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Why I left Google (2012)

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Re: Why I left Google (2012)

#101

Post by jonnathanson »

Joeri wrote: post #98
jonnathanson wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than 97% of Google's revenues have always come from advertising (give or take a few percentage points). This goes back to the pre-IPO days. It's all well and good to say that Google is about "pushing the limits of human knowledge," but when you're a public company with a responsibility to generate return on capital, you need to protect and grow the golden goose. Now, it's perfectly valid -- maybe even necessary…

Companies that focus on the thing that makes them money eventually start losing money. You have to focus on the next thing to make you money, not the current one. I'm willing to cut google some slack here though, with the self-driving cars and google glass. Innovation at google isn't dead, it's just not in web app form anymore.

Agreed, and I didn't say that they should have kept focusing on one thing. Rather, I said that they suddenly found themselves having to defend that one thing, for the first time in their history. And they thought that diversifying into social was the best way to do so. So much so that they doubled down on it and tried to make a concerted, unified strategy around it.

Totally agree that a company should never be in that situation to begin with (hence, my comments about the vulnerability of depending for 97+% of revenues on a single product). But they made a bet on social to be their "next thing" and, in retrospect, many smart people probably would have made the same bet. The bet didn't pay off, per se, but that may have been a function of lateness to market more than a function of strategic unsoundness. (And let's give them at least some credit: Google+ had a unique thesis about social w/r/t groups, and it came to market with a differentiating factor from Facebook. It was not simply the me-too product everyone retrospectively labels it as).

I'm not writing an apology for Google's strategy; I'm just saying that hindsight is 20/20 in this case, and we shouldn't lose sight of that.

Re: Why I left Google (2012)

#102

Post by jonnathanson »

dgreensp wrote: post #99
jonnathanson wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than 97% of Google's revenues have always come from advertising (give or take a few percentage points). This goes back to the pre-IPO days. It's all well and good to say that Google is about "pushing the limits of human knowledge," but when you're a public company with a responsibility to generate return on capital, you need to protect and grow the golden goose. Now, it's perfectly valid -- maybe even necessary…

I disagree. I worked at Google for a year in 2010, around the time of the first reorgs around social. They were decimating teams like Calendar, Sites, and other products with millions of users that were stagnating, as far as they were concerned, and building a team 200-strong to take on "social" -- whatever that means. We joked that no one at Google knew what it meant. We felt Google was deeply clueless about the nat…

"In fact, if you're looking for hindsight vs reality, I don't think Google and Facebook really were competitors -- until Google decided to build a copy of Facebook's product."

Respectfully, I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Google saw Facebook as a potential identity platform and de facto backend for the entire web. It might have been paranoid in its assumptions of just how much of Google's lunch Facebook could have eaten -- but the move into social was very much a defensive move, not an offensive one. They weren't trying to eat Facebook's lunch; they were trying not to get theirs eaten.

It's (still) not a stretch to think that advertisers would transfer dollars on a zero-sum basis from AdSense to a Facebook-credentialed web. As for AdWords? That's a harder lunch for Facebook to steal, but it's not inconceivable.

"Google acted out of some combination of fear, insecurity..."

Smart companies should be afraid and insecure, to some degree, about potential competition. I highly recommend Andy Grove's excellent book "Only the Paranoid Survive."

"...pressure from Wall Street..."

Just the opposite. Wall Street wanted Google to keep milking the cash cow and trying to expand its market share overseas -- which is a pretty typical Wall Street-pleasing playbook. Wall Street likes steady expansion of existing markets; Wall Street hates big bets in unproven products or markets.

Re: Why I left Google (2012)

#103

Post by marssaxman »

numbsafari wrote: post #17
niggler wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I look at it as a more public exit interview. I don't doubt that his expressed concerns were part of why he did leave (I also don't doubt that there are other factors)), and by making those concerns public there's a chance that more people may see it and try to rectify the problems.

