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Fortune Magazine On Google Growing Up
prostoalex writes "Fortune Magazine runs a pretty long story on Google, but instead of the usual exultation over PageRank algorithm and Larry-and-Sergey biographies, we get a different message - is Google growing up, and is trouble brewing at Google? Here's Fortune's description of the pre-IPO days: 'Google has grown arrogant, making some of its executives as frustrating to deal with in negotiations as AOL's cowboy salesmen during the bubble. It has grown so fast that employees and business partners are often confused about who does what. A rise of stock- and option-stoked greed is creating rifts within the company. Employees carp that Google is morphing in strange and nerve-racking ways.'"
An open source search engine run by a business with an open source business plan. We should trust closed source business plans as much as we trust closed-source software.
Beings aspergers AND pulling chicks... I enjoy the challenge!
Also, anyone else noticed that Google itself is getting less effective lately? Some searches I make, the first 2 pages all go to the same advertiser's site except all the links have different domain names; I think they're figuring out how to exploit its page ranking. Other searches I get tons of 404s, especially with image search, and the images aren't cached except as thumbnails so it's even more annoying.
I think Google has something very important. It is now almost a generic name now for searching. I know a lot of computer illiterate people who have heard of Google, and have no idea that there are other search engines out there, and that google IS the internet's search engine. As long as people hold on to the association of the word "Google" with "searching" they will have no problem.
Summary of the article: /might/ be doomed.
.com bubble survivors, who survived /because/ they were different.
"Oh no, there's this company here that values engineers highly, and does all sorts of wacky non-corporate stuff. How can they survive ?
They must behave more like other dot-com companies, otherwise they
"
All in all an odd article, since google is one of the few prospering
For those of you who hadn't heard -- Google recently blew minds in the advertisng scene by being voted the most recognized brand in the WORLD -- over Coke, GM, BMW, FedEx, IBM, Microsoft, you name it.
the voters were senior advertising execs. perhaps you saw this news earlier this year. it was truly a shocker to the usual suspects (the suits), as Google accomplished this amazing feat in just a few years and with virtually ZERO bucks spent on advertising.
Really, going public does only one instantaneous good thing for a company, raise some instant cash, and a good thing for the owners of the company, raise some more cash for them.
After that, it's a big burden, the company has to follow a whole new set of rules, publish accounts, be subject to pressures from shareholders for instant returns, etc. etc.
Anyway, maybe there is an economist out there who can explain to me why it is good for a company to be listed on the stockmarket as opposed to being in private ownerships. Is there any more to it than a one-off sum of instant cash?
Ponxx
Fortune and the author of the article is notorious for taking comments/events out of context and blowing them into a story that is not really there. This certainly fits the pattern - and account of outrageous behaviour followed by carping loosely sourced but based on what competitors (and snubbed suitors = MSFT) are saying. Can any of the "engineers and other geeks attending a conference on Internet search" comment on accuracy of the characterization of Brin's Q&A session as being like "a rock star being asked to play his greatest hit one ... more ... time?"
In the last week, Google did a change to their algorithms which effectively eliminated most of the top-rated businesses from search results.
It has been suggested that they are doing this to force businesses to use Adwords so that their valuation can be increased in the IPO.
What apparently happened was that for any keywords which are actively bid for in Adwords, Google applied a filter making it very hard for legitimate businesses to get any ranking in normal search results.
Here is an application which was built to show the difference between current and previous results (before the new keywords filters were applied by Google) www.scroogle.org/.
This message has some good data and a summary of the argument.
What makes this so worrying is that Google made its reputation on objectively good search results. If they are now distorting results in pursuit of cash, they're LESS objective than search engines which have explicit pay for placement, like Overture: in those search engines you can at least see which results are paid for and which are actually real.
Farewell Google. We hardly knew ye.
The idea that businesses are "run" is somewhat of a illusion. In fact, businesses run themselves once they get beyond a basic size, and they follow rules (like Zipf's law) which (appear to)govern their size and market position.
Of course a business has a culture, and this affects the way it works, but a culture is like a strategy: theft, honesty, quality, exploitation... all choices made in order to improve the odds of winning at what is always a gamble.
No surprise that as Google gets larger, its culture would change: it is entering new domains, needs to adapt, has many new people, each with their ideas and influence.
The "give the customer what they want" culture is very strong at Google, and is the reason for their success up to now. But it is only a successful strategy when it makes a difference. When Google find themselves needing to defend a captive market (of advertisers), fight off hostile intruders (like Microsoft), and change its definition of "customer" (from people doing the searches to people placing adverts), it will also change as a company. This is what is happening now.
Zipf's Law is fun, BTW. It explains the relationship between size and power, in summary it states that in a self-adjusting system, power is balanced out at all levels. I.e. in a market, the largest business will be about twice as large as the two second-largest businesses, about three times as large as the next three businesses, and so on.
