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Page Can't Turn Back Clock At Google
rsmiller510 writes "As much as incoming CEO Larry Page would like Google to be as quick on its feet as a small company, when you're as big as Google, decision-making gets bogged down in the management structure, and it's hard to make the company something it's not."
...he competed with, and beat the largest software company at its own game. He's doing pretty good in my opinion.
zero impact opinion piece go!
Won't somebody take some of this money off me to ease the burden?
If it bothers you that much, Larry, you could always start up another company. Without Moritz, Schmidt et al. It wasn't just luck, was it? You're smart enough?
If /. is no longer your cup of tea, why not leave? There's about 40 zillion other tech news sites you can hang out on and spare us all your trolling every story.
This sounds like a 45 year old who longs for the golden years of being a college student. Google should acknowledge it's not a nimble startup company but a near monopoly search engine with a massive amount of money. It should invent itself as something new appropriate for it's age rather than be a 45 year old with a faux-hawk and skinny jeans.
If you want to do new things, then have the entrepreneurs start a new company. Google is in the position to buy them out when they come up with something good. Isn't this the corporate way? Google is too big to do everything in house. I seem to remember they acquired youtube and picasa. If Larry Page wants to work at a small company then he should quit and if you ask me he seems a bit sentimental.
TFS doesn't actually attribute it to being a quote by Page, just a supposed summary of his intentions/desires for handling Google.
/.
Just another slow news day on
...when you've sold your immortal soul to Mephistopheles.
Google's company motto is "Don't be evil". Given that huge companies are inherently evil, why did Google's top executives make the choice to become a huge company? Surely, a smaller company would simply lack the ability to perform evil on a scale large enough to be noticed. It's like the difference between the tyranny of Joe and his sons of Joe's Muffler Shack in Flyover Territory, Oklahoma, and Microsoft. One is large and evil, and the other is equally evil but simply lacks any ability to influence events outside of its local prey of fuckwit middle Americans.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Evil: Let's do it!
(We're rich! We can map everyone's WIFI while we drive past and take photos! No one can stop us! Buhahahahahaha)
Dr Evil: 1 BEEEELLLLIUN Dollars!
You know: Evil!
Do you know evil?
(Oh no weavils!)
Oh no! Evil!
Dr Evil: 1 MEEEELLLLIUN Dollars!
Do no evil!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Having worked for a company which went from fairly small and agile, to being publicly traded and fully "corporate" ... it's a one way trip.
Once the accountants and management layers are in place, it's too late. Then, it's mostly becoming more bureaucratic and management heavy and filling out TPS reports.
Sure, if you try hard you can give some room to you engineering staff to actually do their jobs ... however, I have seen entire development teams grind to a halt as someone from finance gets everybody bogged down in paperwork and reports to explain what it is that we do.
Of course, nobody in finance was capable of recognizing that the labor costs of the people they'd derailed far exceeded the middle-level idiot who insisted that everything be done in the first place.
While I admit that these people actually do useful things, sometimes they can stop a lot of people from building the products just so their spreadsheets are up to date.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If Google broke up into 10 smaller entities, it could increase shareholder value and spur more innovation. Plus with the Feds going after them, they could just say, "oh, that was the old company. we're a new company."
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Back in the '90s whenever someone came up with a hot desktop application or idea for customizing the OS, Microsoft would offer to buy them out; if deal fell through, MS would "out innovate" them by assigning a few hundred engineers to build something similar right into Windows, sometimes buying out other startups in the space to get their jump start. Good look competing with that.
Guess who's doing the equivalent these days.
There's no rule that says a big company has to have big company issues. The problem is that almost every big company (or at least the ones I've seen) is structured for the same top-down management system that pervades corporate culture. The more important a decision the more layers of management it has to travel through. There is almost total disconnect between the top of the pyramid and 99% of what a company does, with the CEO only making broad policy decisions, etc.
If google really wants to have small company feel they need to learn how to make management work in support of engineers and innovators, not the other way around. Saying something is impossible because its different then what you currently have is foolish. But I do doubt that Page really has a vision for how a company that size could become agile. Much more likely he is just your traditional CEO who gives an abstract goal like this and hopes other people will figure it all out.
Google Clock Can't Turn Page Back
Google is smaller than it looks. The core search engine team was about 90-100 people as of a few years ago.
97% of the revenue still comes from search ads. Google has a huge array of money-draining services, some of which are labor-intensive. They're not generating much revenue. Mostly, they're defensive measures to ward off Microsoft. GMail, Google Docs, the free hosting service, etc. exist to threaten Microsoft. It's not like offering spreadsheets on line is a viable business. Even the whole Android phone thing is mostly there to prevent Microsoft from monopolizing that space. (It's also a threat to Apple. Google pays Apple $100 million a year to stay on the iPhone. If it weren't for Android, Apple might provide their own closed iPhone search engine.)
