network effect in play: more users do not necessarily create a better user experience.

But with platforms, there's a real question of the chicken and the egg, and you have no choice but to drum up as much excitement you can, the earlier the better. Without the artificial momentum, it might not go anywhere.

Re: Secrets of success from Google co-founder Larry Page

#13

Post by dmoney »

Encosia wrote: post #2

Seems more like a Google press release than anything sincere. Maybe trying to regain their preferred status among the top talent looking for work during these tumultuous times?

Maybe trying to regain their preferred status among the top talent looking for work

Have they lost it? Whom have they lost it to?

Re: Secrets of success from Google co-founder Larry Page

#14

Post by jimbokun »

"# We spent a lot of time getting our offices right. We think it's important to have a high density of people. People are packed together everywhere. We all share offices. We like this set of buildings because it's more like a densely packed university campus than a typical suburban office park."

I work at Carnegie Mellon, and Google Pittsburgh is literally right next to the building I work in. I visited a friend there, and there really isn't much distinction between their office layout and the way the rest of the campus looks (except they have better food). Googlers attend and give talks on campus and in their offices all the time, right alongside the faculty and students.

So, yes, I would say they have succeeded in recreating the grad school environment, assuming their offices are anything like the Pittsburgh one.

Re: Secrets of success from Google co-founder Larry Page

#15

Post by Harkins »

# The 'be good' concept also comes up when we design our products. ... We will make it possible for you to get your e-mail out of Gmail if you ever want to.

I'd like to see this applied to Google Analytics, which is nice but has no way to export any data. I'd also like a way to delete all the junk Google has on me like logs of my searches.

I guess I'd believe that "be good" was some kind of important principle to Google if they acted any different than any other company: use personal data for customer lock-in and to reuse/resell/mine elsewhere; give a small escape hatch to only those few services people complain loudest about.

Re: Secrets of success from Google co-founder Larry Page

#16

Post by dcurtis »

Harkins wrote: post #15

# The 'be good' concept also comes up when we design our products. ... We will make it possible for you to get your e-mail out of Gmail if you ever want to. I'd like to see this applied to Google Analytics, which is nice but has no way to export any data. I'd also like a way to delete all the junk Google has on me like logs of my searches. I guess I'd believe that "be good" was some kind of important principle to Goo…

You can export data from Google Analytics pretty easily to CSV or excel.

Re: Secrets of success from Google co-founder Larry Page

#19

Post by 11ren » 

    # You don't want to be Tesla. He was one of the greatest inventors,
    but it's a sad, sad story. He couldn't commercialise anything, he
    could barely fund his own research. You'd want to be more like
    Edison. If you invent something, that doesn't necessarily help
    anybody. You've got to actually get it into the world; you've got
    to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it.
The other Edison vs Tesla difference that strikes a chord in me is:

    Edison: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."

    Telsa on Edison: "just a little theory and calculation would have saved him
    90 percent of the labour. But he had a veritable contempt for book
    learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his
    inventor's instinct and practical American sense."
Edison was a hacker - and I mean one who hacks, like a bad golfer or a bad novelist, but who actually gets the ball in the hole, and actually writes the novel.

When you are the only one who has done something, you are automatically the best. No matter how bad you are.

The second last quote sort of reinforces the "learn through mistakes" attitude of Edison:

    # The thing that matters is experience. We have lots of executives
    from failed companies; they learned a lot from these things. They
    say, 'We can't do that -- we tried that and it didn't work.' So
    failure is useful.
Post reply on HN