Slightly more organized info in the intro bullets.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the CEO and President, respectively, of Alphabet, have decided to leave these roles. They will continue their involvement as co-founders, shareholders and members of Alphabet’s Board of Directors.
In a way this seems like an admission of the failure of the "Alphabet" thing. The idea behind that originally was that all of these other projects were going to become so significant that it wouldn't make sense to have them or their management coupled with Google.
But a half-decade later, it's still 99.9% Google, so just double-up the Google guy to lead both tiers. Same as it ever was.
> The idea behind that originally was that all of these other projects were going to become so significant that it wouldn't make sense to have them or their management coupled with Google.
No, the idea was that they were high risk speculative efforts and that it didn't make sense to have their branding mixed up with Google, which is a stable, established industry leader.
That's a semantic distinction. All major corporations have highly speculative projects that they aren't certain will succeed. With (relatively) minor investments most don't form an umbrella corporation to distinguish them.
In this case, I dont see anything else coming out of non-Google alphabet of meaningful significance, and this org change kind of highlights that.
In my personal opinion, the Google founders probably still DO have some radical plans, but I bet with the increased scrutiny in Congress and abroad they are thinking the Google vrand is more of a liability than an asset.
No, separating branding and separating management are substantively different ideas, not a matter of semantics.
> All major corporations have highly speculative projects that they aren't certain will succeed. With (relatively) minor investments most don't form an umbrella corporation to distinguish them.
That doesn't support your argument that it's a semantic distinction, it instead seems to be an unrelated argument with some implicit premises that argues that most corporations wouldn't have done what Google did to separate Alphabet in similar circumstances, which may or may not be true but is irrelevant to what the point was of Google doing it.
Don’t the companies now also give different financial reporting? Alphabets companies have wildly different expected growths and margins expected. It totally makes sense to be clear with investors that Google’s margins aren’t suffering, Alphabet is just investing upfront capital in Verily or Fiber
In the past major corporations used to launch speculative research projects and risky ventures, but that rarely happens any more. All the resources are being shifted to stock buybacks, everything else is a secondary priority.
Some companies like Chevron and Texas Instruments have even committed in writing to "returning 100% of all cash flow in perpetuity" to buybacks and dividends. So yes, they have legal contracts saying they won't agree to invest in future growth or investments or research no matter how much money they make, they are so committed to this buyback first model.
Google is a true leader in the buyback wars, they were the first company to commit to $25B in buybacks per quarter, which used to be a shockingly large number for these programs. Lots of other companies have followed that pattern since.
I'm a subscriber, mostly because of YouTube Music. I wanted a music platform where I get push notifications of new music by artists I follow. This feature is broken in Spotify and they have no plans to fix (their words). It seems like a simple enough request, but it turns out this feature is also not available and/or broken in YouTube Music. I keep the subscription SOLELY to watch YouTube ad-free now, and for that it is awesome; but I'm considering switching to another music platform. It's hard for me to cancel my subscription to YouTube though because removing all the ads from YouTube is the only thing that makes it actually useful as a platform.
If you love YouTube and hate advertising, then Premium is a very easy decision to make. I'm more than happy to pay Google $12 a month so I can have an ad-free experience on my TV, iPad, phone, and computer.
I have both Netflix and HBO-Now as well, but I'm thinking about canceling them, as 90% of my viewing time is spent on YouTube.
One really nice thing about YouTube is that you can download your favorite programs there with "youtube-dl". I don't know if that works for the premium stuff though (I doubt it). So if you want to download, for instance, all the Rick Steves episodes and then watch them on your plane flight (where you don't have free internet access, or someplace else where the service isn't fast enough to watch YT), it's easy to do, and impossible with those other services.
The original reason was that smart people like career progression. Money alone isn't enough to keep them - they want something good on their business cards. Otherwise some will leave to become CEO of another company.
By making a group of companies, you can have many CEO's, more directors, more VP's, etc. and therefore keep hold of more smart people who are after external recognition more than money.
I doubt Einstein cared what was on his business card, but I'm sure he cared very much about being in the right career position to do the work that interested him, and to have the ability to influence his work and others.
I dont want to nitpick, but some of his most influential work - dubbed the "annus mirabilis" papers / "amazing year" [0] - was done while he was an assistant examiner at the patent office in Bern. Definitely not a position he was aiming for, but still, a highly productive time.
Typically job titles as noted in that post accompany some varying level of responsibility and leadership. If this is simply about what title is on your card then OK, sure. But in my experience, many (not all) are seeking the autonomy and influence behind those titles. Einstein had titles too, but it was the influence and work behind those titles he wanted. It's the same for many "careerists", a term I do not like.
I think you're losing sight of the original argument I was responding to: that a main reason for spinning off bits of Google as separate Alphabet subsidiaries was to allow job title inflation for the same role.
There's only one CEO per company, so if you want more CEOs you need more companies. Being CEO of Waymo probably isn't that different from being Manager of the Autonomous Cars Division or whatever, but it sounds more impressive.
But you forget that to Patrick Bateman the (so called) greater good and broad knowledge expansion or other humanity-propelling criteria weren't nearly as relevant as the question if Patrick Bateman appeared successful.
The image of Patrick Bateman was more important to Patrick Bateman than Einstein or his accomplishments.
It is, but most people are at least slightly narcissistic. Most people get at least a little bit of validation & happiness from obtaining a "better" job title. Also, it's not really just the plain title itself, but the trust the company has in you that it represents. Being able to say to somebody, "I'm VP of ____" gives you some cachet in today's middle/upper-middle class.
Sure, there are also people who couldn't care less what their title is, but I can't help but feel that most people would find the possibility of a 'better' title at least moderately motivating.
Titles are a currency in some parts of society. I am strongly anti-title and also pretty strongly anti-celebrity but I think it’s important to recognize that these things both have value to most of the people around you.
I think the reason they went for this is so that the sub-companies would not be at risk if Google (the search engine / advertising giant) had a problem.
I don't think it was mostly motivated by management separation, as much as it was desire to break out revenue and expenses by unit. And this is unchanged.
You're conflating a lot of things here. GOOG class A versus C (GOOG vs GOOGL) dates to a 2014 restructuring of ownership, whereas the Alphabet reorg was in 2015.
Can you break out revenue in a single company? Sure. But you can also easily do it with the structure Alphabet adopted. And, this structure also lends itself to easier valuations of entire units, useful if acquisition of a unit is something being considered.
> The idea behind that originally was that all of these other projects were going to become so significant that it wouldn't make sense to have them or their management coupled with Google.
This isn't entirely true. A major consideration was fear of anti-trust litigation. If all of these are the same company/orgs/departments, then you could reasonably say that this "search company" is far too powerful. If there's a search company and a youtube company and a self-driving car company (etc.) then you can make a (specious) argument that you're not vertically and horizontally a monopoly.
keeping it as separate entities meant that useful data could not be shared. Under one org, more data can be safely shared while respecting user privacy.
Google might not respect the desire for an open internet without ads and no single large player.
But i believe they fully respect their users privacy, comply with most of the law around privacy already, and have the strong desire to fully comply with it in the future.
Maybe I'm naive that way. But painting them as not respecting privacy at all is a bit blunt and not nuanced enough.
