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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.
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.
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
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
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.
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?!!!
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.