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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

#91

Post by CydeWeys »

mancerayder wrote: post #66
itsaidpens wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complete aside: all of my friends/acquaintances who work for Google (and in full disclosure, they're generally not engineers) unequivocally agree that Google could fire 30% of their workforce with no disruption in service/revenue. They've become bloated.

Ironically they just purchased last year a huge block of Manhattan - presumably for even more employees[1]. 1 - https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/google-bought-manhattans-c...

Google already has a huge amount of office space in Chelsea Market, though. That's more about owning rather than renting.

If you want to talk expansion, look at the new Hudson Square expansion about a mile south of Chelsea Market: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/17/18144448/google-nyc-camp...

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

#92

Post by UncleMeat »

trophycase wrote: post #26
nostrademons wrote: post #13

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…

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.

> unable to come up with even a simple in browser tipping system to hedge against the downfall of their almost entirely ad based revenue

Google has launched multiple micropayment products as replacements for ads. Nobody uses them.

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

#93

Post by lukewrites »

heymijo wrote: post #48
shutton wrote: post #10

Really enjoyed listening to this recent interview with Eric Schmidt. I’d never heard of Bill Campbell before, seems like he was a huge influence around Silicon Valley. https://tim.blog/guest/eric-schmidt/

For a counterpoint on Campbell as a terrific business coach read "Hatching Twitter" [1]. He was hired as Ev Williams' coach and the picture the book paints is bad. Working more for the board of directors instead the person he was hired to help. Telling Williams he was doing great then reporting to the board he was doing terrible. The book is also a great way to understand why Twitter is such a shit show of an organiz…

I really enjoyed this one as well. The descriptions of Jack in the book give very interesting context for evaluating some of the decisions he's made recently about hate speech and bullying on twitter.

I would love recommendations for similar books that aren't just hagiographies of startups/tech giants.

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

#94

Post by UncleMeat »

mancerayder wrote: post #58

Google seems to be falling flat on its face growth-wise. Its ad revenue is down, its Pixel 3 platform fell completely flat, it shuttered Google + and had a security breach? How can you have a large scale security breach with a brutal tech hiring process, sky high salaries and a whitepaper-producing workforce? Hell, when you interview at much smaller firms, the tech groups copycat the Google hiring techniques, that's…

> Its ad revenue is down

Ad revenue is not down. Ad revenue is growing slower than in the past.

> How can you have a large scale security breach with a brutal tech hiring process, sky high salaries and a whitepaper-producing workforce?

Security is stupendously hard. It is also not a stable state. Software engineering as a discipline does not have methods of turning dollars into security with confidence. There is no company on the planet that avoids getting pwned.

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

#95

Post by sanderjd »

patejam wrote: post #45
nostrademons wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jumping into a new thing regardless of its potential is a necessary, not sufficient, component of innovation. If you wait until it's obvious to everyone that something's a good idea, you're not being innovative, you're just an opportunist. Similarly, if it turns out that it's not actually a good idea, you're not being innovative, you've just wasted a whole lot of time. Innovation happens at the intersection of contra…

I'm confused by all the assumptions in this thread, including 1. That Google didn't research crypto internally and purposely decide not to pursue it. 2. That crypto is worth staking Google's time, energy, and ego on. 3. That crypto involvement is a direct reason a company is or is not innovative.

Who is making those assumptions? My comment assumed the opposite of #2 and #3.

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

#96

Post by scarface74 »

anyfoo wrote: 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…

Google has been an ad company from the time they IPO’d until today when 85% of their revenue is still from ads.

From a business side, they really haven’t done too much.

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

#97

Post by skybrian »

trophycase wrote: post #26
nostrademons wrote: post #13

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…

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.

There have been experiments that you probably didn't hear about. I liked the old version of Google Contributor, but apparently few others did.

