Slashdot Mirror
The Fall and Rise of Larry Page
schnell (163007) writes "Slate has a long, detailed story about how Larry Page founded Google, how he struggled with its growth, and ultimately how he came back to reinvigorate it. The story recounts fascinating details about Page's relationship to Sergey Brin, the combative culture Page fostered in the company's early years, his resistance to having engineers managed by non-engineers, the company's struggle through its rapid growth, and how Page once even wanted to hire Steve Jobs as Google's CEO."
Here's the original.
Besides all the fallacy-ridden trash Slate publishes, it's started spamming my Facebook-unique email address recently (I once clicked 'like' on an article there, apparently, before I knew to block all those trackers) so I try to avoid it now. Wasn't paying attention to the hover, so Slashdot got me. :/
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Spoiler alert: the article basically spends most of its time saying "Larry Page is a genius, and like many geniuses, is socially awkward." Wow. How ground-breaking.
That said, I did find it interesting enough to keep reading it.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
An engineer is someone who Google would employ, because Google only employs engineers, duh.
My imagination is struggling to fathom a timeline where Steve Jobs became CEO of Google. Anyone care to hazard a guess?
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
They're designing browser engines and search engines. So, logically, they're engineers!
Ezekiel 23:20
How the darkness spread through the heart of Google, infesting its ethos of "Don't be Evil" with its corruption and engendering a perverse desire to force Google Plus on all.
My guess was "succeeding is easy if you can throw money about".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Microsoft.
Microsoft.
Excellent example. Let's also not forget Ampex, Palm, VisiCalc ... Oh wait, most people have already forgotten them because someone else took their idea and made it big..
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
android (iphone is eating the dust of android phones)
google search (if you think that google was the first ever search engine, yahoo, altavista says hello to you)
facebook (myspace is still angry you know)
need more example of non-first runners winners?
Facebook, iPod, Ford Model T...
It's a lot easier to "win" if someone else has spent money and effort pruning the search tree of possible ideas before you so that you can focus on executing the ideas that have been proven to work.
My guess was "succeeding is easy if you can throw money about".
What happened to Windows 8 then?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
pagerank, adsense, gmail...that's google
everything else is a major mistake...and the world will discover it one day
here's how I know this:
1. 'just search' Larry Page wrote the original algorythm for search indexing...that's it...that's why we *all* used google over webcrawler or yahoo when it came out...it was *just search*
2. Brin's relationship with current Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer. She was his girlfriend and spent millions of Google's money to justify her existence, then she hired her own PR team to get her a new bigger job...she didn't do *shit*...her title was "main page designer"...are you laughing? do you remember google.com's main page for about a decade? yeah just a logo, search field and two buttons
3. Glass, Google+, Google Wave, and maps redesign...it's clear now that Google has no idea how to make new products people want to use...and when they **do** Forrest Gump their way into a cool new thing (Wave) they cancel the project
4. this quotation from TFA:
why??? b/c of...idk...it's the most egregious copyright violation in computing....even bigger than a service like Napster
Page is a good engineer...Brin is an airhead....they stopped sticking to the knitting long, long ago
Thank you Dave Raggett
I want to end the notion that young tech founders need to "grow up" or find a "grey hair" to actually run their business.
It's bullshit and ruining our industry.
I'll be the *first* to admit that the techies who make the systems that define new awesome products/services are not trained or experienced in running a high finance business...that's well known
The dispute comes in the **fix** for the above problem.
Hiring some dipshit as a figurehead for investors...that addresses absolutely **none** of the **original problems**
When tech companies need to hire businesspeople, they need to hire businesspeople that are as innovative and progressive as the engineers, not someone to "hold them back"
What happens instead is that a new, user-centered company becomes spoiled by typical US MBA-type heirarchal capital hogging, data selling, evil corporation.
There is a 3rd way! Just say "no"!
Thank you Dave Raggett
There's plenty of non firsts who succeeded
iPhone, macbook, iPad, iPod iMac. Are you noticing a pattern here?
"... Eric Schmidt, an experienced industry professional..."
Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Novell, a VERY badly managed company. He was experienced in knowing little about what he was doing.
The entire Business Insider article is, in my opinion, obviously written by someone with little or no understanding of technology, a writer who doesn't have much depth of understanding about what really happened.
Yeah, just look at where AltaVista is now.
"... before I knew to block all those trackers..."
