Sorry, Larry Page: Tech-Industry Viciousness Is Here To Stay

Nerval's Lobster writes "At this week's Google I/O in San Francisco, Google CEO Larry Page stood onstage and took unscripted questions from an auditorium of conference attendees. That's an unusual move for any chief executive, the sort of thing that risks giving their PR people a heart attack. But Page wasn't up there to offer insights into strategy or drop hints about upcoming products: he wanted to talk about how negativity in the tech industry stood in the way of innovation. 'Despite the faster change we have in the industry, we're still moving slow relative to the opportunities that we have,' he said. 'And some of that, I think, has to do with the negativity. Every story I read about Google, it's us versus some other company or some stupid thing.' Being negative, he added, is not how the tech industry makes progress. But minutes later, Page couldn't resist swiping at Oracle and Microsoft. And Google's battles are just one small element in the circular firing squad that comprises most of the tech industry: Apple versus Google versus Samsung versus Microsoft versus Oracle versus Salesforce versus lots of little startups. Those battles won't fade away anytime soon, because corporations have one goal: profit. And so long as other rivals' technological innovations or marketplace maneuvers stand in the way of that profit, the lawsuits and the CEO sniping will continue. The part of Page's talk that centered on peace and love played well to the audience at Google I/O; but it's easier to argue that the true mode of the tech industry, at its core, is Darwinian competition. Do you agree?"

Comments

This is America. We compete.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hard. Sometimes viciously. Mother nature has already shown us that dog-eat-dog is the best way to adapt, survive, and even thrive. The business world is the same way. Take your kum-buy-yah bullshit and go sell it to someone else. I have work to do so my company can kick your company's ass and put them out of business.

Re:This is America. We compete.

[Salgak1]

Don't remind me, I just had a headhunter pitch a job to me, with her going on and on about their "diversity, respect, and social responsibility", and how the employer "strives to help you become the best person you can possibly be. . . ". I guess excellence and profit motivation aren't attractive anymore. . .

Re:This is America. We compete.

[AuMatar]

Except it hasn't. There's a reason why empathy and altruism exist, and both have shown positive correlation with the ability of the species to survive.

Re:This is America. We compete.

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Socially I absolutely agree. Commerce should be a vicious shark tank though, that's the foundation of capitalism. Don't try to apply social methods to commerce, or commercial methods to society, and you're good. The government only needs to step in when the competition fades, that's when you get monopolies causing trouble.

Re:This is America. We compete.

[spire3661]

This clap-trap is insightful? Wouldnt it be nice if we could evolve to a point where we dont feel the need to trample our peers to survive? At our level of intelligence, cooperation is FAR more productive then competition.

Re:This is America. We compete.

[iluvcapra]

Evolutionary fitness of the United States is yet to be determined.

Re:This is America. We compete.

[RoknrolZombie]

Or shoes.

Re:This is America. We compete.

[Sponge Bath]

dog-eat-dog is the best...

Norm Peterson: ...and I'm wearing Milk-Bone underwear.

Re:This is America. We compete.

[Nadaka]

The libertariantards have been out in force recently. Remember that socialism is the devil and the only cure of the inequity of man is to ruthlessly crush your adversaries and climb up on top of their mutilated corpses while fondling your nearest Ayn Rand novel.

Re:This is America. We compete.

[bigstrat2003]

Making a profit and being a decent human being/member of society are not mutually exclusive. You can claim all you want that one has to be an asshole to get ahead in business, but it simply is not true.

Re:This is America. We compete.

[Ambassador Kosh]

We definitely make faster progress on scientific developments through cooperation instead of competition. Overall I think we have a lot of growing up to do as a species and especially as a society. Other countries that have gone for cooperation for medical treatment instead of competition are doing better per resources used than we are. Competition has a high overhead.

Re:This is America. We compete.

[ATMAvatar]

Hard. Sometimes viciously. Mother nature has already shown us that dog-eat-dog is the best way to adapt, survive, and even thrive. The business world is the same way. Take your kum-buy-yah bullshit and go sell it to someone else. I have work to do so my company can kick your company's ass and put them out of business.

Not all species, nay, not even all human cultures and periods of history follow this rule. If you look across the continuum of group sizes, that's not even true at all levels in even the most competitive society. It's rather unfortunate (and rather telling of how immature we as a culture are) that so many aspects of our lives are ruled by cutthroat competition, where 0.9 + 0.95 + 1 = ~1 rather than something closer to 2.85.