Saying "they fully respect their users privacy" is also blunt and not nuanced.
They are a huge company with thousands of teams pursuing their own agendas and made up of people of varying degree of scruples and viewpoints with regards to privacy.
I've worked for large companies that handle sensitive user data, and they all have at least some teams of people trying to figure out how they can respect the letter of privacy laws just enough, while ignoring the spirit of those laws, in order to profit from the personal data they hold, regardless of the potential side effects or long-term impact on the data subject.
What i meant was that i believe they try to follow the law around privacy. The law might not be "good enough", but that's in us not them (modulo the lobbying).
I'm not trying to say larger companies are innocent. Saying they don't respect privacy insinuates to me that they intentionally violate the law, and i don't think that that's true.
If you only base good/bad actions around the law (which I understand is really the only _real_ reference point we have), then that's part of the problem.
Technology moves faster than the law, we all know this.. What we need are ethical companies who not only respect the law but also respect the data owners.
We need a company with a motto like "don't be evil" or something like that.. if only, right? ;-)
Compliance with privacy law is not a good indicator of respect for users' privacy when you're in a position to nudge privacy legislation to limit its impact on you.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but there certainly is evidence out there that suggests Google in fact does respect user privacy. For example, activity.google.com. They are also pretty up front about their privacy policy, how they use cookies, data retention policy, and so forth on policies.google.com. There is a lot of information there.
There's a case to be made that Google is trying to do the right thing.
I don't understand how being under Google vs being under Alphabet changes that.
They're still fundamentally one org sharing data with itself. If anything, I would think the company segregation would make it more complicated and difficult, wrt logistics, legality, and internal politics.
Lack of any obvious vision or ideas: a safe pair of hands. The similarities are there, and not just Sundar/Ballmer but Sundar/Ballmer/Cook. It seems visionary CEOs like to appoint non-visionary successors. Someone who won't make big changes to their baby.
This is often inherent in the organizational structure of big companies. To the extent that there are visionaries in a big company, they're usually not anywhere on the executive team, or even anywhere that the CEO comes in direct contact with. If they were, they'd clash with the CEO's vision, which first of all would be confusing and inefficient for the organization and second is a power contest the CEO would win. So if the board wants to appoint a visionary from within, they usually need to reach several levels down in the org hierarchy, to someone who's run an innovative division semi-independently but been protected from overall company politics. If they elevate this person to CEO, everyone above them in the org chart will quit, as they've now been passed over for the top job.
It's not an admission of failure. Two businessmen created one of the most successful, influencial businesses ever and are passing the torch. They're rich AF and probably want to retire.
He's talking about the decision to make the Alphabet conglomerate, not Sergey and Larry. Obviously no one disputes the two of them are extremely successful.
They probably understood that the game is rigged in their favor and no matter who is leading the company, they will be just fine anyway. Also, playing a rigged game gets boring after a while.
I don't know man. Doesn't that sound a little bit suspicious? If you were to create Google why would you just peace out? Look at Bill Gates. He still wants to do things but the google founders are all MIA. How do guys like that just lose all ambition and disappear?
I don't know their lives. Maybe they will do stuff like Bill Gates. All I know is that if I were them, I'd have stepped down long ago. Either way they achieved great success and are leaving on a high. I don't know how anyone can interpret it differently.
If I had created Google I would have peaced out looooong ago.
Sure, I wouldn't disappear completely, but I'd work on low-stress things where I have a lot of free time and don't have so much responsibility under me.
I'm looking at early retirement in the next year or two. I'm certainly not anywhere near as financially successful as Brin or Page or Pichai, and I doubt I've put in as much stressful work as they have, but I've done ok for myself, and I'm looking forward to doing literally anything I want with my time, without having to answer to anyone, whether it's a boss, investors, or board of directors.
I guess only time will tell how much I like this arrangement, but I'm pretty optimistic about it, and am tired of hearing the usual "oh but you'll be bored and want to work again" tropes. There's a lot more to life than work...
Perhaps they didn't envisage it turning into a giant surveillance and advertising machine. I doubt that is what they imagined when they started on their PhD's.
Are you proposing that Larry and Sergey are starting a secret society of billionaires who are withdrawing their genius contributions from society as a protest against government regulations?
If Larry and Sergey were the kind of people that were quitting and disappearing in the book, they would not quit, but instead try to sneakily dismantle Google from within, like d'Anconia in the book. :)
Even if your observation is correct, it's not a bad thing. A failed experiment is hardly a failure. I doubt the legal border between Alphabet and Google won't prove useful in the future.
I am both cautious enough of Google that I've started avoiding using some of their products, and still have an opinion on how they should organize themselves that has very little to do with those feelings.
I was sort of hoping Alphabet would be a spot they could stick all of the projects that aren't going to make a billion a year. I think it still makes sense to maintain projects that 'only' clear $20+ million a year in another division. That would cover a lot of projects that are getting cancelled and causing them serious PR problems (like accusations of being a group of spoiled man-children who can't be relied upon to stick with anything for longer than four years).
Basically there's a lot of space to make money and products that they won't touch, and I don't think it has anything to do with Wall Street. It's just an artificial limitation they've imposed upon themselves.
Anybody inventing AGI would be a big deal, but (1) don't hold your breath and (2) it could just as easily be a negative for Google and for the rest of us.
And their core goal of truly autonomous vehicles is a technical challenge that at this point seems like it will take at least several years more than what they originally thought 3 years ago. Their situation is not similar to FB in 2008 at all.
Even if they overcome this the bigger question is whether the market opportunity is worth the R&D costs, and whether or not bulky self driving vehicles are the best and most lucrative solution to mass transit.
Speaking of market opportunity, are there SDVs being tested in outside of California and Arizona? The rest of the US gets its fair share of rain, snow, and ice. Even if the Bay Area can manage self-driving cars, when would we expect a rollout in places like Minneapolis or Boston?
Yes, there are. Off the top of my head, in the US:
Las Vegas (Aptiv), Pittsburgh (Aptiv, Aurora, Ford, Uber ATG), Dearborn MI (Ford), Miami (Ford), Washington (Ford). There's also a retirement community in Florida that Voyage is testing in.
That seems like a huge problem. Even places with idyllic weather like California can have bad days. I'm skeptical of anything purporting to be a revolution in transportation when it will largely limited to a few select areas and is prone to catastrophic failure based on something as common as snow or rain.
Because of the elevation of parts of CA & AZ, it's absolutely possible to encounter snow and ice (and even whiteout conditions on interstate highways!) in those states, if you make the effort to find it. A smart testing team would make the effort to head for the mountains when the forecast calls for wintery weather.
Even if the answer there is "never", so what? Do we really need to set the bar at "replace all vehicles everywhere in all situations" for it to be a success?
It becomes much harder to justify buying a self-driving car if there are many parts of the country where I can't drive it. Even a mid-tier sedan can be driven all the way up the west coast from southern california to Seattle as long as you have chains and wait for the pass to be open. Waymo's cars are designed to not even have steering wheels, last time I checked...
Most likely due to Waymo being not designed for personal consumer use... but I’d also say they are pretty detached from having to deal with real societal problems.
