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James Whittaker: Focus on Ads and 'Social' Destroying Google
theodp writes "In June 2009, Google welcomed James Whittaker as its newest Test Director. In February 2012, Whittaker rejoined Microsoft. On Tuesday, Whittaker explained why he left Google: 'The Google I was passionate about,' Whittaker writes, 'was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus ...The old Google was a great place to work. The new one? -1.' Welcome to the real world, quips CNET's Charles Cooper in response to Whittaker's still-awesome-even-if-a-tad-naive rant."
More from from his post: "It turns out that there was one place where the Google innovation machine faltered and that one place mattered a lot: competing with Facebook ... Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much more about those people. Advertisers and publishers cherish this kind of personal information ... Larry Page himself assumed command to right this wrong. Social became state-owned, a corporate mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name invoking the feeling that Google alone wasn't enough."
So he moved back to Microsoft? Huh? Don't get it.
Now he'll experience a "corporate mandate called $variable"
where $variable = { "the cloud" , "Windows 8" , "whatever marketing thinks up next" }
Who thinks they would have made that push into automated cars if they had the choice to rethink that today?
The whole company is getting focused on profits rather then innovation.
That might be valid. However, it might also be possible that the best way to ensure future profits is to take risks now on new ideas.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Exciting startup with a couple of people does exciting things, attracts excited developers because they can do exciting things.
Over time company gets big, has to worry about shareholders and lots of internal politics with growing levels of management.
Company is grown up, things slow down, life becomes boring, bored developers seeking excitement move on to next startup.
Are there any exceptions?
Google could have become the every man's corporate replacement for systems like Autonomy and Endeca. They could have gotten super aggressive at making a turn key, highly scalable search product that everyone from a 20 employee company to a 200,000 employee company could use. They have the talent to make a product that can do that. Instead, they never really went hard after the enterprise market where they could have not only revolutionized things, but have left themselves fairly independent as a whole business on advertising.
The sad part is that they probably could have beaten Autonomy like a rented mule because Autonomy's documentation is pretty bad and not easily accessible to people who aren't firmly on the Autonomy reservation.
If Google can't compete with MySpace they're FINISHED!!!!1!!
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
They have a bunch of failed experiments--Buzz, Wave, Health, Google wifi, and probably 100 others that died in the vetting rooms at Google.
They also have some stunning successes that started out as private projects within the company--Gmail, notably.
That's not a sign of a dying company--it's a refreshing sign of a company that dares to experiment and isn't afraid to fail occasionally.
So this guy retreats back to a safe, old-school software corporation--Microsoft. 25 years ago, Microsoft must have been an exciting place to work. Today, it's stodgy, rigid, backward thinking, corporate-focused, a follower and not a leader in most areas. He'll feel right at home in his safe, easy corporate 9-5 job.
Google reminds me of the old AT&T Bell Labs organization, where you were expected to put 25-50% of your time into your own projects. It wasn't for everybody; some people need to be basically told what to do 8 hours a day, while other people could feel free to create amazing (or stupid) things, and management just knew that sooner or later something useful would result.
The real question is, how does a large corporation preserve its startup mentality. You really can't, but at least you can try to make the place fun for people who are chasing new ideas all the time. Me, I'd work for GOOG any time. It would be a blast being around so many smart people!
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Man goes to a company with a delusion purported by tech media, saw the reality, then left because reality didn't match the delusion.
Happens all the time. Move along.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Google has gone nuts with the ads. A few years ago there were plenty of text ads: nice and non-intrusive ones, but noticeable. Then they moved to images and then flash! It used to be the innocent child of the web, now it is the creepy old man hanging around the playground. I have been gradually moving away from their products - my default search engine is duckduckgo - but gmail still has me by the balls. Its only a matter of time though.
To keep the profits growing, you have to innovate because the copycats come fast; especially with a non-tangible product - like everything software related.