We've figured out that at the smaller sizes, cooperation is superior. After all, small teams of people get more done than a whole bunch of individuals who are each working towards their own ends, especially if you tell the individuals that they have to expend some of their effort to fend off attacks from others and attack in kind. We still struggle at the sizes involved at the corporate level, where some companies unify vision and goals rather than pit each department against one another.

When there's some external stimulus (usually some common threat), people figure out real quick that it's better to work together. Perhaps one day, we will evolve to the point where people don't need prodding to stop the bullshit and put their resources to work towards common ends, or at least not spend so much effort opposing one another.

Re:This is America. We compete.

[NewYork]

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." - W. Churchill

Page was just dissembling anyway

[dhavleak]

It's not just that tech industry viciousness is here to stay -- it's also that Google is a pretty strong participant in it. Google's been pretty good at appropriating the language of open source when it suits them, and using EEE tactics once they have the upper hand.

Re:Page was just dissembling anyway

[Anubis IV]

^^^^^ This.

The honest truth is that all of these companies are vicious when it suits them, and conciliatory when it suits them. And it suits them when it means that it will make them more profit. Google, I honestly believe, was at one point the sort of altruistic company that many still paint it as, but with its rampant growth it has moved well past that point. Today's Google is far different from the Google of 10 years ago, and they are definitely the sort to engage in the embrace, extend, extinguish tactics you were talking about.

Re:Page was just dissembling anyway

[IamTheRealMike]

(usual disclosure: I'm a Google engineer).

Those are all really bad examples.

Retiring ActiveSync for consumer accounts is not "trying to prevent Windows Phone from syncing calendar and contact data". Not even close. ActiveSync is a Microsoft-specific protocol which is so heavily protected by the patent system it requires fees. There are open equivalents for all its functionality. Perhaps if Microsoft doesn't want to implement CalDAV or CardDAV like its major competitors do and would rather its competitors pay them per-user license fees for the privilege of using a crappy syncing protocol, they should not be surprised when support for said protocol goes away. They can catch up with everyone else and support the non-licensed calendar and contact syncing protocols instead. For corporate users, well, they pay so the costs of ActiveSync can just be passed straight through.

By "hindering the development of a YouTube app" you actually mean requiring Microsoft to obey the terms of service, right? The sort of co-operation Page was talking about doesn't mean Microsoft can do whatever they want, demand whatever they want, and everyone gives it to them on a plate for nothing. It means cooperating to find a reasonable solution that works for everyone. In this case, there's already an HTML5 website Windows Phone users can access, and if WP becomes popular enough then probably Google would make a native app that follows content creators requirements and allows the site to be funded. Or maybe provide the access they need to build a proper app that does follow the ToS. After all, that's what happened with the iPhone app despite the iPhone being Android's biggest competitor (it started out written by Apple and later moved to being written by Google).

The sort of thing Microsoft does here is exactly what Larry was talking about. They must have known when they were developing the YouTube app that the features they added were not allowed - because it says so right in the YouTube ToS. So what was their goal here? Apparently to try and confuse people and try to score points when they got inevitably told to stop. And it's working on you, isn't it? It's exactly the same kind of immature behaviour they're pulling in so many other ways. This is not co-operation. It's playing politics instead of building better technology. Larry isn't the only one that's sick of it.

Lost in the Billionaire Bubble

[mbone]

I think that the real purpose of the Google I/O in San Francisco was to show just how clueless Google's top executives are in their "Billionaire Bubble."

Money..

[Vortran]

Money is power. Power corrupts. Ethical behavior is incompatible with the pursuit of profit. This is the essence of the old adage "Money is the root of all evil." Think about this very carefully while you consider what values of your own are compromised because you're a slave to your paycheck. Now multiply and amplify that ad infinitum.

Please read this twice if you feel the need to refute anything herein.

Re:Money..

[eriks]

Not refuting anything you're saying (Because I agree wholeheartedly), but the quote from 1 Timothy is:

"For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil."

Emphasis added, since I think that's the most important part of the quote. Money is just a tool. It may be a tool that we need to leave in the dustbin of history, and I'd personally like to see that happen, since there are many ways we could live without a monetary system entirely, but as a pragmatist, I don't see it happening anytime soon, at least not without a very strong catalyst.