Self driving cars is indeed a cool technical problem to solve if you asked an engineer, but if you asked society what it needed I doubt self driving cars would be the answer.
I don't think it was a failure at all. It was a hedge against slowing ad revenue growth. They didn't want the billions they spend on moonshots dirtying the books of the ad business. This was specifically to keep the stock price moving up and up. I think they should find someone new to be CEO of Alphabet so they can focus on the non ad business companies.
Plus they got to change the name that appears in investment portfolios, and take the opportunity to appear at the top, since they are almost always alphabetically ordered, and at the very least they would be appear above Amazon since l comes before m, and also above Apple.
not that I know anything but it seems like the decision was complex both to create the Alphabet and now to kind of merge it under one CEO.
I think some of the reasons could be they no longer see a risk of anti Monopoly regulation targeting them so they don't need to keep everything so divided. they genuinely want to give Sundar a go. They need a process to gradually fade out The original founders, but also importantly ensure those founders isolate their risk from any future missteps the companies take, and vice versa.
maybe the two co-founders were simply getting in the way.
Anyone who thinks Google is a failure should reconsider. They have had their share of bad decisions, but nothing has yet challenged their dominance. They keep spreading to other areas of tech. They may not dominate the AlphaBets, but they sure attract attention and investment.
I don't know any other company that people love to hate. A large number of those will flee Google in droves when/if a viable alternative presents itself. Their lock-in on email and dominance in search may be enough of a moat to last forever but if your users (paying and free) hate you then you are on borrowed time.
Facebook too. I hate both with a similar passion. But I'm in tech and thanks to HN I have a vague idea how the sausage is made. Do regular users share our dislike of these companies? If not, which is what I suspect, this fleeing will be mostly nonexistent.
I think generally, people do hate both, though neither as much as Twitter.
Personally I feel most strongly about Google, because I really believed the marketing back in the day. Took me a long time to get disillusioned, and when I did I felt all the worse for having been a supporter for so long.
Why would anyone hate Twitter? I mean, I don't care for it either, but it doesn't really affect me because I simply don't use it. I don't have an account, and really don't pay attention to it, except for all the "tweets" from Trump in the news.
Facebook is different. It's pretty hard to avoid using Facebook without being an outcast in a way, if all your friends and family are on there and they use it to communicate, schedule events, etc. There's also Facebook Marketplace which seems to have taken over for Craigslist for selling stuff locally. I'm one of those people who has an account there, but never actually posts anything, but I keep it because I have a few people who insist on using it to communicate; I've met lots of people like this.
Twitter just isn't like this at all. I think it's dumb, but it's easy to ignore.
I'm curious what their continued involvement will look like.
For a while after Bill Gates stepped down as CEO, there was this awkward tension where Steve Balmer was CEO, but people still treated Bill like he was the one in control -- because he was.
> I'm curious what their continued involvement will look like.
Page and Brin, combined, are currently the majority shareholders of alphabet. Each controls 27% of the voting power ( 54% combined ). They are still in charge. They just won't be involved in the day-to-day operation of the company. Sundar will still report to Page/Brin and the board of directors.
Isn't the more appropriate response to respond to the comment rather than downvote it? It doesn't seem to be a personal attack, or some other violation of the community guidelines.
I'm not a moderator, but IMO, it was absolutely a violation of community guidelines. It was incredibly snarky, flamebaity, and was obviously written to start a political battle.
The fact that it got flagged shows I'm definitely not alone in this thinking.
I suppose it did push some readers' buttons, thus ipso facto is flamebait whether or not that was the intent. I did not find it snarky (hyperbole is not snark), and it seemed to me its intent was to explain the situation as the author saw it. Of course, now that it's flagged I can't even re read it to check if my initial impression was off.
I wasn't one of your downvoters. (As you may know, you can't downvote a direct reply to your own comment.) But I think I know why your comment was downvoted.
greesil wrote: "now that it's flagged I can't even re read it"
I replied: "You can read flagged/dead comments by turning on 'showdead' on your profile/settings page."
You then replied: "False: you can't if you're browsing the site anonymously."
Now ask yourself, who was the "you" I addressed in my comment? Obviously greesil, and by extension other logged-in users like yourself.
I wasn't talking to, or talking about, anonymous readers. I never said they could read dead comments. They don't have profile pages! The discussion had nothing to do with anonymous readers until you brought them up out of the blue and incorrectly called my comment "false".
I thought comments downvoting or flagging was based on the content, not on grammar.
Anyway, I had to login with my phone to comment and read the dead comment, at work I go through a corporate firewall that strips all the unnecessary headers, so I can't stay logged in on HN and I can't read dead comments.
So maybe that you should have been an "I".
I'm not an anonymous reader, but during the day I'm forced to be one.
BTW anonymous readers are probably not an irrelevant number, they still are users and they still count.
Your answer was not entirely wrong, but it was incomplete, hence not true or false.
Don't take it personally.
It's like assuming that everybody speaks a perfect English, it's false.
Not even native English speakers are immune to errors.
I disagree, despite how much the hyperbolic posts I see on this site annoy me.
Assuming good faith, hyperbole is at worst intellectually lazy. It is, however, sometimes a useful rhetorical device.
Snark, on the other hand, is directly disrespectful of the content it is replying to. This signals that the snarker is not going to discuss the subject in good faith and disincentivizes further discussion.
I'm just giving you the straight dope on a few aspects of the organizational disaster that is google. The fact that you think it's incredible etc just shows what a basket case this company is.
But this article isn't evidence of Google having a liberal orthodoxy. It supports instead the claim that Google is a politically charged workplace, and that diversity advocates working at Google were facing harassment.
“cofounder” isn't “what you're doing now”; it's “what you did 20 years ago” but it's important because people put weight on what the founders say and think. “[large] shareholder” is sort of a role, and often goes together with “member of the board”.
Bill Gates is probably a good example to look to. He also stayed on the board (as chair) and remained a large shareholder, and was looked up to as the cofounder. So I'd imagine “like Bill Gates but with less active interest and involvement”.
The difference here is that Page and Brin have always been willing to give up the CEO seat i.e. day to day operations.
They're 100% still in control of direction and people will always treat them as the boss (esp voting power), but the dynamic will not have nearly as much friction.
I would assume nobody. Unless it's explicitly stated in the Alphabet corporate charter, there's nothing that requires them to have an employee with the title President, or any employee with any particular title at all.
Weirdly this feels like a non-issue. Google has not felt like it has a "personality" for some time - maybe it's a function of hitting mega-corporate size, but it also feels a bit like when Microsoft (a Computer on every Desktop) essentially achieved its goal, it then spent a decade in "goalless and soulless exploitation" mode - something that one suspects is the next step for the worlds largest personality-free platform.
If the two of them leave (have fun sipping pina coladas on the beach!) I am not sure (from the outside) what difference will be made. This may sound like great corporate succession planning - but I feel without a goal there will be little to stop business plans that boil down to "squeeze every dollar from everyone everywhere"
(Was there a glimmer of light in "unbiased free information to all" - is that a mission for the new decade?)
Edit: Just to emphasise - I hope they have fun spending their billions.
That page is awful with a hood that keeps flapping around up and down and text that is trying to be true to italics for quotes instead of lots of diacritics and ends up looking badly diseased. Then the letter sidesteps into a memo, which is equally odd and awkward. It's all a bit odd.