If they were strictly focused on profits, they'd be making cuts exclusively to boost their bottom line - like what 90% of corporate America has been doing in the last few years. But that's pretty much a one shot deal - it's a just a bump in profits: not growth. Hence, that is one of the reasons (Asian operations is another for some) why corporate America has record profits -cuts mostly people. Now, we have this very high unemployment rate that for the life of me, I don't see how it's going to abate anytime soon - regardless of who's in the Whitehouse next year.
Uh, i'm sorry, the rants about Google innovating too much are down the hall? Whittaker is complaining that Google _used_ to be innovative, but now they're not. He's claiming that they used to let the engineers spend 20% of their time on whatever they thought was cool, but now there's an ultimatum (it's not clear if it's official or not) that everything has to be subservient to the goal of pushing "social" and "sharing" in general and Google+ in particular or it gets thrown under the bus. He's not complaining that they're innovating too much, he's complaining that things like Google Labs and other experimental projects have been killed.
I know that not RTFA is considered the norm, but how did you manage to interpret even the blurb as the exact opposite of what it said? Or did you just assume that if two different parties complained about google within 24 hours then they must be complaining about the same thing?
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Google should be all about advertising, because that is their only business which makes money: They made $35 billion or so last year on advertising, and $1.3B on everything else . Assuming 1 Billion on-line people, thats $35 a year for every man, woman, and child on the Internet.
And the way for more effective advertising is more effective stalking, err, profiling of people. Google is very good about tracking its users when there are advertisements, but was losing out to Facebook on non-advertising pages, thus the advent of +1.
It also explains a huge amount of the change in Google's privacy policy: before they would silo data, but now its all-inbounds. If its beneficial for them to data-mine your email (or email sent TO you from gmail users), including paid email accounts and to correlate it to the advertising tracking cookie for DoubleClick, they now can do it. Even services like Cloud Storage and App Engine are under Google's privacy policy. Fun, hu?
"Its hard to believe in a company that says 'Don't Be Evil' when they are busy firing a death ray"
Test your net with Netalyzr
Bell Labs, PARC, Cray Research, etc. Companies start with great innovation, then Wall Street forces the to focus on near-term profits instead. Ads are where the quick profits are, so of course Google will focus on ads. If history is any indicator, this is the early beginning of the end for Google as we knew it.
Actually, I think they are very much interested in innovation, just perhaps not in areas that might seem quite so obvious. Why else would they hire Regina Dugan, the outgoing director of DARPA? Somehow, I don't think it's going to be for the use of UAVs as an advertisement delivery mechanism...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
the internet of the late 20th century and the first few years of the last decade was you go find the information you want. Google flourished because they were able to organize it better to make life easier for you.
Facebook, twitter and the rest of social is the new internet. You "like" or follow brands and then read the stream of their updates/news feed. sort of like a custom RSS feed. the point is that you no longer find the information, you are fed a stream of data. just like TV of the 20th century where you sit in front of a box and consume the content.
this is where google is having problems. the whole idea of fighting spam in gmail was to force those companies to use google for advertising. Yes, all the shady loan companies and no prescription drug companies used google almost 10 years ago to advertise. but with SEO the spam problem is coming back and the only way to solve it seems to be social where people crowd source the content filtering.
that's the whole point of Plus, to filter the content. but lately Plus is crap as well. Just a bunch of bloggers/internet oprahs and you are supposed to comment on how cool they are when they post something
I use for reverb when recording.
When Google took over search engines- there were other companies at play- but no-one had an emotional attachment to them.
Now Google wants to take over social media- but Facebook is entrenched. It's different than conquering the search world because Facebook has an emotional value for people- and the less technical people that anchor it are less likely to switch than the early adopters of the internet that switched to Google's search engine.
Going social and creating Google+ was a good idea too late for Facebook. If they wanted to do it they should have done it before every non-techie auntie and granny had it.
(I still refuse any social network of that ilk)
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
What's immature about it? He called out the list of reasons that caused him to lose interest in working at Google, and he did it articulately. There was no name-calling or whining. Kudos to him for being honest and moving on.