Re:Can we have...

[Farmer Tim]

Could be worse: Ray Kurzweil.

Media

[Sarten-X]

It's time for Sarten-X's semi-weekly anti-media rant.

The reason the news stories you read about are always us-vs.-them is because you're reading news stories. It's not what's really going on. In a newspaper, the story about the big technology company donating millions of dolalrs in products and support to a third-world country takes a nice little corner on page 12. Meanwhile, the front-page big headline is a story about the company that sues another company for just as much.

People love controversy, and the media is happy to supply it. It doesn't matter how good your company is or what your corporate charter's stated mission is, you're still portrayed as a Big Evil Company that's out to greedily gather money and decimate your adversaries. On the off chance that you keep your dealings clean enough to not get sued (and don't sue others), you can bet that the media will invent an adversary for you, combining the markets of your closest competitors into a shady conspiracy, just for the sake of a story.

Sorry, Larry Page: News-media viciousness is here to stay.

Negativity vs. Competition

[kevkingofthesea]

This submission, and the comments so far, have missed some key differences between negativity and competition. It is possible to compete without being negative towards your competitor. Good competition (from the consumer's point of view) involves both (all) sides striving to create the best product they can. Bad competition is when, rather than improving themselves, competitors seek to cut each other down.

Re:Negativity vs. Competition

[idontgno]

What you say is true but unpersuasive. The surest way to win is to make sure everyone else loses. And that is why negativity works.

If the "W" on the score card is the only thing that matters, almost anything is acceptable.

And, on a related side note, I've seen behaviors that make me believe that for some people, it's more important to make someone else lose than it is to make one's self win.

Google is no better...

[mystikkman]

Larry Page: Every story I read about Google, it's us versus some other company or some stupid thing.

He means like in these stories?

http://www.wpcentral.com/google-microsoft-remove-youtube-windows-phone-store

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-admits-it-was-blocking-wp8-maps-2013-1

Stupid thing indeed, to send lawyers to make things worse for Windows Phone users who are mere pawns in Google's strategic games.

For example, the imaging tech in Nokia's flagship Windows Phone is far better than Android phones, look at the below videos for proof.

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/samsung-galaxy-s4-video-is-shakier-than-rivals-in-test-50011238/

How about advancing the state of the art for smartphone camera imaging tech through its loss making Motorola Unit instead of trying to compete by making Windows Phone worse by sending C&D take down letters?

Why doesn't Google use it's loss making Motorola to advance the state of smartphone camera tech like Nokia is doing instead of trying to prevent people from getting Windows Phone by sending C&Ds and takedowns?

Re:Google is no better...

[game kid]

Besides, Page is the same guy that got into a "shouting match" with Brin (I'll let Slashdot find the WSJ link this time, I've linked it enough) because Brin was getting in the way of sharing personal user info for money.

He's given the viciousness, and now he can go take it like the karma-challenged man he is.

Re:Google is no better...

[LordThyGod]

Stupid thing indeed, to send lawyers to make things worse for Windows Phone users who are mere pawns in Google's strategic games.

Buy a ms product and expect not to get shit on? Ah, come on! W phones should come with toilet paper.

Hypocritical coming from Google...

[recoiledsnake]

Google is no better at greed for money.

See how Google started removing borders around ads and made the shading super light in order to get ad clicks from older people and people with bad monitor calibration:

http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-it

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentionally-trying-to-minimize-the-fact-that-these-are-ads/

Those carefully and scientifically calibrated colors must be worth atleast few hundred million of extra revenue from their cash cow by making gullible people click on ads mistaking them for real search results.

"Study:Contrast sensitivity gradually decreases with age"
http://www.eyeworld.org/article.php?sid=818&strict=0&morphologic=0&query=

Chrome is a trojan horse to weaken Mozilla which is becoming less powerful because Google uses its ad dollars to bundle Chrome with Flash, Acrobat and Java updates by default thereby reducing Firefox's share and has the nice side effect of reducing Google's payments to Mozilla for searches.

And Web DRM? Of course it's going to be a HTML standard very soon because IE, Safari and... ding! Chrome are going to be supporting it fully with 80% marketshare and people will blame Firefox if Netflix doesn't work in it and recommend you switch to Chrome to see movies! iOS, Android and Windows Phone, BBOS will add support for 100% tablet and phone support for the DRM.

