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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.'"
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.
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.
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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.
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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.