S and B (in my very opinionated ... opinion) did create a great thing in Google. I can't fault people trying to make a living and running with the ball to the point where the playing field is not just paved with gold but it nearly redefines what the concept of gold is.
I think they should have retired before "do no evil" was ditched. That would have cemented their status as internet demi-gods. Instead I think their legacy will be
LOL. I agree with a lot of your points but this one really hit home. On this one, the spying, I always wondered how odd or awkward it had to be internally to push new methods, techniques, or initiatives for "improving user experience" (I.e., spying). I interviewed for some Technical Solutions Engineer role at Google a long time ago. I really wanted the job but when asked a couple questions about how I'd technically achieve some goal related to spying on users and I always found myself hesitating, looking at the interviewer, and thinking, "is it ethically okay if I say this?" I can't imagine how the work environment transitioned at Google over the years from "do no evil" to actively fostering spying on users. I have to imagine it happened because there were few if any laws around user privacy while Google was up and coming. But I know Google has good internal controls for privacy, but I have to imagine there were many unethical or borderline conversations in the name of better spying on users data. I'm still trying to get away from Gmail because I know everything I send/receive is parses but the struggle is real. This is in addition to Chrome and an Android phone, not to mention Google search results. What's the risk of all this spying? In sum, what is at risk is the loss of free will. People who don't care because "they have nothing to hide" cannot see the forest for the trees. Then again, I need to make some changes myself. As an ancient Chinese proverb says, "To know, and not to do, is in fact not to know."
>I'm still trying to get away from Gmail because I know everything I send/receive is parses but the struggle is real.
There's the spying, but then there are also the numerous instances where Google simply terminated someone's account for completely random reasons that their automated system picked up. And you literally cannot ever get a human to talk to you at that company unless you manage to create a social media circus. Just semi-recently a bunch of people got permanently banned (that includes gmail, gdrive, everything) because they spammed emotes on a YouTube stream (something that is fairly commonplace on Twitch, at most you'll get a small timeout on that stream). I think most of them got unbanned eventually, but it took like a week and the streamer trying to raise awareness on social media. If something like this happens to you and you're alone, your account is just dust.
Using gmail or google drive isn't just giving Google your data to look at, it also means that everything you don't have a local backup for might be completely inaccessible to you on a whim, forever.
I don't think trying to select for an ethical core really works. Ultimately, you are either going to go along with the people around you or you are going to stick to some principles that aren't shared by everybody, and in the latter case, you're going to be unsuitable for the job, because you're not running the company.
So looking for evidence of ethics in an interview is just looking for a smooth talking hypocrite, even if you think you really want to.
The one Googler I know personally and have talked to about this stuff seems to have a weird blind spot around privacy and data collection. They're super friendly and happy to discuss products and features, but any questions about keeping data on your own device, limiting data access etc. just gets a blank stare, as if the very concept of "data which Google doesn't track" is nonsensical to them.
> And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
The problem was that it was moved from near the top to being near the bottom (though it's own paragraph). Sadly there were lots of very inaccurate headlines like this:
> Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct
The problem with the phrase is that it is very relative depending on your meaning of evil. It's a shifting over time and varies by person.
At the same time it provides a good guiding principle for Google as a whole. You need to think about users in different parts of the world with different ideas of what is good and evil, and try to cater to all of them. It's a really hard problem.
That code have conduct I linked tries to explain how evil is defined and give more concrete principles to follow.
From my experience, no one tries to be evil within Google, and we try to do right by our users. But when you're dealing with products like YouTube and Search with massive amounts of user-generated data, suggesting good answers that satisfy everyone and doesn't generate news headlines is impossible. We do what we can, but when you have billion user products, some people are always going to be pissed at you.
"but when you have billion user products, some people are always going to be pissed at you"
The problem with this narrative (which has been the official line for almost 7-8 years now) is it doesn't cause exaptation or adaptation. It is good enough to hold on to, if the goal is stagnation (which is what has happened with Search - you can point at things like wolframalpha, alpha go, stackexchange, quora, wikipedia, elasticsearch etc etc and ask why if the goal was to organize the worlds info, these things failed to develop internally - Similarly with Youtube - why did they missed being netflix or twitch, how did they not become the default platform for disney). The answer is the Scale has worked against that goal. So you stagnate.
The initial goal was to scale globally. That goal was achieved. After that new goals had to be defined. That did not happen because its hard to define achievable goals at that scale. The only default goal was empire defense - i.e. hold on to scale by hook or crook. For what? Well no great answer to that has been found. Which is hinting that global scale is counter productive to innovation whether technical or moral.
Its kind of like a football team winning the game and then staying on the pitch. Not playing any new games or restarting play. Then saying but guys we won leave us alone now.
I don't blame Google. But I expect Google to lead not to react and be defensive. And to do that the narrative requires honesty.
> Which is hinting that global scale is counter productive to innovation
I'd say not Global Scale per se, but achieving own goals without further goals to work towards. I.E you've achieved everything there is to achieve, what can do you do more?
Bill Gates reinvented himself by tackling humanitarian causes. Googlers set up further missions, e.g. self driving cars or health improvement, but those seem unimpressive comparing to world dominance.
And I agree that I've never known any individual Googler to be evil, or intend to be evil (Although I've seen questionable decision making at times).
But whilst no one Googler is evil, the larger body that is "Google" has turned slightly further towards evil (In my personal definition of the word evil).
It's still nowhere near what I would consider true evil, I would probably go back to Google one day if the opportunity presents itself. But I would argue the Google I see today is less "good" than the Google I saw 5 years ago.
Individual motivation and well intent has nothing to do with the forces that drive a large corporate entity at scale.
Implementing censored search for an oppressive regime or providing research to killer drone programs is quite a different ball than "pissing off a few users".
Megacorps are only driven by one goal: growth. And Google has certainly proven that a lot is flying under the radar way on the wrong side of the good vs. evil dichtonomy.
While valid take here, I don't think it was ever meant to be taken as a literal guiding principle that needed to be written down so clearly as much as do the second thing you said, act as a guiding principle.
To me, the minuta having to be written down was a symptom of the complexity making the simplistic and guiding principle don't be evil useless, which I think mainly was caused by scale and the way the ad industry and personal data practices everywhere have evolved. No need to dig in there, but basically, I think that the fact it's still there doesn't really say much. This isn't to say the problems and scale of Google are easy, for the record. Also not impossible either of course.
Curious, in your 100% personal opinion, do you disagree that the company has more or less "deprecated" it?
> That code have conduct I linked tries to explain how evil is defined
You don't need to define evil for us. Small children know evil when they see it. People are quite capable of gleaning a person's or group of people's intent from their actions.
When you start needing to define what evil is, you've lost the debate entirely.
I saw a 4 to 5 year-old child watching the psychological equivalent of a snuff film on YouTube while his mother was working the kitchen at a warung in Ubud. "Don't be evil" means if you knew this sort of thing could happen you should've done absolutely everything you could to prevent it, or simply resigned your post at the company.
Evil to most people is obvious. But where money is concerned few "Googler" could do the right thing even if they wanted out of fear of biting the hand that feeds six-figure salaries in exchange for obstinate servitude.