Chrome on Chromebook already has the EME DRM module. Firefox and Opera are powerless to stop it. We have already seen this play out with the h.264 HTML5 video support in Chrome fiasco when Google promised it would drop H.264 from Chrome to push WebM but did not and Mozilla was left holding the bag with WebM and had to recently had to eat crow and add support for patent encumbered H264. The web is owned by the corporates, not individuals anymore, there was some hope when Firefox was at 40%, not anymore. And we all willingly gave them the power by believing in "open" and "do no evil" and switching in droves.

FOSS ain't exactly a love fest...

[jwthompson2]

FOSS ain't exactly a love fest, and they lack to direct profit motive of large corporations. Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds aren't consistently known for being just the nicest guys you've ever met. The only open source community that overtly talks about being nice and polite is the Ruby community with it's "Matz is nice, so we are nice" mantra that falls down just as often as it shows through. Competition and even brutal competition are part of life, for good and ill.

We need both selfishness and altruism

[sjbe]

There's a reason why empathy and altruism exist, and both have shown positive correlation with the ability of the species to survive.

Species exist on a spectrum between complete selfishness (everything for me) and complete altruism (everything for the group). Some species tend more towards one end or the other of the spectrum. However the success of a species typically depends on the circumstances and the balance between the two. Our success depends on the tension between the two. Sometimes a little selfishness is good for the species as well as the individual. It's actually beneficial to society that I earn a good living instead of immediately donating every penny to charity. However never donating a dime isn't ideal either. The balance is somewhere in between.

E.O. Wilson wrote about this dynamic recently. Interesting read if that sort of thing tickles your fancy.

Summary.

[SeNtM]

Can we all be a little less Star Wars and a little more Star Trek???

Re:Summary.

[u64]

About being a little more Star Trek,

Picard: The economics of the future are somewhat different.
You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century.

Lily Sloane: No money. You mean, you don't get paid?

Picard: The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives.
We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.

  - Star Trek: First Contact

Somehow i think the notion of 'no money' sits uncomfortable with advertisement companies, such as Google.

Ethics

[sjbe]

Ethical behavior is incompatible with the pursuit of profit.

Nonsense. Pursuit of profit *can* lead to unethical behavior but it does not follow that pursuit of profit *must* lead to unethical behavior. Buying something and then selling it to someone else for a higher price has no component that is fundamentally unethical. If you have a good I need and I'm willing to pay a price for it (a price that is low enough that it does not cause me injury) then we both get something we want/need and both are better off. There is nothing unethical about that exchange.

I won't even get in to the question of what you consider unethical behavior or why. Ethics are societal conventions and standards which differ between people and groups, not immutable laws of the universe. Perhaps you do consider pursuit of profit to be unethical. That does not mean that the rest of society must consider it so.

Re:Darwinian means evolution, patents IP not

[HeckRuler]

Whoa whoa whoa, "anti-evolutionary"? The rules surrounding intellectual property may be dirty, rotten, and underhanded maybe. But anti-evolutionary?

Son, evolution is a cold-hearted bitch and she doesn't care if it's a one-sided fight, she will straight-up murderize your entire clutch of eggs. Even if it means less food for everyone in the long run. As long as it helps her and her own, in the here and now, she's down with that. Evolution will toss ethics right out the window, baby, bathwater, and all, if it means she gets to send another gene into the future. That bitch plays hardball and is the first to turn in the other prisoner. It's no dilemma to her. She can make some truly beautiful and breath-taking things, but she has no goal or sense of morals, and the moment you put her in a corner she will sucker-punch the nearest fatty so she's not the first eaten.

The *love* of money

[Swamii]

Ethical behavior is incompatible with the pursuit of profit. This is the essence of the old adage "Money is the root of all evil."

The actual quote:

"The love of money is the root of all evil."

This is an important distinction. When a man loves money more than personal morals and ethics, only then does his business become unethical.

Re:The *love* of money

[femtobyte]

When a man loves money more than personal morals and ethics

From where in the quote, or elsewhere in the scriptures from which the quote is drawn, are you getting the "more than" qualification? The text seems pretty clear that "the love of money" is problematic ("the root of all [kinds of] evil"), period. There is no exception made for "a little love of money is OK," any more than "a little love of murder is OK."

