The Final Days of Google

theodp writes "Robert X. Cringely speculates about The Final Days of Google, making a compelling case that when the end comes, it is going to be an inside job. To find the founders of a Google-beating start-up, Cringely suggests looking no further than the thousands of entrepreneurial geniuses currently working for Google, who will inevitably be driven to leave the company to realize the dreams of their rejected ideas. 'The real money is in taking existing ideas and twisting the idea just far enough to make it work in a fantastic new way. Think Google vs. AltaVista; Apple vs. all previously existing laptops and mp3 players; YouTube vs. all previously existing video sites, etc. In addition to ideas, you need creativity, resources, connections, and luck -- none of which appear to be in short supply among Google worker bees. Much of the next influx of ideas to Sand Hill Road will come not just from former Google employees, but also from groups of former Google employees who are planning their future companies over free sushi and Diet Coke late at night in Google cafeterias.'"

Comments

So.....

[Anonymous Coward]

An innovative startup made of ex-google staffers will kill google?

But Google wasn't the end of MS, MS wasn't the end of IBM, the markets big. A new player doesn't mean the 'end' of old players.

Re:So.....

[Aliriza]

The former employes of real big firms usually can not build firms that are as strong as their old firms.Cause they are born into the empire , but small firms are not empires and if you act you are an empire you only fall down.

Re:So.....

[PopeRatzo]

Cringely is starting to lose it, I think. Too much time out on the edge can make you start to see things and hear voices.

Seriously, there's a lot of pressure on writers like Cringely to come up with something "counter-intuitive", "insightful", and "outside the box" and "forward thinking" to the point where, faced with a deadline or empty blog post, they throw caution to the wind and blurt out some shit that sounds smart, but if you scratch the surface is nonsense.

TFA is one of those.

Re:So.....

[phantomflanflinger]

Google - remember that? Those were the days. No wonder they went the way of all the dotcom companies, what with all the billions of dollars they made.

Note to self: must cut down on LSD-flavoured potato chips.

Here's Cringely telling it like it is. Amen to him.

Interesting, but...

[rm999]

"Cringely suggests looking no further than the thousands of entrepreneurial geniuses currently working for Google, who will inevitably be driven to leave the company to realize the dreams of their rejected ideas. "

To destroy Google, someone would have to beat them at what they make their money on - search and ads. First off, 95% of the people in the company probably do not work in this division, and don't have the background and aren't surrounded by it enough to get ideas about it. The 5% who do probably could not start a company without running in trouble legally given all the Google trade secrets they are privy to.

Re:Interesting, but...

[Moraelin]

First of all, Cringely is... Cringely. The same guy who recently claimed to know that IBM will fire 150000 US workers... out of 130000 total. Or then looked all wrong at a job search site and said IBM is looking to hire 15000 workers... just to fire them right back again. Never mind that a quick ask at IBM or a better look at those jobs (e.g., a job for a programmer on an IBM mainframe, isn't actually a job _at_ IBM) would have told him that they're only hiring 3000 people. He's also the author of such brilliant predictions as that Intel is buying Apple, when Apple switched to Core CPUs. Or the guy who years back predicted that people on the internet don't need more than webpages, email and chat, because someone at AOL told him that's what their users do. (Never mind that at the time AOL was offering such abysmal throughput and latency that it was unusable for anything else.) Etc, etc, etc.

Cringely makes a good living talking out of the ass, so the sanest thing is to ignore him. Just because it was a slow enough day on Slashdot to let him get the front page, doesn't mean you have to take it as news. Have a good chuckle and move on.

Second, well, there's more to Google than having the right idea. They also know how to _keep_ talented people working there, and how to invest in R&D done by talented people. Both are skills lost on todays "your job could be the next to go to India" and "let's fire some people to make Wall Street happy" PHBs.

If you will, Google's _real_ secret sauce isn't even one of good engineering, it's one of good management. And that'll be hard to steal because most PHBs try to just pretend it doesn't exist. They're looking for something else that must be the secret, because, don't be silly, noone ever got rich by treating their employees right and offering customers what they want. So before they'd be able to steal it, they'd first have to acknowledge that it exists. It's like getting your car stolen by someone whose whole life revolves around pretending that cars don't exist. It's just not going to happen.

Even if it were to get stolen, I'm not betting the big money on it being stolen by someone who currently is a R&D guy at google. From my experience, most nerds are not good managers, and don't do well when (self)promoted to management. It's simply different skills. It's like promoting a passionate pilot to be an archaeologist. Chances are his interest, experience, effort, etc, were spent on the former, not the latter.

In fact, the absolute worst PHBs I've ever had to work with... were brilliant (ex)nerds. It's guys who once were able to code a whole OS via the front toggles on a mini, and come with brilliant algorithms that cut a one week batch job to a couple of hours job. (When most of your memory is on a magnetic tape or drum, such kinds of optimizations are actually very possible.) Then someone went and moved them to a job they don't understand and which gives them an ulcer: management.

So if anyone did leave Google with a brilliant new idea... let's just say that for 99% of them, let's hope they can do it alone, because they won't be able to be good managers.

Re:Interesting, but...

