341–348 of 348 posts
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> It's almost as if the "largeness" of a company allows the non productive people to hide within it, all while successfully siphoning off their sustenance. Bang. You're spot on. From what I've seen, it's an unfortunate artifact of many (if not most) large companies. There are just too many places to hide. I'm keen to know if it's the same at Apple and Amazon.
Yes, it's the same.
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For example a CTO could say unilaterally "no, we won't help build the great search firewall for China". That would be absurd, as such decision has no technical merit.
>That would be absurd, as such decision has no technical merit. You think a CTO's job is only to decide which technologies to use?
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>That would be absurd, as such decision has no technical merit. You think a CTO's job is only to decide which technologies to use?
Yeah, this is my point. CEOs are often too detached from the technology to understand the moral/privacy implications of practically anything.
Arguably, Google's best CEO was Eric Schmidt. He's the one that turned Google from a startup into an awesome tech company. But nobody ever accused him of having no vision. That's because vision was not his role. That role was for both founders who acted in a duo CTO role. Looking at Google today, they have a CEO but no CTO and the founders seem to be not involved in day to day strategy of Google. So, the real problem…
In order to understand Google actions it's important to understand a bit of culture at the top as well as who Pichai is. Pichai spent all his management career at Google. He is undoubtedly a very bright individual but his personal life experience is limited to a single company which was on the rise during his entire career. He came to prominence by inventing the MSIE Toolbar. The thing was quite insidious: when insta…
This line contradicts with others. My issue is that Google tries too much to enter new markets. Google is fine with starting 10 projects if one of them will be successful and kill others. It is the same thing you wrote.
Arguably, Google's best CEO was Eric Schmidt. He's the one that turned Google from a startup into an awesome tech company. But nobody ever accused him of having no vision. That's because vision was not his role. That role was for both founders who acted in a duo CTO role. Looking at Google today, they have a CEO but no CTO and the founders seem to be not involved in day to day strategy of Google. So, the real problem…
In order to understand Google actions it's important to understand a bit of culture at the top as well as who Pichai is. Pichai spent all his management career at Google. He is undoubtedly a very bright individual but his personal life experience is limited to a single company which was on the rise during his entire career. He came to prominence by inventing the MSIE Toolbar. The thing was quite insidious: when insta…
It isn't that simple I think. You need to know the volume of each "something". Selling a lot of product A at 5-10% margin is great!
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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”.
But for me, that's not the reason i come here. I'm more interested in discussion about entrepreneurship and businesses, and some of the commentors are quite good.
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> Otherwise what innovation are you talking about? Quantity: Google has the highest number of deep learning papers accepted into top conferences among all institutions, even when papers from DeepMind are not counted in Google's. Quality: Transformer and the recent BERT have, pun intended, transformed the entire NLP field. Batch normalization is now a staple of all neural networks, as are its descendants instance norm…
While I don't know real numbers, back of the enveloper estimations for hardware costs alone (based on GCP TPU/GPU pricing) give order of hundreds thousands for BERT, and tens of millions for AlphaGo and friends. Notice how very few organizations in the world are in position to commit these kind of resources to AI problems, and that only Google and China are choosing to do so.
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In order to understand Google actions it's important to understand a bit of culture at the top as well as who Pichai is. Pichai spent all his management career at Google. He is undoubtedly a very bright individual but his personal life experience is limited to a single company which was on the rise during his entire career. He came to prominence by inventing the MSIE Toolbar. The thing was quite insidious: when insta…
> At the same time the new challenges and the new markets are likely to be missed by Google, just like it happened under Balmer at MSFT. This line contradicts with others. My issue is that Google tries too much to enter new markets. Google is fine with starting 10 projects if one of them will be successful and kill others. It is the same thing you wrote.
The distinction is in having a sustained effort behind the project. One may have 6 messengers while none of them gets the resources to succeed. The projects are used for a short-term career advancement, not for a long-term effort to open a new market.
The logic is indeed to have "... 10 projects if one of them will be successful and kill others". It just does not work that way. Google's leadership (the top ~10 people) position themselves above the fight. They don't throw their weight behind one of the (for example) messengers because if it fails it's their failure too (remember Google +?). As a result the users are confused, the resources are spread thin, and none of the 10 wins the market.