Google spends an incredible amount of money on non-revenue defensive measures.
Why don't they just start some semi-autonomous collectives?
Merge one back in if it comes up with anything decent.
I think their related worry must why like 70 percent (off top of my head)
of their new innovative product rollouts (as opposed to extensions to gmail
and improvements on search) seem to be failing in the market,
and how they can crack the Facebook nut.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Looks like we have some joker promoting hits on his own blog with /.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
But... but... if you make a bunch of incitement statements without backing them up in any way whatsoever, your audience is guaranteed to grow!
I mean, it works for Rush Limbaugh! You're not being fair. Why shouldn't this Ron Miller guy get to do the same thing!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Please don't feed the trolls.
Am I eval()? - http://www.monst3r.com.br
Does as much for Google as Jerry Yang was able to do for Yahoo!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
How exactly would you propose splitting it? Advertising is their only real money-maker, and splitting that would be shooting themselves in the foot.
Conclusion: You better not rely on Google for your daylight saving time. They can't turn the clock back. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I actually think that is a good idea. The problem is that Google doesn't have 10 profitable enterprises, it has one profit center and a number of initiatives that might become profitable some day, but which have almost no chance of standing on their own without the search engine's money and market share behind it at the moment.
So, the choice is either, take a risk with them and break off, or see if you can shepherd them to profitability and then spin them off. The former is probably going to be the path to the small, dynamic business he wants to be with again, but its an open question if he wants to accept the bad parts of that model (chaos, long hours, uncertainty, significant possibility of abject failure) along with the good.
If Google broke up into 10 smaller entities, it could increase shareholder value and spur more innovation.
Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, HP, Dell and EMC first.
I once read (many moons ago) an in-depth article about how "3M Corporation" is organized. The implication was that despite being large, it was able to be nimble because of the way it was divided into sections (each section had a lot of autonomy and could therefore behave like a small company). Whether or not it is still organized this way, or Google can copy such organization scheme, is the key question, of course.
Google succeeded because it was the best search. But Larry didn't know at the time of creating the algorithm that they had the best algorithm. They were guessing, like everyone else in the search industry (altavista, snap, ask, lycos, etc). It just so happens that their algorithm did a much better job.
They also guessed that advertising dollars were the best way to bring in money. Other providers tried subscription based models. Turns out Google was right again.
NOT because Larry is a genius. He just happened to be the guy who guessed the correct formula. He didn't know. Everyone was guessing and trying every combination. Larry was the guy who just happened to get the right formula.
Now that Google is huge, Larry would like to return to the "old days" where everyone was just guessing and trying new things. But what was the cost of that era? How many companies failed? How much money was lost during the dot-com bubble? Larry has a very distorted perspective because he just happened to be the guy who got it right.
"Wasn't it great when we were just guys out of the garage, trying new things?"
Yeah sure. That was great. For you. Because you succeeded. For everyone else, who lost lots of money, it wasn't that awesome.
Nope. Google's still playing catchup with Apple and it's barely entered the race with Microsoft.
First off, Apple isn't a software company, it's main revenues are from hardware. The GP comment was in reference to Microsoft, and I do think Google has been successfully competing with Microsoft vis-a-vis anything Internet (and now, mobile). Microsoft has not been competed with on their own turf, but as Google and Apple grow the landscape away from Microsoft, it will be clear to everyone that what was once the entire consumer computing world (Windows) is now just a big continent, and the other areas are growing faster.
The best way to compete is not to destroy your opponent but to grow faster and eventually acquire them or make them irrelevant.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Just maintain the company as small groups of 10-30 people whose customer is Google. Give them regulated autonomy. Give them intensive like monetizing what they produce (a vested interest) backed by contracts so that they willingly give Google their pipe dreams. So what you get is small businesses within Google without quite so much stress concerning financial matters or marketing or patents. It also means if someone thinks up the next killer app they will be proportionately rewarded unlike the guy from apple that convinced apple to market a brand name music player and create the iTunes store. Oh also have a guarantee if Google decides to pass on a groups work they can opt to leave Google and pursue it on their own with Google maintaining a certain stock option if later they pass a revenue mile stone.
When you can't turn the clock back, you turn a new page. Oh, wait. they already tried Page. Oops.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
We're talking Google, Microsoft and Apple here, not Sony.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
And this is a summary of what, exactly?
Um, okay. Whatever you and your army of sockpuppets are smoking, please share with the rest of us. This vodka just isn't cutting it for me anymore.
