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."

Comments

slow news day filler?

[jcombel]

zero impact opinion piece go!

Grow up

[serano]

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.

Corporate Structure

[WarJolt]

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.

Re:Corporate Structure

[JamesP]

You can do that internally

If he really wants to shake things up, create 'micro-startups' inside Google. Put it in a separate building, isolated area, whatever. Shoot any managers or bean-counters that approach the area

Worked for Apple

Re:Corporate Structure

[Nerdfest]

I first read that as "Shoot any managers or bean-counters that approach the area or Worked for Apple". Seemed a tad harsh ... but still ... they are managers and bean counters. I can sometimes understand the attitude.

Re:Corporate Structure

[LordNacho]

You can do that internally

If he really wants to shake things up, create 'micro-startups' inside Google. Put it in a separate building, isolated area, whatever. Shoot any managers or bean-counters that approach the area

Worked for Apple

You still can't get around the thing that makes it one company, rather than a bunch of companies: if your internal startup is crap, it won't die. You have to kill it, or wait for the whole firm to go down. This means management will, despite your best efforts at separation, meddle with which ones it likes and which ones it doesn't. You will get good ideas fighting with bad ones for resources. You have the same problem of "how do I pick a winner" and the same incentives for management ("if I let project x live, and it loses money, I'll look bad. If I don't have some interesting sounding projects, I'll look bad. Where are my dice?").

Re:Leave Page alone...

[Hazel Bergeron]

Nope. Google's still playing catchup with Apple and it's barely entered the race with Microsoft.

Of course, it's beaten Altavista and Yahoo. In other news, Jesus has more followers than Hubbard.

Why did Google choose to become big?

[DNS-and-BIND]

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.

Good luck ...

[gstoddart]

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.

Re:Good luck ...

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

The essential problem is that once you create a management, accountancy, HR or other department, the people within it will find work to keep themselves employed whether there is an actual need for them to do it or not.

Hence TPS reports, meetings, paperwork, etc. The purpose of this flack is not to help the company, increase efficiency, or anything of the sort; its purpose is to keep management employed.

Google has a very simple way of dealing with any oncoming "management" crisis. Fire say, 50%, of all managers. Those that remain will only have enough time to focus on their core work. If you leave their hands idle, your company will be swamped with the devil's work. Better to show them the door than allow them to cook up some hideous "synjergisation" strategy between unproductive meetings.

Re:Good luck ...

[sjames]

It's funny how that works. The bean counters manage to assign an actual cost to every bit of trivia and insist on tracking it and justifying every last penny. Except for accounting. They assume that accounting costs nothing and so it's all pure benefit. You'll never see a cost/benefit analysis of requiring quarter hourly time accounting for salaried workers.

Re:Good luck ...

[ryzvonusef]

Then you have shitty accountants.

I am student accountant (To be specific, an ACCA (UK) student), and one of the major themes of *any* activity were are taught to perform is it's cost benefit analysis.

Taking the poster below's example, if the data gained from the five minute increment provides less benefit, and is actually hindering work, then you do NOT need that data, period.

An accountant, (or at least, a *Professional* accountant) ought to have enough common sense to know that much, it's practically part of the definition.

But I guess US CPA's are a bit different, as I once pointed out in another post once. They are taught differently, so might be brought up to have different perspectives.

Then again, I have yet to start my article-ship, let's see what sort of world I step into :P

they should breakup up before the Feds make them

[jsepeta]

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."

The search part of Google isn't that big

[Animats]

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.

Re:The search part of Google isn't that big

[fwarren]

Nobody wants to "own" music anymore. Its a chore. People just want to listen to music.

I take exception to that. I want to own music. A good part of my collection is made up of rare LPs CDs and Tapes that I have converted to MP3s. They are not offered by any service out there. I am worried that plenty of what they do have, will go away because it to much bother for them to keep it online.

The only way I know of keeping all the music I like is owning it. Even if I was willing to rent it, the major labels are not willing to be land lords.

Re:The search part of Google isn't that big

[KnownIssues]

It's like a nuclear arms race preventing a country from investing into productive activity.

Re:The search part of Google isn't that big

[SydShamino]

I'm like you. I buy music I like. I listen to Pandora for the first half of each month to find new music, but I don't pay for Pandora One because, in the second half of each month, I like to listen to music I've already paid for.