Misrepresentation

[g2devi]

Larry wasn't swiping at Oracle and Microsoft any more than a person who is being picked on isn't bullying if he says "it's not fair".

As for negativity, it's not only here to stay, it is actually beneficial in some cases. Some companies add restrictions to their EULAs that state you are forbidden to comparing their product to others (e.g. via benchmarking). I'm sorry, it might be "negative" to say one product is better than another, but it's irrelevant. People want the best value for their money and not just "a good enough deal".

Imagine how poor the Linux kernel quality would be if Linus was too worried about offending contributors? Imagine where free software would be if Stallman wasn't so negative on even the hint of proprietary software?

Own fault, idiot.

[seebs]

A guy whose company uses stack ranking is not in a position to complain about non-cooperative behavior.

Profit is not required for Excellence

[mx b]

Excellence is very alive and well. Even she said it, "become the best person you can possibly be". I think most people especially of the younger crowd want to seek out ways to learn more and better themselves. Learn more, improve your skills and abilities, and be the best you can be.

The difference on "profit motivation" is money for money's sake is perhaps beginning to disappear from the younger generation. It is more widely recognized that wealth alone does not make everything great, for: what purpose is money if you never get to enjoy it? I for one (and many of my peers would agree) would prefer a smaller check (that is enough to pay bills and save for retirement, of course) and enjoy my hobbies and life with wife and family (or even spend some of that excess time learning more things for the job! always interesting things to learn), than to take a well-paying job that requires 60-80 hrs of work per week with few vacation days. If I am always at work and stressed, what good is the money?

I hope society settles on a nice work-life balance very soon. I personally believe we are started on that path, and the conversation is beginning to be had (as evidenced by this thread).

Millenials are Learning To Fix Mistakes

[Anonymous Coward]

At least the Millenials care about their fellow humans. The amount of hatred of the poor, distrust of anyone with a different viewpoint, and lack of empathy from the older generations is frankly sickening to me. It's like a whole generation of sociopaths hell-bent on getting their share of the wealth and enjoying their own retirement with all their needs taken care of, and fuck everyone else.

No one likes to live with the parents. When you add up skyrocketing cost of rent, skyrocketing college bills (which we trusted older people to give good advice! What was the advice? "Go to college", great help that was), the practical requirement of owning a car to work due to larger and larger cuts on public transportation which adds yet ANOTHER loan, and a minimum wage with declining buying power because of inflationary policies created to tackle financial problems created by our parents and grandparents, I can't help but feel like the youth are actually very BRAVE, HARD WORKERS for tackling that problem and trying to make it work. Entry level jobs pay like shit, and demand waaay more than a 40 hr work week. I know, I have been interviewing and taking jobs lately.

More of our money is taken out for taxes. You know what the majority of my taxes are? Social security, medicare, to fund programs that the older generations didn't take seriously and let politicians raid. And so now, instead of having money to save for a home, ALL OF MY MONEY is going to pay loans that the older generations TOLD US WE HAD TO TAKE OUT (every parent, every educator, insisted we must go to college! even if expensive, it will get paid back easily!... without telling us that the laws on student loans were changed and it actually doesn't work that way anymore), and pay for the retirement of older people that BLEW THEIR OWN RETIREMENT (or at the least, invested poorly in the stock market and lost it all due to lack of financial oversight).

Now, I believe everyone should live comfortably, and I am perfectly happy to have my taxes go to pay for your retirement and health care (unless you are lucky enough to have pension -- which great, but understand that it pretty much does not exist anymore, the young will not get pensions or good retirement plans, companies are trying to give us the worst deal possible to pad their bottom line). What angers me is when I am trying my best to provide for my family and help my nation, people like you come along calling us self-centered fools that will destroy the country.

The country is circling the drain right now because of policies implemented 10,20,30 years ago. It was not the young, it was YOU AND YOUR GENERATION. Now shut up and help, or at least have the decency to admit that the policies of past generations have failed and it is time to move on, try new things, and get our country moving again.

Check your naivete.

[stoploss]

the USA ... still willing to kill people over access to natural resources

No, the USA is not.

Here's one proof to the contrary: we were willing to overthrow a democratically-elected government merely to ensure our access to cheap bananas.

1954 Guatemalan coup d'état

Bananas, Mandrake? Children's Chiquita bananas?

So: planning to move the goalposts now?