It would be nice to see a focused mission from El Goog. From the outside it feels like they incubate a bunch of random semi-competing products which are arbitrarily terminated or boosted. There's a lot of talent that could be marshaled.
People find the thought of a company with a clear mission appealing but there's no clear advantage of having a mission other than maximizing financial value.
The company mission is just one of the Sillicon Valley tropes, another one is the idea of "changing the world".
Having a mission might be useful for focus and clarity in thinking but if it's taken as something more than that, it's just an artificial constraint. If you can use the company capital more effectively in a completely different market, you should do that, regardless the mission.
I feel that the mission is often constructed backwards from the products. I.e. at Google they looked at their products and came up with a broad description of the user need (organizing the world's information).
Google and it's story were inspirational! The prospect of working there .. free food.. working with fellow like minded people who were supposedly the best of the best(kids from Harvard, Stanford, etc), the 20 percent hacking time they advertised and the fact all was wrapped up in their "Do No Evil," bow made it further an inspirational place to dream to work for or with.
It's "Do No Evil," ethos/mission was important and having one & sticking to it is equally important vs. swiping it under the carpet for the sake of profits. Further it's mission was important to all the women and men they inspired to start up and to get into tech. Yet once they brushed their mission under the rug & focused on money many who they inspired became shocked to learn that many times they do 'Evil," prompting disenchantment. You can see that disenchantment with Google everyday here on Hacker News with the various negative stories and comments about Google. Something I bet if you go back more then five or six years you'd never see here.
> The company mission is just one of the Sillicon Valley tropes, another one is the idea of "changing the world".
Maybe you think of it this way because of how much its abused. At its core, I do sincerely believe (still) that Silicon Valley does represent a unique force of change in this world unlike any we've seen before.
Semiconductors and then Software: it has changed the world (for better or worse, that's another question).
Corporate missions are valuable/futile tools for filtering investors: "we may occasionally compromise between that and Total Profit, don't act all surprised if we do".
Not just digital. In the analog age, all those little "yellow pages" publishers around the world were in a similar position and got quite fat from it as well. Now that entire market is concentrated, with enormous automation benefits, at a single address in Mountain View.
Injecting Google intro the interface for brick and mortar businesses is why Maps and Android exist.
I share the sentiment that Sundar to me feels a bit like an invisible placeholder for leadership that I would argue is obviously lacking in Google lately.
There's nothing wrong with its stock price and revenue and I'm sure from that angle a lot of financial people are pretty happy with the status quo of just milking that cow perpetually. However, looking at it from the technical angle, I see a company that is asleep at the wheel and showing a distinct lack of vision, leadership, and direction across the board of its product portfolio. Perhaps a bit like MS under Balmer ramming out increasingly less popular iterations of windows and office. MS turned things around under Nadella. Google perhaps hasn't sunken far enough that it needs that kind of leadership change yet but it seems in my eyes to be going down that same path slowly.
IMHO all the money making units worth mentioning in Google have their origin in a brief period of the early 2000s perhaps up to the 2006-2008 time frame (i.e. the Android launch) when it was smaller, more creative, nimble, and definitely more capable of translating vision into execution. That includes things like google docs, hangouts, maps, photos, youtube, gmail, android, chrome, google cloud and of course the big money maker ads.
A lot of other stuff launched in the years since has simply failed to get traction or got killed early. This has actually become a meme on HN and elsewhere where people openly wonder when they will kill X at the moment of the announcement where X is a long list of stuff Google tried and failed to deliver or just walked away from despite internal and external enthusiasm (e.g Google Inbox). The list of stuff that they announced in the last decade or so that actually didn't get killed is worryingly short.
There actually is very little of significance that I can name that emerged out of Google in the recent decade that is worthy of being added to that list and only some stuff under the Alphabet umbrella that comes close (i.e. Waymo would be the main success story there that has yet to prove itself as a long term money maker).
In other words, I think of Sundar as a caretaker, not a leader. He's greasing the wheels of the money printing machine that is ads but maybe not really the best for coming up with the next big thing. Maybe now is a good moment to start looking for a real leader to replace the founders that clearly just announced their permanent retirement from the industry and any other meaningful involvement with tech (tu un-sugar coat this announcement).
"maybe not really the best for coming up with the next big thing"
But does any huge successful company that ends up having a second act really do that, go and find a visionary* to rejuvenate the company? With Nadella, wasn't it more like, Microsoft did a lot of random things, and when one of them was particularly successful, then the leader of it (cloud, Azure) rose to the top? Not that they picked him and then he decided the direction of the company.
*Jobs isn't really what I mean, because he was the original visionary, not a replacement.
I think Nadella is a clear case of MS getting lucky. They picked a leader from their own ranks that transformed the company in a few short years. Given the names that were circulating for that role at the time, I don't think they could have done better. It's current valuation would not have happened ever under Balmer. Not even close. That's why he was pushed out. MS was down a path of slow decline and now they are not. There are plenty of big tech companies that technically still exist but are shadows of their former glory. E.g. HP, Oracle, IBM to name a few. MS was on a track of joining that list of has-beens.
Google is in a much better shape than MS just a few short years ago when they replaced Balmer (certainly financially). But yet I'm calling out that now is a good moment to prevent Google from going down that path any further. Sundar is in my view simply not the type of leader Google needs to prevent that.
I think the decline of Microsoft in the mid-2000's was mainly caused by them missing the boat on the two massive shifts in computing -- from desktop software to web and mobile. Google, on the other hand, is firmly entrenched in both web and mobile. Until there is a similar shift (if there will ever be one), I don't see Google stagnating the same way that Microsoft did.
They missed that boat because of a lack of vision. They lacked viaion because of their leadership. Nadella drove through some big changes in short timespan and demonstrated a keen sense of what was important for MS. E.g. applying embrace and extend to OSS is a classic MS play that neither Ballmer nor Gates was prepared to make happen long after it was obvious it needed to be done. Enter Nadella and we now have vs code, ms github, and an actual ff-ing linux kernel that actually comes with windows 10 ready to run docker and a lot of other stuff. Also Azure is now runs mostly linux and things like sql server can run on linux. To top it off, MS is now once more exciting developers. I've not seen that level of excitement about anything they do since the mid nineties. That's leadership.
Google at the same time seems to struggle to convince developers that they need to drop their fancy languages for a bastardized and outdated thing called Dart that basically can only be explained as a ginormous not invented here syndrome combined with sunk cost fallacy. Just a minor example of things Google tries that have an obvious ticking clock in terms of them killing it in favor of something else. Also what's up with having 3 operating systems for devices and dragging out picking one out for half a decade? That's Conway's law in action right there.
Microsoft didn't miss the boat on either web or mobile, they were one of the first to both. They just fundamentally misunderstood the value proposition of each because of how successful they were with Windows on the desktop.
For the web, they thought the browser was key to the web and would be what would hold all the APIs because the browser was like the OS for the web. The most valuable thing about the web ended being the graphs and connections you can create through data rather than the browser, which is why Facebook, Google, and Amazon had the most success because of the internet.