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

#98

Post by wwweston »

itsaidpens wrote: post #62
mancerayder wrote: post #58

Google seems to be falling flat on its face growth-wise. Its ad revenue is down, its Pixel 3 platform fell completely flat, it shuttered Google + and had a security breach? How can you have a large scale security breach with a brutal tech hiring process, sky high salaries and a whitepaper-producing workforce? Hell, when you interview at much smaller firms, the tech groups copycat the Google hiring techniques, that's…

Complete aside: all of my friends/acquaintances who work for Google (and in full disclosure, they're generally not engineers) unequivocally agree that Google could fire 30% of their workforce with no disruption in service/revenue. They've become bloated.

Do they know which 30%?

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

#99

Post by minwcnt5 »

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #78
itsaidpens wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complete aside: all of my friends/acquaintances who work for Google (and in full disclosure, they're generally not engineers) unequivocally agree that Google could fire 30% of their workforce with no disruption in service/revenue. They've become bloated.

> Google could fire 30% of their workforce with no disruption in service/revenue. Isn't that true for a large amount of large tech companies? I was under the impression that a large amount of the workers are working on incremental improvements to existing services or working on new features/services entirely. If those people stop working that shouldn't disrupt the service and you shouldn't see the revenue fall until…

I think it's more that there are a large number of employees who don't actually contribute much and treat it like a retirement gig. I've seen people who are only in the office from 10-5, take long breaks for lunches, socializing, working out, massages, etc. and regularly "WFH" one day a week on top of that, and clearly aren't very productive (note: there are people who keep that kind of schedule and do get a lot done; I'm not talking about them).

It's possible to give the appearance of being busy and valuable if you make every project way more complex than it needs to be by scheduling lots of meetings that end up mostly involving bike shedding, publishing lots of design docs and spreadsheets to gain visibility, submitting mediocre code so that you can subsequently submit lots of cleanup CLs, and so on. The game is easier to play these days because the company is so large that entire teams can go off the radar and not have to be accountable.

This happens at every big company and it isn't the norm at Google, but it happens quite often. It's really hard to fire employees, and a pain for managers. It's way easier to just let them be, and for a low-mid level manager that can even make it easier for them to justify additional headcount, which makes their org bigger and increases their standing.

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

#100

Post by paganel »

dekhn wrote: post #79
paganel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Page had the right idea, because if you look nowadays at people under 30 for them the Internet is represented by social networks, be it Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or even Snapchat, the internet/web represented by the browser and by visiting different websites via Google is no longer that important. I think Page realized that if Google doesn't hop on the social train they'll end up looking from the outside…

None of G+ was Page's idea. There was a product manager (who left for facebook!) who did the big pitch deck that got it rolling. Then they put Vic Gundotra in charge and gave him carte blanche to modify multiple products. I agree that was the wrong person for the job. But you can't even imagine the amount of groupthink and ego that Vic surrounded himself with. I don't think it was super-obvious 10 years ago, but soci…

> None of G+ was Page's idea. There was a product manager (who left for facebook!)

Didn't know that, it's cool to learn about it.

About Twitter and FB being on a minefield I agree, but I don't think that will lead to any serious consequences for them, because there's almost no political will to make things right and that happens because the voters themselves (those FB and Twitter users) have almost no interest in how those companies reached their present size. In the end any skilled politician can smell that there's no sense in going to war against a company (or against a communication medium) that consumes at least 3 or 4 hours per day, on average, of their voters' time, it's like a US politician going to war against television in the 1960s, backed when TV had just emerged, it would be public opinion suicide.

Retrospectively I still do think that Page had the right idea to try and force Social (back at that time I also thought it as a crazy idea), like I said, I think that he had sensed that Search will be of almost no use in a world where the internet/web is not represented by websites anymore. I do agree though that even as seen from the outside Page could have done a much better job of getting the Google employees behind him and behind his idea, I think that that wood and arrows metaphor he used was really, really poor and, frankly speaking, quite condescending.

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