Apple was run into the ground during late 80's/early 90's by bad management until Steve came back. Everything Steve built up was destroyed, and Steve had to recreate it from the ground up. Steve took control in 1998, so it's arguable that Apple never had any lead at all when Google was founded.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Big companies can do more but tend to do it at a slower pace. As long as Google keeps their winning percentage high (Apple rather than Microsoft), they'll do fine.
If Slashdot had featured this story yesterday, Gmail vs. Wave would be the textbook Google management case. Wave is genius technology with analogs to inbox, contacts, and message threads, yet Google never integrated it into Gmail so it never got a chance to gain traction. Was that Schmidt making the hard decision not to screw up a beloved Gmail for the sake of dubious innovation, or was Google drowning in turf wars the way Microsoft does? I dunno. Google Voice may be stuck in the same limbo.
But Amazon just released Cloud Drive/Cloud Player. Google has nearly all the pieces to do the same: I can already upload music files to Google Docs, Google has a checkout and an Android app store. I'm sure it's a humiliating wakeup call that Amazon got there first. Google Docs even has the nifty "Share" feature, though enabling it for music would trigger yet another epic legal battle.
=S
A good friend of mine recently interviewed at Google for a technical position and was turned down; a first in his career and a nasty shock for the man. This is a guy who has done fundamental work in his field, which is admittedly not web-programming but an underlying discipline that Google is now trying to get into. He said that he was interviewed by a bunch of fairly young programmers, a couple of whom admitted that they had not even read his resume. One of them said `My job is to ask you about search', and hit him with a bunch of questions about graph theory algorithms, even though he admitted that he had not done anything in that field and it was not really required for the specific group he was interviewing for. His opinion of the process was that it is biased VERY heavily towards people who are just out of school, since they are the only folks who will have such knowledge at their fingerprints. If that particular hiring process is representative, Google is hiring themselves a bunch of people that fit a specific paradigm, and blatantly screening out folks that don't fit. Time will tell if this serves them well in the long term.
Set up an internal market using a fake currency which is converted into real money when paid to employees and external suppliers.
Deleted
If you're finding it hard to move quickly then having a "skunkworks" group at a company can help, so long as you can afford to burn cash on failures from time to time. It is useful to have a group of people with a budget to develop new products or ideas without management interference.
Their products seem redundant. Wave, buzz, orkut. . . Google talk, voice, and mail should all be one integrated service. Everything could be far more integrated, with iGoogle as a sort of command center. I should be able to start coding projects in Google Docs, or store my medical records. . . instead of having different places for them. Why are picnick and picasa two different services? Why is there both Google Video and Youtube? They've got all these different products yet the integration sucks. Being able to log into my google account isn't real integration. What I love about Google is that I can have an iGoogle set up that comes up with my documents, my reader, my calendar, my email, and other useful things. I want more of that. I want it to be easier, and less messy, and work better. The gmail widget for iGoogle kind of sucks. I want Google's services to be simple, smooth, and not convoluted as they are right now. Google's like a really messy fridge. Tidy it up. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. . . people will start using Orkut instead of Facebook if all this wasn't quite so messy. Heck, Google wouldn't really need Orkut if everything was properly integrated. They've also got some great ideas that they completely half-ass. Chrome bookmark syncing is only useful if you have two computers that you exclusively use. On public and shared computers it's completely useless because all of your history and bookmarks remain in the browser after you log-out. Android needs to improve. If you install a better browser or keyboard, you should be able to uninstall the original Google stuff. There's individual problems there as well. For 3G&4G users with limited plans there needs to be a quick and easy way to turn images on and off, and perhaps have website specific rules with images. .
in one paragraph, to improve innovation:
and then, two paragraphs later:
Which is it that they want to do? Decrease the number of projects, or free the engineers to start new projects?
If they're proposing to set up a new bureaucracy that will examine every project and kill the ones that the manager doesn't like, with the intent to "limit the number of projects," that's hardly "letting engineers loose to innovate."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Are the Feds really after them anyway? Other than in a recruiting sense?
"Oh, Really?" seems to work for most companies. I don't see why Google would need to use the "old company" excuse.
Too big to change the clock, too big to fail...HMMM
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Google has always been a fairly poorly managed company. It wasn't management efficiency or flexibility that made it successful. It was having a killer product.
Amazon is a big company. Not as big as Google, but pretty monolithic. They didn't have a lot of trouble getting the kindle out and making ebooks popular, and apparently are ahead of Google with cloud based storage. Apple is another pretty hefty company but Steve Jobs turned it around and took the lead in a lot of fields.