Ghostery for Firefox.
Ghostery for Chrome.
Google is on the way down, sadly. Part of the URL for Ghostery for Chrome is: mlomiejdfkolichcflejclcbmpeaniij
This Slashdot story is about Google, but the linked story only gives "facts" that are apparent on the surface. Below the surface, Google is going the way of Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild Semiconductor, and Tektronix: Slow and sometimes fast degradation. Yes, I feel I am qualified to make that statement.
I would have called such people "Programmers" but that's just me.
Mod parent up to +10. A CEO of a technological company should have technical knowledge.
Not like Steve Ballmer, fired from Microsoft. (The paragraphs about Steve Ballmer link to a BusinessWeek magazine cover that calls Mr. Ballmer "Monkey Boy", an article that says he was the "worst CEO", and an article about Ballmer's "temper tantrums".)
Not like Paul Otellini, fired from Intel. Quote from that Wikipedia article: "Otellini was considered a departure from the norm when he was promoted to CEO because he was not formally trained as an engineer."
Bah! To me, any person with a CS degree is more like an applied mathematician of the more practical variety. And some of them happen to program, just like some poets also happen to write. :-)
Ezekiel 23:20
Hiring some dipshit as a figurehead for investors...that addresses absolutely **none** of the **original problems**
It does if the only "original problem" was that the investors wanted a dipshit figurehead, and you wanted their money.
being 2nd is usually better. you can copy what works, throw out what doesn't -- and still be new enough to grow the market yourself.
Contrary to what all journalists think, the first major internet search indexer was not Google but AltaVista, circa 1995. It was written by just three people at DEC. The goal was not to sell advertising, nor even to make money. The goal was to show off their new Alpha servers that were so powerful that they could index the entire web (which was tiny at the time).
In the early days the web was small, there were no spamers, and things like Meta tags could be depended on. PageRank only became useful when the web grew. It is sensible, but is exactly what academics have used to rank papers for centuries -- citation citations citations... It is also an old idea from the hypertext community.
So the question is, how did Google succeed as a start up several years later? I would have written off their business plan as hopless. Internet search is an obvious thing to do, it has already been done, and if anyone will compete with AltaVista it will be the big boys throwing money at it. Yahoo, Microsoft etc.
But I would obviously have been wrong. Partly the reason is that Google back then was not run by MBAs. They did not try to extract as much advertising out of the search engine as possible. Nor full of flashing banner ads. Main search results relatively untainted by advertising. But it is still weird.
Weirder is the success of Android. There were giants like Nokia with decades of experience and bucket loads of cash. How could Apple and then a nothing company like Android blow them away?!!!
yeah I got those switched but the concept of making poor life decisions (dating a B1tc4) and then costing your company millions and infinite headaches to keep her happy
also: Google Maps is an awesome product I use virtually every day...forgot to list that in their "win" file
Thank you Dave Raggett
Just want to make a correction: Google Maps is pretty awesome and I use it everyday
their re-design of Maps is textbook bad design though! removing and hiding features under memory-intensive animation you have to click to see
Thank you Dave Raggett
Not to mention google. There were plenty of pre-google web search engines.
If you just s/Android/Google+/g the tone of that whole piece goes from being a hagiography to a funeral dirge.
There was also the mere fact that Google's search engine was shockingly fast compared to the alternatives at the time and returned much more relevant content. You didn't want to use any other search engine and wait, wait, wait for dubious, and mostly garbage responses. Generally speaking, it made other search engines of the time irrelevant.
Boeing wasn't first. The Comet's string of catastrophic decompression accidents due to then-unknown fuselage micro fractures overcame its "first"ness and allowed the 707 and its descendents to capture the industry for decades.
I think Google succeeded because Altavista threw away their lead in search to become one of those trendy but useless "portal" sites. Google's search page had the clean simplicity of what had been Altavista prior to then. Even today, the main Google page is pretty clean, with the other stuff kept fairly unobtrusive.
There was Webcrawler before Altavista too, but it was never very good (but better than nothing). Altavista was heads and shoulders above it when it came out.
Though one could say that Apple was the first to bring the GUI to the general public. Xerox had the GUI first but they didn't have an interest in taking it to the general public. I played around with one of their systems and they had all the hooks there to make it a success if they brought the cost down and tried to sell it to more people but for some reason they kept coming up with great ideas but not wanting to take it to the world.