[SpinyNorman]

To destroy Google, someone would have to beat them at what they make their money on - search and ads.M

That's not at all true. Google likely won't be destroyed by being out-Googled - they'll be destroyed by failing to anticipate a change in the computing landscape that someone else is positioned to take advantage of. That's the way evolution usually works. That's the way that Google is "beating" (displacing for relevancy and growth) Microsoft - not by competing head-on but by being better positioned for the times.

Also at some point Google's core businesses, successful as they are now, will naturally stop growing. Online advertising will peak, or advertizing will shift to another venue (handhelds? Internet TV?) that Google fail to take advantage of. No business lasts forever. Without growth the stock P/E will collapse and the stock drop with it, employees will begin to leave, the forward momentum will be lost. Some new hot tech darling will emerge, not necessarily in Google's core business areas at all.

The end of google will come

[Anonymous Coward]

But first they need to fire 150,000 workers. It's not going to be pretty.

Cringely may want to do a little more reading

[jomas1]

Check out this old joelonsoftware.com piece on what good managers do for to get the most out of powerhouse developers:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Development Abstraction.html

The most pertinent part of the article I've linked is:

Management's primary responsibility to create the illusion that a software company can be run by writing code, because that's what programmers do. And while it would be great to have programmers who are also great at sales, graphic design, system administration, and cooking, it's unrealistic. Like teaching a pig to sing, it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.

Microsoft does such a good job at creating this abstraction that Microsoft alumni have a notoriously hard time starting companies. They simply can't believe how much went on below decks and they have no idea how to reproduce it.

Some of the perks that google gives its employees are quite devious. Why risk your money and time starting your own venture when you have it made at google?

Why do you think that the most innovative and radical ideas come from unemployed hungry developers? Who has made a concerted effort to hire said hungry developers? That's who I'd bet on to hurt google's bottom line.

Re:look further

[Anonymous Coward]

(if u are old enough to remember that).

Hi Grandpa - If you're going to abbreviate 'you' to 'u', please also abbreviate 'are' to 'r'

Re:Yeah, no...

[Stocktonian]

Why do yo think most of the ideas are not search related? I would have thought that if you live and breath search engines for 80% of your week, working on something else would probably be enjoyable but I'm sure you can't just switch it off like that.

People used to say that Yahoo and AltaVista did search really well. Then Google came along and changed the game. If an ex-employee of google figures out a way to cut out all the spam rubbish on the search results then I'm sure almost everyone would switch overnight. It's that risk of 1 truly great idea being missed that should worry google investors. Internet search users are a fickle bunch and I'm sure they'd switch without a second thought which in turn would hit google's paid for advertising hard.

Remember Ken Olsen

[mce]

The next killer app does not have to come out of the current killer. But it is a very well documented and repeating pattern that many of these "next killer apps" are developed within the then dominant organisation - because that's where the money is - but ignored or not understood by management. The inventors then quit and build the new killer organisation, leaving their previous employer wonder what happened. The most important observation, however, is that the very same people that went through all this later fall in the exact same trap themselves.

Remember Ken Olsen. IBM didn't believe in his ideas for smaller better and more ubiquitous computers, so he built DEC. But 20 years later he didn't believe in the PC ("there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home") and DEC ended up being bought by Compaq.

There are plenty more examples of this pattern in the computer industry.

Actually

[WindBourne]

IBM is really a fraction of their size that they were back in the days of uncle lou (which is what we called him when he first started). Their decline is not a decline, but a losing of the market share that they had. Basically, IBM was the 8000 lb gorilla back in the 70's and 80's.

Likeiwse, MS is starting downwards as well. Apple and Linux are finally eating into their desktop. To really see it, step out of America.

OO and google office is starting to take some of their office monopoly. As time progresses, more govs will go the path of OO as well schools who pick up olpc.

And MSIE is down a LONG ways down from the late 90's, early 00's. Back then they owned 98% of the market. Now, they are at around 80% and still continuing downwards.

MS was never the main attack on IBM, just the last one prior to their downfall. Likewise, we are seeing MS's downfall. They will not end, but they will not own the market with free reign to crush whoever looks wrong at BG or Balmer.

Re:Actually

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Likeiwse, MS is starting downwards as well. Apple and Linux are finally eating into their desktop. To really see it, step out of America.

To see how wrong you are, step into any enterprise environment. At my organization, we're running more Windows now than we have ever run. Windows has changed from a joke in the server space to the standard server platform we run everything on. 15 years ago, you couldn't have deployed anything but UNIX. Today, to deploy anything but Windows means that you support it alone.

Linux has made some big wins. So has OOo. I don't know what the hell you're talking about with Google Office (no real IT department takes stuff like that seriously, it's far too dangerous to have company docs residing on 3rd-party servers).

But, guess what? MS has pretty much the highest market share they have ever had in every segment they operate in. Windows Mobile sales are up 35% from a year ago, and it's finally starting to be a threat to BlackBerry. There are still more XBOX 360s than Wii's and PS3s combined. SQL Server continues to eat away at Oracle's market share, particularly as companies like SAP grow increasingly wary of Oracle's acquisitions of their competitors.

There are more PCs out there running Windows Vista than there are Macs running Mac OS X.

And, guess what? Nobody cares that MSIE only has 80% marketshare. Microsoft ignored the product for FIVE YEARS. And it's still at 80%! Phoenix (Firefox) didn't even exist five years ago!

So, yeah. Microsoft is making record profits on record revenue and their platforms are either near market saturation or growing strongly. Sounds like a company in decline to me.