Google is run by people who are good at technology. That's really al they're good at. Business tactics requires a different skillset.
Sounds like Google wants to become bigger desperately. Google has a great search engine, a decent webmail system, an OK handheld/smartphone OS and a highly profitable advertising business. Why do they feel an urge to start dozens of other projects that compete with innovative startup companies? Is it a cultural thing, or do they seriously fear that their current products might be obsoleted so soon that they need to come up with the next big thing before someone else does? Wasn't it the megacorporations that tried to be and do everything (most of it wrong) that always failed in the end?
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
1. Keep the incentives high.
2. Stay cool. The only way to do this is release cool products.
3. Smart startup strategy
a. Stop stomping on startups lest you want to suffer Microsoft-itis
b. But, don't buy too many startups. You end up with people just making the deal to get rich and look good.
c. Engage startups, help them, and get them on your side. If they truly align, then buy them. If they flop, their good engineers will flock your way.
4. Stay #2 in size. You need Microsoft (and now Apple) to make you look like the underdog, even if you're not. Engineers often love working for the underdog.
5. Give me 1 million dollars. I will give you 5 more tips (including this one).
What is needed is for them to have one core company and then set up multiple subsidiaries that compete against each other. Interestingly, MS has moved to this model VERY QUIETLY. There are a number of small search engines that are owned by MS that compete against each other to try and beat Google. MS is waiting for a real competitor to emerge before folding back the ideas into MS proper.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Is it sad that one of the funniest parts of the above Oblig. XKCD was the Bash.org reference in the mouseover text?
So let me get this straight, if I don't believe that the obviously made-up and utilitarian "God" abstract concept has a physical instantiation of some kind in the universe, I'm probably sociopathic.
The one thing I'll agree with you on is that religion educates child-like, non-independent thinking people on the benefits of social reciprocity.
But you could just explain the benefits of social reciprocity with a bunch of other stories that don't involve weird-ass supernatural deities
intervening all over the place.
It kind of fails the Occam's Razor principle. The game theory principles of social reciprocity are starting to become well understood,
and I suspect that before long we'll have theory proving that social reciprocity (do unto others, don't covet...don't steal etc etc) for intelligent
agents like ourselves is an organizational configuration (of constraints) which leads to thermodynamically more efficiency per unit of survival
(to reproduction) probability per person. Live in a civilized society with social reciprocity, lifts all boats. Lifts the hierarchs boats just a little
bit more so we get hierarchical religious authority backing up the stories with sticks and stones. Just a stable societal organization structure.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
Take that sociopathy and stuff it in your pipe.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
Essentially, Google needs to decide whether it wants to be a post-scarcity institution or an artificial-scarcity-based institution. One approach has a long term future, although it is challenging to surf that wave moving from scarcity to abundance... Google is doing a pretty good job of it in a lot of ways intuitively, but maybe they need to reflect on that issue more deeply?
See also, for related ideas about Princeton University:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Create a Google Core with divisions spoked out. Google Core innovates and the divisions execute.
If Google broke up into 10 smaller entities, it could increase shareholder value and spur more innovation.
Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, HP, Dell and EMC first.
Yep,
Microsoft's OS and Office divisions.
Apple's hardware and music sales decisions.
These two need to be broken up long before Google and I'm not entirely sure it's absolutely necessary to break these up, however we would benefit from it.
HP, they only have HW and Service, EDS needs to die, not be broken up. I've seen so many managed services contracts mismanaged by EDS.
Dell and EMC don't really have enough market share to be abusive, the only way I can see an EMC breakup being remotely useful is separating VMWare back into it's own entity but I cant see why that would be in any way necessary.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
at Zombo.com
you think i don't understand my options? you deny one of them is staying and sharing my truthful observations?
you're an ignorant hypocrite.
cower in my shadow behind your chosen deity based pseudonym some more, feeb.
you're completely pathetic.
you are NOTHING
you're an ignorant hypocrite.
i am michael kristopeit. i am not a puppet. i am not a sock. i'm not smoking. you're a presumptuous idiot.
who is "us"?
you are exactly what you've claimed to be: NOTHING.
cower in my shadow behind your chosen pseudonym some more, feeb.
i am michael kristopeit.
you are exactly what you've claimed to be: AN INSIGNIFICANT COWARD
So why don't they just sell their shares and start a venture fund?
Seastead this.
Your mum is a fu manchu starting and running companies.
You are exactly what you claim to be, a MichaelKristopeit420.
In soviet Russia clocks turn pages.
The lack of any specific examples of the author's thesis (Google slow-moving) made his conclusions hard to take seriously.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
slashdot = stagnated