Facebook is the new AOL
Reading Charles Cooper's banal and juvenile rant reminded me of why I never read C|Net. Now I have to start looking at where links from /. articles go. :-P
"The mind is a terrible thing to, um, uh, oh bollocks." -- Me
You're correct, that's exactly what the article is saying. And the gp is correct about MSFT.
As a (recent) ex-employee I can testify that there is definitely nothing exciting or innovative about MSFT now, coupled with the age-old problem of thinking if it compiles then ship it (that's why I left). As far as products go, they're stuck in the backwaters of stale tech and middle management seems to be ok with it as long as the big dollar enterprise contracts are renewed.
Of course the research division is fine but outside of Kinect, very little ever seems to produce revenue. Employee morale is even lower than the Vista days which is amazing since Win8 isn't too bad. Larry Page had better hope that Google never comes close to being the type of company that Microsoft has devolved into over the last 10 years.
Bottom line is that absolutely nothing can save them from drifting into obscurity while Ballmer remains at the helm.
Let's call it a draw.
The CNet reply was immature, scarcely germane to the highlighted quotes to which Cooper was trying to respond, and very repetetive. I can't believe I read the entire thing. There's nothing wrong with lamenting a company for losing its character and transforming into something not resembling its former self. We all do this every day, almost every hour. "Things just aren't as good as they once were". Unless you're 15 years old, that sentiment rings true for most aspects of our lives. Let's face it, guy is just ticked this ex-Googler went to MS. So sick of this anti-MS bullshit. I use it and I get along just fine. You don't use it, you get a long just fine. It's not a fucking religious war here people, for God's sake we're supposed to be more intelligent and civil than the rest of the school, but we spend all our time in rant wars about god damn software we don't even use??
There aren't too many organizations public or private left in the world, that can replicate Google's indexing capabilities. That index has unimaginable untapped value and it needs to be opened up (unlimited api access). It's value can never be tapped by a couple hundred engineers sitting inside Google. Giving a small group within Google complete access to it, is equivalent to only giving a couple scientists access to human DNA data. I hope they find a way of opening it up before the regulators do. If there is anything worth building a platform around. more than a Google+ or an Android or TV or googledocs or chrome or youtube it is that index. I don't know how it would work but they need to start thinking about it as an end goal.
Rant? Please. I know ranting, and this isn't it. The guy didn't like his job, and a billion people were bugging him about it, so he tried to articulate his reasons. Maybe he didn't do a great job there, but trying to argue with somebody about the validity of personal decisions like why they chose one job or girl or car (yes, a girl is like a job and expensive possession all wrapped into one, deal with it. imaginary girl that may be reading this, you may substitute guy. unless you're gay, then don't. unless you're a gay guy, then do. and if you're bi, pick one or both depending on ... jesus christ I don't care. see, I told you I know ranting) is the very essence of immaturity. They're always going to be right--it was their decision. If it doesn't seem "right" to you, then you're just not able to get into their head well enough. Even if it ends up making them less happy in the end, they made the best decision they could with the information they had, which is their entire lifetime of experience.
The real rant is in the response. Somebody is all upset because somebody else left a company they don't even seem to like that much, but they're pursuing their own happiness and that just needs to be nipped in the bud. This is the real world! Things don't work that way! A company's gotta make money! Aristotle younger generation cliches!
Seriously? You're going to go there, but you don't realize that people rarely make solid arguments in defense of personal decisions? I guess if it's not something that's repeated a thousand times as if it's some sort of amazing insight that you can parrot, it's not worth thinking of on your own.
