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More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

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Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#311

Post by antpls »

shereadsthenews wrote: post #305
antpls wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying you have no ethic at all ? Are you comparing yourself to an independent carpenter ? An independent carpenter would be like a mercenary, who first works to earn money, and then eventually selects his/her clients according to his/her own vision. A carpenter working for a big corporation would wonder what is the vision of the company, what is he contributing to, beyond the delivering of the building, imo

No, but I am saying that I don’t need any executive “vision” to motivate my work, especially when the executive vision is obviously insipid, like it was with Vic Gundotra and G+. It is motivating enough for me if search gets 10% faster every year. If you hook your motivations to corporate figureheads then you’ll eventually find yourself without any reason to go to work.

If you are a Google employee and you don't care about the executive visions, you are a living proof that Google is made of people who don't even understand what they are working for, beside having a good salary imo.

When you work for a corporation, you are supposed to embrace (and consent to) the company's goal, which is defined by the top level.

Having a search "10% faster every year" looks like a narrow-minded KPI without awarness of a greater purpose.

If you are happy, fine, but I think some people would trade your happiness for their freedom and privacy

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#312

Post by petra »

Jedi72 wrote: post #240
petra wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think that Google has a technical vision. They want more people writing amazing content, and not SEO garbage. They want to offer people focused answers to their questions. They want to serve as your personal assistant. They want people to really trust the first answer they get from Google. And they want to be deeply integrated with your life. The thing is: building AWS is more of an engineering project. Achievin…

Google's current vision is to try and shape/control the tech landscape to a point where you have to pay them to be found, distributed on or otherwise operate over the internet. They would like to have all search, social interaction and business services to be transacted or facilitated by them, so they can make money from it. That's at direct odds with all the missions you just stated, and is inevitble because of wher…

Maybe.

But once you most people blindy trust the first answer Google gives them , you know what an awesome sales tool that is ?

And instead of advertisers having 4 Adwords + 4 local search(sometimes) + Google shopping + SEO to target placement for - what if everyone competed for the same, single ad placement location ? What would that do ad prices ?

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#313

Post by petra »

paulcole wrote: post #287
petra wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As of anything with SEO, it's all guesses. But in general, the job of SEO's is increasingly being about writing better content and satisfying the user, and less about "tricks". That's true , at least generally. But when i say better content, better is defined as more engaging, shareable, linkable, clickable. that sort of stuff. This isn't our cup of tea here at HN, but maybe that's what most people go for. Maybe. BTW…

> But when i say better content, better is defined as more engaging, shareable, linkable, clickable. that sort of stuff. This isn't our cup of tea here at HN, but maybe that's what most people go for. Maybe. Are you kidding? Look at the articles posted on HN. MANY are pure marketing or self-promotion pieces designed to be shared on social media like HN, get clicks, and start discussion. It’s funny how HN commenters o…

The articles here aren't that great. that's true.

But would you say the same about the comments ?

But also, we come here mostly for entertainment. And even in our entertainment we prefer a high-quality discussion.

But Google isn't a tool for entertainment. And people here do complain about shitty Google results.

And to be fair, they also complain about the declining quality of HN. But still, it's better than the alternative communities, probably.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#314

Post by petra »

AJ007 wrote: post #296
tyingq wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They want more people writing amazing content, and not SEO garbage" I'm not convinced on this one. It feels like they've ceded the SEO spam war to me. As mentioned in the article, they just crudely exclude large swaths of content now instead of trying to filter out actually bad content. And they have just generally devalued the organic results in favor of ads, widgets, curated stuff...anything that keeps you walled…

Google wants extractable facts that they can insert directly in the search results. I speculate the users want it too, at least as long as those “facts” are actually true. The more voice makes up the percentage of searches, the fewer searches will be directly to a non-paid organic website. Anyone trying to build a scalable business and expecting SEO to play a meaningful role probably doesn’t have a firm grasp on what…

>> Anyone trying to build a scalable business and expecting SEO to play a meaningful role

Maybe true. but it can still, sometimes be an effective tool for small businesses, both in local and organic.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#315

Post by petra »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #307
artificial wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your clear critique, would you mind clarifying the Google leapfrogged by MS statement? I don’t keep close tabs on Azure.