And yet.... I don't think we're like 20 year old kids any more. (My apologies if you are still 20 - but given that your UID is pretty close to mine we're probably a similar age.) We remember when there were no cell phones, when most houses didn't have a computer, when portable music was a cassette Walkman, and a two-cassette stereo was awesome because we could copy our sibling's tapes and/or create mixes. As the type of people who now visit Slashdot, we probably organized our tape or record collections and enjoyed looking at them all in a neat stack / row. There was a definite, tangible meaning to "owning" music.

A 20-year old today barely remembers life without a computer in the house, and has had portable, digital music throughout their teenage years, and is just now looking to greatly expand their music selection. Most will barely remember tapes and only remember listening to records if their parents liked them. Most think that a CD is a conduit for music from a store (or a friend) to an MP3 player, not an item to organize on a shelf, making it easily replaced with a digital download. A subscription might seem like a good investment to them to avoid a life-long "hassle" of data organization.

Re:Leave Page alone...

[Wyatt Earp]

Google
Revenue US$ 29.321 billion
Operating Income US$ 10.381 billion
Profit US$ 8.505 billion
Employees 24,400

Apple
Revenue US$ 65.23 billion
Operating Income US$ 18.39 billion
Profit US$ 14.01 billion
Employees 49,400

Financially they are playing catchup to Apple and M$

And in the all important Fortune 500 list, Apple is a Fortune 100 company, Google is a Fortune 200 company.

Just a self promoting blogger

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Looks like we have some joker promoting hits on his own blog with /.

Re:Just a self promoting blogger

[flanders123]

...He must have compromising pictures of Taco or something: http://tech.slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=rsmiller510

Re:Just a self promoting blogger

[Fujisawa Sensei]

That may have something to do with this.

Re:they should breakup up before the Feds make the

[IQgryn]

How exactly would you propose splitting it? Advertising is their only real money-maker, and splitting that would be shooting themselves in the foot.

Re:they should breakup up before the Feds make the

[tnk1]

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.

Re:Leave Page alone...

[Ja'Achan]

Hence the word 'catchup'

Re:they should breakup up before the Feds make the

[bigpat]

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.

A Possibility

[VernonNemitz]

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.

Re:A Possibility

[Blakey Rat]

That organization is used by, believe it or not, Microsoft. The reason it's not necessarily ideal is because the sections you create don't have much incentive to work together. On the contrary, Microsoft groups are always bickering and fighting each other.

It could be done as long as you ensure your sections are far divided from each other-- the Xbox group would be a good example at Microsoft. They have virtually nothing to do with the rest of the company, and they're one of the healthiest, most innovative, and most popular of Microsoft's products.

When you can't turn the clock back ....

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

When you can't turn the clock back, you turn a new page. Oh, wait. they already tried Page. Oops.

Re:You're Right! Anything is Possible!

[517714]

We're talking Google, Microsoft and Apple here, not Sony.

Re:Leave Page alone...

[dala1]

I've heard quite a few religious people claim that without God, humanity would lead a life of debauchery, violence and sin. .

Kinda like we do now?

Re:Success is a lot of Luck...

[mikael_j]

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.

Considering several other big players at the time based their algorithms solidly on "What the page claims to be about" in retrospective it's not that hard to understand why Google had the best algorithm. Hell, when I first read a description of Google's new "magic" algorithm (there were a lot of "oohs" and "aahs" about it back when Google was the new kid on the block) my initial reaction was "Huh, I thought that was how they all did it..." followed by disbelief at the idea that major search engines were basically just trusting the sites to be truthful about their content (although this did explain why so many search engines were giving incredibly bad results).

I suspect there were plenty of people not really interested in search engines at the time who just assumed the algorithms used were something along the lines of what Google used as opposed to what the others were using...

Re:I'd love to have Google's problems.

[onepoint]

The issue is simple, Microsoft is moving like a tanker at sea, it takes a while for the boat to turn, it's just got the rudder turning recently ( Bing search engine ).

History tells us that they will over time, join the market and win it entirely or take only 1/2 or screw it up completely.

so the only way to really fight MS, is to have many small companies that are great in there respective fields merge, and take consistent bites out of MS at all levels.

   

Re:Leave Page alone...

[geoffrobinson]

Yes, and we live in a world that has gotten a lot of its mores from Christianity. And then say we don't need it or something similar for those mores.

Re:Leave Page alone...

[Blakey Rat]

...he competed with, and beat the largest software company at its own game.

Either you're saying the "largest software company" is Yahoo/Altavista, or you're saying that search and web advertising is Microsoft's "own game".

Either way, DOES NOT COMPUTE.

Actually, they can turn back the clock

[WindBourne]

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.