The greatest shows occur when the person being attacked for their decision doesn't realize that theirs wasn't the objectively correct one for everybody in the world, and tries to further defend their position as if it was. Increasingly specious arguments fly back and forth, people on both sides burrow further and further into their own heads, and the argument just gets weirder and weirder. The only way out of it short of running out of steam is for somebody to both realize what's happening and not care at all what either their opponent or spectators think, because all you can do is go, "it was my decision, I don't give a fuck what anybody thinks" and then stop defending yourself. Or, "wait, I'm trying to convince somebody that they aren't right about their own desires." Either one needs to just deal with everyone too wrapped up in the argument to realize that it's completely changed from where it started, thinking they "won". My prediction: Whittaker will have at least an intuitive understanding of this and shut up, the internet will continue to argue. Blog author will move onto a new inflammatory subject. But sometimes ... sometimes magic happens, and it escalates for everyone to see, until it explodes in some self-destructive chest-beating. On the internet, where it can be watched by everyone and remembered forever. Or until something else shiny and loud comes along.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
...is that now they are making interfaces changes that make no sense, or add little value over the previous interface. Google has taken a page from FaceBook and begun pushing some horrible page design onto unsuspecting users. And no amount of complaint helps. Their support just laughs because they know there are no other real options to run to.
Bearded Dragon
Well i certainly agree that in terms of actually _producing_ new technology Microsoft is pretty far behind the curve. However it does seem like Whittaker feels that currently Google is actually suppressing innovation in areas that it doesn't believe will help it in the social/Google+ arena. It is possible that he feels he'd rather work at a company that does interesting research that never sees the light of day than at a company that he feels has become to focused on "directed" research intended to produce or bolster revenue generation.
It definitely does seem like Google is in a lose-lose situation, with people like the ones in the article yesterday complaining they're blowing too much money on stuff like automated cars and people like Whittaker complaining they're killing too much blue sky research.
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Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much more about those people.
Knowing nothing of James Whittaker other than what is in the summary, and having not RTFA, I'll assume he is a very intelligent and successful person.
He is also missing the obvious (and he's not the only one).
Facebook knows more of what people want other people to know. Google knows about what is really going on with people. People lie in surveys, whether it's to say what they want to be true or what they think is expected. Facebook is like a survey you create yourself.
Facebook has your holiday photos, knows you've been to an island, like partying on the beach. Google knows you're reading up on herpes treatments.
Maybe Facebook knows you're married. Google knows you're trying to find a divorce attorney.
If Google is relying on + to compete with Facebook, it has already lost the battle.
Because, love them or hate them, Microsoft is a software company trying to apply engineering to diverse software problems.
Ultimately, they make their money through the sale of products, so their interests tend to align with their users'.
Google, on the other hand is an advertising company trying to apply engineering to, um, data mining algorithms; and acquiring start-up companies for the purpose of increasing data collection and improve the targeting of ads.
Ultimately, they make their money through better and more targeted advertising, so their interests tend to align with those of advertisers'.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
If he joined Microsoft Research, they do a lot of amazing things. I wish I worked over there. Granted I don't know where in Microsoft he went. Though working at Microsoft in general I hear is actually a rather nice experience save for a few departments. (I have a friend who works there and is quite happy)
I think Regina Dugan's reputation at DARPA relates directly to the focus Page has been seeking at Google with his "more wood behind fewer arrows" approach (which has, no doubt, been disruptive to many Googlers and is a change of focus.) Dugan's reputation has been one of fostering innovation, but focussing on quick return of value to the core mission from innovation, rather than blue-sky projects.
Google+ is awesome, it's a great way to talk to Google employees.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
BTW, this is not true. I work for Google, have a 20% project that has nothing to do with social or sharing (in fact it's an open source Bitcoin related project), and before this one I had a different 20% project which now has a team of two full time engineers on it, which is also not related to sharing or social.
The guy who wrote this blog was not actually an engineer. As somebody who is, I can say that at least in my part of the company 20% time is alive and well. It has not been killed. It requires managerial "approval" only in the sense that your manager needs to know about it, but they aren't allowed to pick/choose your 20% projects or tell you what to do. As a way to stimulate research it's very effective and one of my favourite things about working here.
Over the years I've read a lot of stuff about 20% time and how it's supposedly just a scam, or whatever. I think a lot of the confusion stems from the fact that it's always been somewhat vaguely defined. As far as I know there's no precise, written set of policies for 20% time. It's just a tradition that's always been there. The result is that whether you succeed with it or not is largely up to the individual - you need a certain amount of confidence and drive to make it happen. And bad managers can potentially try and discourage you, even if they aren't supposed to, or give you insane deadlines so you feel you can't use it. But there are ways to report such situations and try to fix them.