For mobile, they released Windows Mobile in 2000 but it was just a slimmed down version of Windows on the desktop. They didn't understand that mobile required a completely new UX experience and just tried to fit what they knew (desktop UX) into mobile.
They viewed both opportunities through the lens of the desktop, which makes sense, that's what made them so successful. But because of their success, they weren't capable of looking at the opportunities with fresh eyes.
Ironically, they could find some focus by no longer being a one size fits all search engine, and instead offer different search products for different types of users, or focused on different types of information. They do to an extent with travel data, financial data, scholar, but their product just isnt great at crawling the web anymore.
They, like Apple and Microsoft, also need some consumer experience advocates, who take a step back and ask how the consumers entire experience is across the whole suite. All of them have products that are often less than the sum of their parts.
I don't think they can. No matter how smart the people working on it are there well always be a group of equally smart people on the opposite side trying to game it.
They recently acquired Fitbit so I expect we should see some brand new product developments within that category soon enough in the future. I do feel they have not participated as much within the IoT market which still has so much potential unrealized. Perhaps the market is not ripe yet without 5G availability? It's incredible that we have all these new AI and ML tools and still they don't really have a lot of meaningful impacts yet in improving our daily lives if we really think about it. The main opportunities still remain mostly unexplored.
I wouldn't expect to see a new kind of product coming out of Google. They have 0 track-record of product innovation. Their main innovation power is in the back-end, on the implementation side.
Internet search existed before Google, but they came up with a newer and much better way of implementing it. Internet email existed before Gmail, but they vastly improved the offering. The iPhone already existed, but they came up with an alternative in Android. Same story repeats with GSuite, Chrome, Chrome OS.
YouTube was sort of new, but it was an acquisition, so I don't know if it counts.
When they do have ideas for innovative products, they fail to deliver.
Waymo is a new kind of product coming out of Google, as was Chromecast, as is the so-far-successful Stadia. I'm there there are others, but those are a few I can think of off the top of my head that are delivering very well for the technical challenge they pose.
Waymo is so far unproven, but you're right, it may turn up to be a successful product.
I forgot about the Chromecast, that's a good point.
Stadia is close to being new, though there have been similar efforts for some time now. However, it is by no means successful so far, most reviews I have seen from the gaming press have seen it as impressive, but ultimately not a great way of playing games, and Microsoft's offering is likely to quickly outshine it by sheer force of games catalog.
Stadia is at best an incremental improvement to PS Now or OnLive afaik. Other companies, notably MSFT and Sony, have been developing this same stuff for years, and Nvidia even has their own version I think.
You can say the exact same things about the supposedly 'innovative' companies. Did Apple invest desktop computers? No, they copied the concept from Xerox. Same story with the iPod (Rio), the iPhone (Blackberry) and Watch (Garmin).
Sure, there are no completely innovative products. But the difference I see is this: going from a clunky, ugly, essentially business-only phone like the Blackberry to ubiquitous smart-phones is a more close to a difference in kind. Essentially, before the iPhone, most people did not believe they needed a smartphone. On the other hand, most people before Gmail did know that they need a mail provider, Gmail was 'just' a much more convenient mail provider. Most people did know they need a browser, Chrome was just much nicer. When Android rolled out, people already knew they want a smartphone, Android was cheaper and less walled-in.
A good example would be if Google's Stadia succeeds. Even though there have been attempts in the past (e.g. OnLive), the mind-share is so low that they are almost irrelevant. If Stadia gets anywhere near console-level market penetration, I would consider it an innovative product that Google created. I don't expect it to succeed, though, based on the track record.
> Essentially, before the iPhone, most people did not believe they needed a smartphone.
I think that's way overstating it. Long before iPhone people were asking for more software features out of their phones. Browsing, email, music, etc.
Even the touchscreen and the development model were things tried in the past with many attempts by various companies to make the PDA a success.
Apple did exactly what you say. They took a few ideas whose time had come, ideas that just happened to be in their wheel house from the work they did on iPod and presented them better than anyone had before.
They got sued, prevailed in court, but by then the 10 year battle sapped energy out of the project. With antitrust and other scrutiny, I doubt Google will attempt other massive forms of digitization that need it like academic journals. My personal opinion.
> Edit: Just to emphasise - I hope they have fun spending their billions.
Meh (time for my socialist side to come out) they could try and do the Bill Gates Foundation thing. Don’t be cynical — it is making some much needed positive change!
Money = Power = Responsibility (with wisdom).
Exponentially true if you are a super billionaire.
Seems like “interesting“ timing given that the Alphabet board just recently stated they’re investigating the handling of sexual misconduct by executives:
> Charlie Ayers: Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around.
Heather Cairns: And we didn’t have locks, so you can’t help it if you walk in on people if there’s no lock. Remember, we’re a bunch of twentysomethings except for me—ancient at 35, so there’s some hormones and they’re raging.
Charlie Ayers: H.R. told me that Sergey’s response to it was, “Why not? They’re my employees.” But you don’t have employees for fucking! That’s not what the job is.
I was thinking “interesting timing” given we are coming up on 2020 elections and Twitter CEO Jack announced he would be living in Africa for a portion of the year... they are washing their hands of whatever shenanigans that Google and Twitter will be up to during this election cycle.
One thing I really like about Larry Page is that it's obvious he never really wanted to be a manager. He's a real nerd at heart who likes technology. But he also realized the value of what he created and acted as a good steward for 20 years. He took the reigns when he needed to, and let others take over when the time was right. He's still one of the people I look up to most.
I strongly disagree. Alphabet is an unfocused company which seems to treat product releases as experiments that can be killed at any time without warning. There's a culture that incentivizes more experiments rather than better products.
The aimlessness is obvious in the frequent and baffling product renaming, reorganizations (like Nest joining Google), duplicated/overlapping products, and killing of acquired products.
A smart CEO knows how to focus, build on early success (rather than abandon), and tell a coherent brand story.
Yeah from my limited view when I was there as an L4, Google felt very much run by a weird network of politics and some bureaucracy. Mid-high level VPs seemed like they controlled things a lot more than real higher-ups.
I think this can be... interesting? Trying to give more power and autonomy to individual teams is nice (there were some efforts that tried explicitly to map things to some kind of free market model). Sometimes higher-ups would be like "hey we're all gonna migrate to technology X" but individual teams were like "lol nah the new thing sucks" and keep using it and nothing really ever happened. But I think that attitude also kinda opened the door for a large political/influence market. And there's not _real_ market pressures on individual teams that I think tend to keep the actual free market a little closer to ground truth.
This all reminds me of a critique I'd heard of flat organizations, which is that all groups of people are going to have power structures, and by not formalizing them, all you're doing is allowing them to opaquely evolve in strange ways on their own.
I really wish that someone could study internal Google politics and actually understand it and map it all out.
One of the first initiatives Larry undertook when he became a CEO is to "put more wood behind fewer arrows" by canceling a ton of bullshit projects that _haven't_ yet been released to the public, and some that have, as well. So if you're going to blame Larry for anything, this is not it.
I'm sure his intentions were good. It doesn't mean he followed through or succeeded.
If they canceled a "ton of bullshit projects" and still ended up with a time when Hangouts, Hangouts Chat, Hangouts Meet, Allo, Duo, Messages, and Voice are all actively used but somehow still missing important fixes/features, then he utterly failed.