There have been a bunch of reports citing MS as being second in terms of market share and growing nicely (hence the MS valuations going up), for cloud based deployments rather than third after Google. That's a failure of Google to beat Amazon and not to get beaten by someone else. That happened on Pichar's watch. That's just a small part of Google's business and a huge part of Amazon's business. Puts the whole ads ar…

Google has been doing not so well in cloud for a very long time, long before Pichai became CEO.

And Microsoft has got some very unique strengths when it comes to Enterprise IT and developer tools.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#316

Post by taheca »

antpls wrote: post #304
shereadsthenews wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I think of it more like carpentry. I can build a beautiful house and not get upset later that the owner sits on the couch watching game shows on tv all day. Similarly it doesn’t have to bother me that the result of all my optimizations at Google was they had more capacity to let a computer play Starcraft against itself for fifty million CPU-years. Just does not concern me at all as long as my paycheck didn’t bou…

Are you saying you have no ethic at all ? Are you comparing yourself to an independent carpenter ? An independent carpenter would be like a mercenary, who first works to earn money, and then eventually selects his/her clients according to his/her own vision. A carpenter working for a big corporation would wonder what is the vision of the company, what is he contributing to, beyond the delivering of the building, imo

I feel it's my duty to insert this here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQdDRrcAOjA

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#318

Post by petra »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #248
petra wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think that Google has a technical vision. They want more people writing amazing content, and not SEO garbage. They want to offer people focused answers to their questions. They want to serve as your personal assistant. They want people to really trust the first answer they get from Google. And they want to be deeply integrated with your life. The thing is: building AWS is more of an engineering project. Achievin…

First of all, they want to make money. By selling ads, primarily. They cloned iOS not because they think they can make it better but because they saw how big mobile would get, and didn't like that apple was in control. They want to cut costs by trying to automate everything with "deep learning and AI." > They want people to really trust the first answer they get from Google. Yeah they already messed up this one by go…

We're not the target audience.

When grandma googles something, and sees a "quick answer" does she trust it ? probably.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#319

Post by paulcole »

petra wrote: post #313
paulcole wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But when i say better content, better is defined as more engaging, shareable, linkable, clickable. that sort of stuff. This isn't our cup of tea here at HN, but maybe that's what most people go for. Maybe. Are you kidding? Look at the articles posted on HN. MANY are pure marketing or self-promotion pieces designed to be shared on social media like HN, get clicks, and start discussion. It’s funny how HN commenters o…

The articles here aren't that great. that's true. But would you say the same about the comments ? But also, we come here mostly for entertainment. And even in our entertainment we prefer a high-quality discussion. But Google isn't a tool for entertainment. And people here do complain about shitty Google results. And to be fair, they also complain about the declining quality of HN. But still, it's better than the alte…

No, for the most part I don’t think the comments here are particularly good.

Plenty of people who think because they’re paid a lot of money to be computer programmers that they can instantly have genius insights into completely unrelated fields. A good amount of “well actually” when any social issue is discussed. Surprising volume of apologizing for discrimination/racism/sexism/etc. under the guise of “free speech”.

Re: More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO's Vision

#320

Post by ptd »

ramraj07 wrote: post #229
ptd wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re a more sophisticated user. Most people would just google something like best [type of food] restaurant in [city]. They’re not going to help specially for yelp stuff when it shows up on google anyways. If I want to find someone’s Facebook, I search for their name and Facebook on google.

Yelp is for sophisticated users?

Perhaps sophisticated was the wrong word, but a lot of people who will never use yelp use google daily. That is what I was trying to express.
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