We count upon large corporations for doing the research that moves our society forward.
Well, there's your mistake. Nowadays, we count on large corporations to outsource, litigate, and obsess over their stock price, not innovate.
I count on the two smart, ambitious guys in a garage to innovate.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
There aren't too many organizations public or private left in the world, that can replicate Google's indexing capabilities.
It's not necessary to have a company the size of Google to do Google's web search. CPU power and disk space have been increasing faster than the amount of content on the web. Indexing the web isn't all that big a job any more. Cuil, despite their problems, did it with about $20 million, 50 people and about 1000 servers. Their relevance algorithm was terrible and their crawler hit the same pages too often, and by the time they had those fixed, it was too late for them. But they did index all the pages they could reach.
Common Crawl, which is a modestly sized nonprofit, maintains a crawl of the whole web. So does Archive.org Neither maintains a search engine, though.
The next frontier in web search is to crack the provenance problem - figure out which pages are derived from other pages, and list the original source first. Google is not good at this. There are constant complaints on Google support forums about scraper sites outranking the original source. Google doesn't get this right for video, either. A video search system which found the best copy of something and discarded all the copies with ads, logos and recompression would be far better than what Google provides.
Google can't do that. They make money off AdSense ads on third-party content. Scraper sites are a gold mine for Google. 30% of Google ad revenue is from AdSense. Much of that is from copied content.
Yeah, that's the speculation being put forward - that she'll be working with Sergey Brin on the GoogleX projects, which is a pretty obvious assumption given what DARPA do. The bit that struck a chord with me though was that she has a suck it and see approach - "Failure isn’t the problem, it’s the fear of failure.” was the quote to All Things D - which aligns very well with Google Labs' way of working. Try it, and if we get the next Backrub or GMail then that's just great, if not scrap it and move on to something else. The big question is, will she be required to work to the Google+ Social Media agenda or free to pursue whatever bluesky projects she wants? If the latter, now might be a good time to buy some GOOG.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
My problem with Google's attempt to be "social" its that it makes their already spam-infested search results even worse, and it's difficult to opt-out. With all the effort that they claim to expend in fighting spam, why is it still so easy to game their system?
The thing I've seen her most praised for in her work at DARPA has been specifically shifting away from blue-sky projects to projects that rapidly provide value to business end of the organization the research arm serves (warfighters, for DARPA.)
I can't imagine that she would be brought to Google to drive more effort behind pure blue-sky projects, rather than finding a way to keep innovation going in a way that rapidly returns value to the business end of the organization, as defined by the organizational leadership.
Finding the balance between the openness that keeps innovation active and the focus that gets it returning value and doen't sink lots of resources into things that aren't relevant to the organizational mission is tricky (the "more wood behind fewer arrows" approach was obviously a reaction to the perceived lack of focus, but the perception that it has so far been unbalanced in the opposite direction may well be valid.) Expertise in managing that balance is something Google may well benefit from.
You don't often see a lot of innovation coming out of QA,...
Well, perhaps you should look a bit deeper at what Dr. Whittaker has done in the past before saying stuff.
This particular QA Manager is also a CS PhD.
You might be perhaps interested in his dissertation:
Markov Chain Techniques for Software Testing and Reliability Analysis
Perhaps that would by why we care about what this QA Manager thinks about software testing.
Yes, Google has been sending out notifications encouraging sites to fill more of the screen with Google ads. I'm trying to find the link where someone reported getting a notification that they should put more ads on their page, because they had less than 3 "ad units". That included the "heat map" referenced above. I haven't found that yet, but I found this Google video "Monetize your content". "Ideally, every page on your site should have some form of AdSense on it". Yes, the Google sales rep actually says that.
In related news, Google is dropping their "domain parking" business, where Google hosts ad-filled pages for parked domains. Not because domain parking is evil. They're just outsourcing the hosting. Google suggest using another domain-parking company like Sedo, which serves Google ads.