No one gets credit for the things they didn't release when the things they did release are still baffling and often result in a betrayal of their loyal users.
Plus ChromeOS, chrome browser, Android, Android TV, Google TV, fuscia. They just can't seem to figure out how to own the set top box (which is obviously hard, it took Microsoft forever too and it's still too expensive, where is the $30 Xbox).
Chrome OS and Android are a worse version of ios and macos.
I don't. He's allowed Google to become many of the things he's long stated he was opposed to. Either he never had his stated values in the first place, or he's turned his back on them in later years.
There are some ongoing theory-crafting in this thread, but the real reason seems pretty simple; Larry and Sergey obviously don't want to deal with all the management and operational stuffs, but only "moonshots" like autonomous vehicles or quantum computing. Yeah, this was the whole purpose of establishing a holding company, but Alphabet has grown by 2 times (both in employee count and revenue) and probably they're now facing the similar amount of bureaucratic workload again.
Personally, I think Sundar has been a pretty good CEO and probably a better businessman for this size of organization but I'm still not sure whether this leadership change will work better for Google though. Due to Alphabet's structure, Larry and Sergey will keep majority voting stocks but they will be away from most of the details in the company. Can they still make good business decisions without such details?
> I think Sundar has been a pretty good CEO and probably a better businessman
Has he though? I get the sense that he’s really Balmering it up in that he inherited a super successful company, and didn’t do much with it except not screw up.
The two big growth areas- social and cloud- are dead or a distant and growing third.
Google hasn’t done much new or exciting through his whole term. So no new products, the 2016 election and congressional testimony debacle, randomly firing different people with no sound reasoning.
It would be neat if someone could establish a vision beyond “10% growth forever through lots of rent seeking.” Maybe a company has to go through their Ballmer to get to their Nadella.
Maybe they can somehow convince Jeff Dean to be CEO and just write an AI that generally maximizes profit.
It's in the nature of social networks that new social networks don't look like old ones. Youtube is definitely a social network, and so is Twitch, Discord, TikTok, etc. Youtube has the additional advantage of having persistent count, so I would count on Youtube lasting much longer than any other social network whose popularity changes generation to generation.
It is interesting that the part of "social network" that now defines something as a social network is really the feed. Its a neverending not-river of more. Chatrooms notwithstanding, a newsfeed a la facebook/youtube/reddit/, it's a mix of professional content and user generated. The actual messaging with each other, and sharing with each other is tangent to what they do. Social network is almost a misnomer because most of the interaction is person->ai. For a lurker who doesnt have friends, doesnt comment, and doesnt share; youtube and tumblr are closer to netflix than they are to anything "social." That grouping should be called something like an Autofeed Broadcaster, of which gmail is tangentially like, because people use it to consume mass marketing and newsletters.
Discord feels more like the odd one out because it is a realtime river, not sorted or ranked like reddit. That sort of content rearranging is what makes modern social networks different from forms and chat.
I would debate both of those are social networks. Now I will grant you that in the past I would have considered YouTube one, but today it's just content delivery with comments.
Thats exactly what the facebook newsfeed is. A streaming feed of content, posted by publishers and users alike, and through likes, shares, and comments its popularity rises and it floats its way up the algorithm. Then when it gains reach, lots of people comment on it.
I'm not sure that Sundar has been a good CEO. The constant shutdown of google services that people rely on has been troubling. The management troubles over employees lately has been troubling as well. They still own the search market, but would you worry about the lifespan of the google products you're thinking of buying?
I still have a Sony Google TV, it works great as a TV but the android OS is no longer supported, so there are no more OTA updates. It's a shame because it seems like if they had thought about it they might have wondered what happens when they no longer support the product.
There was a time when Google questioned the value of managers and managers had to prove their value to the engineers. Maybe it's time to question their value again.
Yes, Google has a chaotic culture of project incubation, which leads to over-promotion of product launches and their eventual deprecation. And this predates Sundar's tenure on CEO. I think Sundar is trying to reduce a frequency of product launches, but there's already a crazy number of product in flight or development so deprecation of certain products are inevitable IMO.
My personal prediction is that Sundar will be to Google what Ballmer was to Microsoft: He will make tons of money but will drive Google into a corner where it will be disrespected by, well, hackers (That is, people who are interested in technically open solutions, configurability, fitness of unplanned purposes, etc). But is it refreshing that Microsoft now is going back into an opposite direction.
Yeah you could say they are close to jumping the shark... it remains to be seen what former Google employees do next. If Google continues to dump money into salaries and stock then they might not have much to worry about. Personal assistants, knowledge graph, Alexa/Siri/"Ok Google" are definitely the future. Apple seems to be winning in the car but Alexa is winning at home.
Interestingly, for my family's n=1 case, we have Alexa and Google Home Mini sitting side by side and Google usually has better answers. Maybe Alexa as a standalone device has more market share, but Google has the advantage of bundling "OK Google" into every Android phone.
Google has never lived up to the "do no evil" motto but under Sundar things have only gotten much worse with no signs of getting better at any point in the future.
Sundar made a mistake in wading into politics after the 2016 elections. A good business leader knows to stay out of the forbidden topics of politics and religion; unite the troops, don't divide them. I don't think he realized how much impact his words would have on conservatives once the TGIF video got out. Anyway let's hope they learned something about remaining neutral in public, as the company "grows up".
None of the big tech companies have avoided "wading into politics" since 2016. Tech is far too big and inextricable a part of society for any competent CEO to think they could hide on the sidelines.
In fact, Tim Cook has been actively engaging with politicians (including Trump) and that is a part of his magic sauce for "maintaining a neutral stance in public".
Yes, this is the announcement that Page and Brin are stepping down.
I wouldn't really call it "incredibly subtle" - most similar announcements are wrapped in a bunch of corporate language as well. This is a pretty standard way to announce this sort of thing.
I guess I just don't believe this. Google is one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. Having both people step down like this is incredibly strange.
I mean, neither of them even tried the ol' "I'm stepping down to spend time with my family" thing.
Larry and Sergey are basically best friends. Their involvement with Google, as a pair, has been receding for quite some time. Today's announcement was foreshadowed by the creation of Alphabet Inc. as a parent company in 2015.
Details in Sergey Brin and Amanda Rosenberg: Inside the Google Co-Founder’s Romance with the Google Glass Marketing Manager | Vanity Fairhttp://archive.is/kQvuR Febr 2015
I'm not sure how long these sort of antitrust cases take to litigate (I was young during Microsoft's high profile case), but I'd say this is one of the most rational explanations as to why, seemingly out of nowhere, they'd parachute away together.
It looks like an attempt to try to distance themselves, their personal images, and their assets before it gets too ugly. I would certainly do so unless my personal financial analysts told me otherwise.
My hunch would be that they are just bailing before they get mired in something like an antitrust suit. They strike me as the type of person that enjoys the fun of a fast startup environment, and a big Co under an antitrust suit is pretty much the opposite of that. I doubt they are driven by money as much, in comparison.
> I'm not sure how long these sort of antitrust cases take to litigate
They typically take years, often over a decade. I'm talking about the entire process, not just the litigation (which is the easiest and fastest part). With Microsoft, it took 19 years from start to end.
