Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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 $100 million a year to stay on the iPhone. If it weren't for Android, Apple might provide their own closed iPhone search engine.)
Google spends an incredible amount of money on non-revenue defensive measures.
You can do that internally
If he really wants to shake things up, create 'micro-startups' inside Google. Put it in a separate building, isolated area, whatever. Shoot any managers or bean-counters that approach the area
Worked for Apple
how long until
Google
Revenue US$ 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.
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.
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.
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.
Hence the word 'catchup'
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.
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