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Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

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Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#21
post #9
post #5

This is of course extremely subjective, and I have no knowledge of what Google was and is on the inside except for a short internship almost 10 years ago: I somehow always felt that Google with Eric Schmidt as a CEO was a much different Google than later on. Under Eric Schmidt, Google seemed like this extremely innovative company with the brightest minds in the industry. Afterwards, it seemed to instead grow into jus…

The other big thing was Larry pushed social on the company without really understanding social as a product, and was absolutely unable to handle the huge negative response both internally and externally to that push. This all happened at the same time Microsoft and Amazon committed to Cloud (which Google has only tepidly adopted). The one time I met with Schmidt to explain my cloud project, he was delighted and encou…

[deleted]

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that Larry was CEO twice: 1998-2001 and 2011-2015. During the first period Google was exceptionally innovative. During the second, Google attempted to be exceptionally innovative but largely fell flat on its face. I'd blame size and market position more. Google was left as one of very few profitable giants standing when the dot-com crash hit, and yet they were young enough to not have the institutional inert…

> cryptoverse What exactly is this and what business is doing well in it?

I am assuming he is referring to cryptocurrencies & blockchain tech. There are plenty of businesses doing well but that's irrelevant. Waiting for established businesses in a growing space before jumping in isn't very innovative.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that Larry was CEO twice: 1998-2001 and 2011-2015. During the first period Google was exceptionally innovative. During the second, Google attempted to be exceptionally innovative but largely fell flat on its face. I'd blame size and market position more. Google was left as one of very few profitable giants standing when the dot-com crash hit, and yet they were young enough to not have the institutional inert…

> cryptoverse What exactly is this and what business is doing well in it?

The set of companies & foundations centered around blockchain, cryptocurrency, distributed ledgers, and related technologies. Coinbase, Binance, CoinMarketCap are doing great, Bitmain would be doing great except they made a terrible bet on Bitcoin Cash, a number of other organizations (VeChain, IOTA, Ripple, Stellar, Ethereum) are doing "we'll see", and still others (Bitfinex, Tether, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV) are imploding dramatically.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#24
post #5

This is of course extremely subjective, and I have no knowledge of what Google was and is on the inside except for a short internship almost 10 years ago: I somehow always felt that Google with Eric Schmidt as a CEO was a much different Google than later on. Under Eric Schmidt, Google seemed like this extremely innovative company with the brightest minds in the industry. Afterwards, it seemed to instead grow into jus…

Remember that Larry was CEO twice: 1998-2001 and 2011-2015. During the first period Google was exceptionally innovative. During the second, Google attempted to be exceptionally innovative but largely fell flat on its face. I'd blame size and market position more. Google was left as one of very few profitable giants standing when the dot-com crash hit, and yet they were young enough to not have the institutional inert…

Google also grew to dominate the browser market during 2011-2015.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that Larry was CEO twice: 1998-2001 and 2011-2015. During the first period Google was exceptionally innovative. During the second, Google attempted to be exceptionally innovative but largely fell flat on its face. I'd blame size and market position more. Google was left as one of very few profitable giants standing when the dot-com crash hit, and yet they were young enough to not have the institutional inert…

> cryptoverse What exactly is this and what business is doing well in it?

I assume this refers to cyptocurrency-related businesses. ICOs ('initial coin offerings') collected around $5.6 billion and most of them never delivered any real product: https://www.coinwire.com/ey-report-finds-most-2017-icos-fail...

One could argue that getting enormous amounts of money without needing to produce any results for it is the very definition of "doing well".

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#26
post #5

This is of course extremely subjective, and I have no knowledge of what Google was and is on the inside except for a short internship almost 10 years ago: I somehow always felt that Google with Eric Schmidt as a CEO was a much different Google than later on. Under Eric Schmidt, Google seemed like this extremely innovative company with the brightest minds in the industry. Afterwards, it seemed to instead grow into jus…

Remember that Larry was CEO twice: 1998-2001 and 2011-2015. During the first period Google was exceptionally innovative. During the second, Google attempted to be exceptionally innovative but largely fell flat on its face. I'd blame size and market position more. Google was left as one of very few profitable giants standing when the dot-com crash hit, and yet they were young enough to not have the institutional inert…

Yes it is quite amazing how they have almost complete browser dominance and video content creation/hosting dominance as well as search dominance but are unable to come up with even a simple in browser tipping system to hedge against the downfall of their almost entirely ad based revenue.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#27
post #5

This is of course extremely subjective, and I have no knowledge of what Google was and is on the inside except for a short internship almost 10 years ago: I somehow always felt that Google with Eric Schmidt as a CEO was a much different Google than later on. Under Eric Schmidt, Google seemed like this extremely innovative company with the brightest minds in the industry. Afterwards, it seemed to instead grow into jus…

Remember that Larry was CEO twice: 1998-2001 and 2011-2015. During the first period Google was exceptionally innovative. During the second, Google attempted to be exceptionally innovative but largely fell flat on its face. I'd blame size and market position more. Google was left as one of very few profitable giants standing when the dot-com crash hit, and yet they were young enough to not have the institutional inert…

[deleted]

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#28
post #9
post #5

This is of course extremely subjective, and I have no knowledge of what Google was and is on the inside except for a short internship almost 10 years ago: I somehow always felt that Google with Eric Schmidt as a CEO was a much different Google than later on. Under Eric Schmidt, Google seemed like this extremely innovative company with the brightest minds in the industry. Afterwards, it seemed to instead grow into jus…

The other big thing was Larry pushed social on the company without really understanding social as a product, and was absolutely unable to handle the huge negative response both internally and externally to that push. This all happened at the same time Microsoft and Amazon committed to Cloud (which Google has only tepidly adopted). The one time I met with Schmidt to explain my cloud project, he was delighted and encou…

Google Cloud is far from tepid.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#29
post #14

Does anyone inside Google care to share how Eric is perceived among fellow engineers?. From the outside, it seems many of the great innovations came when he wS CEO and Larry + Sergey were building the company culture.

I was there for both the end of the Eric era and the beginning of the second Larry era. I liked Eric - he was an engineer at heart, but he also was effective at making decisions, listened well, and was able to defer to subordinates when they had better ideas. Much of Google's strength came because he tolerated Larry & Sergey running around sponsoring talented engineering teams to work on crazy projects without his knowledge, which must've been challenging as a leader but was ultimately a great thing for Google.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#30
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bismarck was a whiz of foreign policy, who had successfully juggled the alliances surrounding the (relatively nascent by European standards) German state throughout his time as a diplomat and Chancellor. His contemporary Hohenzollern monarch (Wilhelm's II predecessor) largely allowed Bismark to take free reign over diplomacy, recognizing him as a generational talent. If Bismarck was an ideological juggler, capable of…

Curious who the analogous Wilhelm II is in Google today? Sundar is not one - Sundar is actually very diplomatic and strategically-minded, which is how he ended up CEO of Google in the first place (he managed to avoid all the political struggles common to Google's SVPs at the time, such that he became the obvious successor when they all left to run VCs / got fired for sexual harassment / became top brass at Yahoo/Soft…

Google's problem now is that anything smaller than a billion-dollar business is not on their radar screen

That seems quite wrong, given that: 1. Google can buy into growth opportunities by making aquisitions. 2. Google is invested in many, many pre-billion-dollar businesses.

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