The same kind of organic maths applies to cities, earthquakes, and natural languages.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I'd hope it would be Alltheweb, but I know they are unknown in the real world, even if their results are nearly google-level in quality.
I fear it would be a great opportunity for Microsoft to seize yet another market...
My favorite part of that story, about M$.
Then there's Microsoft. The company has an army of brainiacs working on incorporating web search into MSN and its new operating system, code-named Longhorn, due out in 2006. It plans to be able to index every user's hard drive and use the information to provide better searches. "All I'll say is that search is vitally important to us," says Chris Payne, Microsoft's executive in charge of search.
That right there is in a nutshell why Microsoft doesn't get it. Users don't want the contexts of their hard drives indexed and shipped off to the highest bidder for them to generate marketing to them. That's the equivalent of a door to door salesmen breaking into my house and taking an inventory of everything I own so he can try to sell me what I don't when he interupts what I am doing with 10 more door to door salesmen at the front door.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
I know I don't bother with many links these days - whats the point when I can use google to search for it, the open directory to find by category (or even on the odd occaision Yahoo). Even if I am looking for something similar I don't even have to web crawl for it - you can just Show Similar to find it.
I stating the assumption that others are also doing this - and if this is so, then won't the ability of page rank and similar link "usefulness" evaluation algorithims to produce good results degrade?
Any thoughts....?
Keep Lamb Chop On Top - SETI - The Team Lamb Chop Gauntlet
"Google has grown arrogant, making some of its executives as frustrating to deal with in negotiations as AOL's cowboy salesmen during the bubble. "
So they're frustrating to negotiate with just because someone didn't get their way?
[alk]
I know it's offtopic but....
Dyson is possibly up there with general motors in the whole "I'm making a profit, but not enough, so I'll close the main plant in x town/city and move production elsewhere and screw the community"
Also he didn't invent cyclone technology, he just made it a bit smaller, wood working factories and other dusty environments have had this kind of tech for years, just very big. How he got all those patents is beyond me...
Ah, jealous that the internet isn't only your playground anymore are we?
Search engines, like google especially, are the only reason the internet took off: They made the internet _accessible_ for everyone, not just for those with big brains that insist everything be a problem to solve.
I suppose you believe calculators are evil as they allow people to do math without thinking too hard...must be bad!
No Comment.
take a look at this and tell me one single company that has such ideas, technology and momentum as google. This article talks about google as if Google is planning to stay as it is for the next decade, ofcorse not.... they might be stupid(which i doubt), but they have so much ideas and "know-how" in their heads they can re-revolutionize (i cant say that word again :)) the web search
technology.
The lunatic is in my head
I'm surprised that no one has pointed out a pattern I see here in these 100 incidents:
000) About 2 months ago Microsoft executive Jim Allchin said condescendingly: "Google's a very nice system, but compared to my vision, it's pathetic."
001) Microsoft may have offered to buy Google right before it is set to go public, but Google turns them down.
010) Google changes it's program in an attempt to get better weighted results and gets bad press from business about it.
011) Word "leaks out" that SCO may be planning to sue Google for not paying them the "license" tax.
100) Fortune publishes a negative article about Google's management.
All this happens just as Google is about to offer it's IPO and just as M$ is starting it's own online search engine. Tons of negative press for Google, lots of praise for M$'s "forward thinking" on search technology. Coincidence? I think not...
Davey B. This eCS-OS/2 (Warp 4.52) system uptime is 14 days 06 hrs 42 mins and 22 secs
A good friend of mine interviewed with Google, and the big problem is that technology is driving the business, not business. The interview centered around how the business model of my friend's former company didn't 'scale' because it required human intervention, instead of focusing on the business reasons for human intervention and how to make it economical. Google's engineer wouldn't have any of that, sticking to his guns instead of getting out of his box...
This will probable be the downfall of Google. It can easily be pointed out with numerous examples, e.g. IBM with OS/2, technology alone does not make a successful business model. The mere fact that the founders put engineers before business managers and concentrate on hiring Ivy League graduates ignoring people with valuable industry experience; this screams that the business is heading for a rude awakening once it IPOs. Wall Street does not care about technology, they care about the stock price. And Google is spreading itself thin by hiring more programmers and engineers, increasing its liability, just before going public.
When the company fails to meet Wall Street expectations, it will need to prune those liabilities, which will mean layoffs for their recently expanded workforce. It means cutting back on reserch projects and focusing on the core business model.
This, of course, is the typical dot.com model of getting your start. The people who lead the IPO almost always fail to plan for market realities. The dream is still fresh for them, but real world sets in at some point.
Silly rabbit, the initial investors would never agree to any such thing.
You think they're going to take 1x or 2x their initial investment when waiting a year will get them 25x or 50x?
More proof that nerds don't understand how the rest of the world works.