Yeah, but in the entire history of people quitting and writing "letters to the editor", has any manager ever actually read it and thought anything other than "whatever, dude wasn't on board, glad he left"? Do you really think Sergey Brin or Larry Page or Eric Schmidt are going to read this and think "oh man, we better change what we're doing". Nope. People who are fans of MS are going to read it and say "yeah, see, I…

It sounds genuine to me. He articulates a lot of the same reservations I felt during my brief time working there.

Re: Why I left Google (2012)

#104

Post by saturdaysaint »

Little mention of Android and Chrome? No mention of Docs/Drive, self driving cars, Go, Google Fiber or their growing forays into hardware (Nexus, Glass)?

As a lot of these indicate, one of Google's chief contributions in recent memory is helping to make computing cheap, ubiquitous and decidedly not monopolized by Microsoft. In the blink of an eye, we've gone from a world where everything the average person owns that can install software runs on Windows to a world where more like 1/3 (and shrinking) of a household's computing devices run Windows. And in 2013, Chromebooks and Steamboxes look like they could displace a lot more of MS's presence.

There's a conflict of interest here. Even if their game is more complex than Coke vs Pepsi, these are very direct competitors. An ambitious Microsoftie has something to gain in a coy, well written put down that conveniently ignores the competition's bigger recent achievements.

Re: Why I left Google (2012)

#105

Post by ohsnapman »

Apocryphon wrote: post #75

Between this piece and other comments I've seen in the wake of the anti-Google backlash of this past week, why is it that supposedly under Eric Schmidt, a "business guy" Google was all innovation and tech, and then when Larry Page, a very technical cofounder, took over, the company is now some sort of ad machine? If this is true, what does this say about leading personalities and company culture?

I've always felt that Ben Horowitz's characterization was the best:

http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/15/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo/

TLDR Eric was a peacetime CEO and could allow the company to do the things he allowed. Larry is a wartime CEO. Hard decisions need to be made, and the company needs to be driven with focus.

Re: Why I left Google (2012)

#106

Post by elaineo »

I recently switched from using the Google Translate API to the Bing/Microsoft Translator API for my Android app, because Google charges usage fees while MS is free at the lowest tier. This was the first time I saw Google charge money for a service that Microsoft offers for free.

Re: Why I left Google (2012)

#107

Post by nivla »

elaineo wrote: post #106

I recently switched from using the Google Translate API to the Bing/Microsoft Translator API for my Android app, because Google charges usage fees while MS is free at the lowest tier. This was the first time I saw Google charge money for a service that Microsoft offers for free.

Can you be kind enough to comment on the quality of translations? I am in need of a translation API for one of my projects and it is down to Google or Bing.

Re: Why I left Google (2012)

#108

Post by dclowd9901 »

lucb1e wrote: post #24

Shouldn't the title be Quitting Google instead? This title sounds like Google is quitting, when instead an employee quit Google.

Maybe it's a play on words, initially as the author participating in the act of "google quitting" but also meant to be interpreted as google itself quitting being the google it was.

Re: Why I left Google (2012)

#109

Post by rpgmaker »

numbsafari wrote: post #5

The way these things read... I wonder if people are getting paid an extra bonus to have PR write up a "why I left the other guy" post and put their name on it as way to just bundle up a bunch of FUD in one place. I'm not a big fan of either Google or Microsoft, so I don't really care about what they say. It's just that these "why I quit" letters have become boilerplate PR pieces that don't really offer anything new o…

I remember reading this story when it came out and reading this comment: So what made you join Microsoft?

Still no answer from the guy.

Re: Why I left Google (2012)

#110

Post by anotherbadlogin »

"Exhibit A: www.facebook.com/nike, a company with the power and clout of Nike putting their own brand after Facebook’s?"

Pretty pathetic, really. Hopefully someday that URL will carry the same credibility penalty as an AOL E-mail address. To a lot of us, it already does.

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