I've seen this explanation multiple times in this thread, but I find it incredibly hard to believe Alphabet was created to shift Sergey and Larry's time away from Google. It seems like there are far easier (and cheaper) ways of accomplishing this without creating a conglomerate.
Well, what they did is install a "CEO" for the main business, so they weren't operationally involved in that part of the business anymore and focused on different side businesses. Now the crown prince takes over everything operationally and the founders move to the board ... No idea if that was the primary plan, but certainly one of the options considered back then.
That's why they can cash out at 10% per year because they cases will last a -minimum- of 5-7 years. Google has the best lawyers in the world. Definitely a slow Homer recession into the bushes.
They've made other major moves together. This is apparently part of a slow fade they've been doing at least since they started Alphabet. The reasons behind that remain mysterious.
Mysterious? I'd personally retire to enjoy my millions long before I got to the point of having billions, so I don't think there's much explanation needed about why they'd want to not have to worry or work anymore.
>Today, in 2019, if the company was a person, it would be a young adult of 21 and it would be time to leave the roost. While it has been a tremendous privilege to be deeply involved in the day-to-day management of the company for so long, we believe it’s time to assume the role of proud parents—offering advice and love, but not daily nagging!
From the outside, it feels much more like the company is hitting a midlife crisis (feeling unsettled, not as agile as they used to be) than a young adult.
Company lifespans these days are a lot shorter than human lifespans. 25-40 years seems typical, making a company-year 2-3x a human year.
By that yardstick, Google was in its young adolescence when it IPO'd (seems reasonable), was an idealistic young adult when I joined in 2009 (also reasonable), is now hitting a midlife crisis, and will die sometime around 2040.
Yep I'm down with your timeline. I joined in 2012 and it felt like a person in their late 20s or 30s in an energetic but responsible part of their career, just settling down to have kids... But before all the buying of sailboats and sports cars and treatments for baldness...
The funny thing is: If you are used to coporate speech, then immediately after you read the headline "A letter from Larry and Sergey" you know that there is a resignation coming up.
It's not subtle at all. Anyone who knows the current state of affairs (i.e. Sundar being CEO of Google) will have deduced this based on the myriad of titles on this topic alone.
Nah, anyone used to reading Google press releases knows that a subject line of, "An Update on X" always means X is being shut down, and thus, "A letter from Larry and Sergey" could mean nothing else except they're stepping down.
I remember Google's earlier days when they shutdown projects and people praised them for iterating fast, not carrying weight, etc. The only difference now is that they have more users but I think they have given enough warnings about their shutdowns, IMHO.
Now that Google Is Evil (tm), we don't seem to appreciate that behavior as much as we did in the past.
Nobody could prove that without it the web would have been a better place. You couldn’t have known what’s to come when you were raising hundreds of thousands of dollars as two students in 1998. Maybe your leadership has been one of the least evil among the possibilities in the evil world we live in.
However, we know what is it like to lose control of your company, and how it could inspire dystopian novels under your leadership now. There’re many lessons for all the entrepreneurs to take from your story.
I sincerely hope that you would prioritize the greater benefit rather than the Google’s benefit as years pass.
That is something that I kind of admire about Bill Gates: As Microsoft's boss he was ruthless, and even anti-competitive, all to benefit his own company.
But somehow, he is one of the "best type of person" that could become the richest man in our world. There are so many rich people that just look to be buried with their millions or pass it to their family.
Hopefully Sergei and Larry will try to get the same type of legacy.
So Gates is not alone. Buffet and Ellison have both pledged the vast majority of their wealth to the Gates Foundation. Somewhat unique to the US, our billionaires tends to be fairly philanthropic.
>Somewhat unique to the US, our billionaires tends to be fairly philanthropic.
slightly more philanthropic than the rest of the world which makes sense given how prosperous the US is, but overall US billionaires actually do not give much and Gates and Buffet are indeed outliers. The average billionaire donates barely more than the small fraction of a per cent annually. The average top 20 billionaire does in fact give less relatively speaking than the average American household.
Also unique to the US. We have one of the highest infant mortality rates of any developed country. And our average life expectancy is one of the lowest for a developed country [0]. We could a lot less philanthropic billionaires and more economic policies that don't treat everyone as disposable cogs.
The high infant mortality is largely explained by the fact that the US counts premature birth related deaths as part of infant mortality and other countries don't.
Drug abuse and obesity are generally a response to chronic stress. America has a chronic stress epidemic due to our work culture and lack of social safety nets. Philanthropic billionaires are people (or progeny of those) who successfully exploited this system. Ergo, the existence of one is correlated with the other, and they share a common cause.
Both, but probably more of the latter. Since the 70s the entire economy and society has been built for consumption and price optimization. That has resulted in both higher life stresses (more two income working households, most Americans have no savings, etc.) and encouraged politicians to cut safety nets which might have diminished the negative effects.
Asian Americans have a life expectancy of almost 87 years, longer than in any Asian country. Hispanic Americans have a life expectancy of almost 83 years, exceeded only by the richest Asian countries (Japan, Singapore, Macau) and Monaco and Iceland.
As an outsider looking in, many in the US seem to value charity over taxation. I can see why, though personally I'd rather send my money to those who (presumably, and hopefully) have a broad enough view of society to know where it is really needed.
The government has many means tested requirements to determine if you really need it. Most charities only take action after the fact; after you are homeless, after you got severely ill. And they rely on a visual means test. They can feed the homeless on Thanksgiving but don’t have the resources for the other 364 days.
And now imagine a society in which it would not be decided by self-proclaimed "philantropists" where societal progress is made and which basic human needs (like a roof over the head of every person, or kids having a lunch at school instead of being shamed for parents too poor to pay) are met, but instead the super rich pay their fair share in taxes and society decides democratically.
US billionaires are only philantropic because they don't want to end up either dead or stripped off of all their assets when there is any kind of revolution - no matter if a "real" revolution or an elected one, e.g. if Warren or Sanders win in 2020.
I completely agree with you. but then, I'm not from the usa and I have experienced the wonders of good social systems in Germany and in the UK.
As you put it, if there was some kind of "richness cap" (say, 1 billion) and all the rest was held as interest generator for social services and society, population wouldn't have to depend on the "goodwill" of people, but would have the basic necessities fulfilled.
Humanity will get there at some point. There is no other alternative, given population growth. But right now we humans are still quite underdeveloped as a society.
And here's the thing, the billionaires depend on the military-industrial complex and police to keep their investments safe and growing... but at the same time, they are not contributing their fair share in taxes towards that goal, which means that the lower classes have to pay for it.
It's the same problem that Europe has with its defense - we have over decades relied on the US to keep us safe, without contributing our fair share.
Same argument as letting Mark run Facebook instead of Wall Street quarterly reports. Decisive focus with longer term planning. Autocrats are often more efficient at achieving specific goals. Plus neither really need to campaign and gather votes to stay in power.
I believe one of them said they were more likely to give their fortune to someone like Musk over a traditional charitable venture.
I feel that was expressing a desire for more transformative change over fixing the individual problems we have now. Change the world so much that the problems are no longer an issue.
They could help with their money, but if they could help with their visions, social capital and network that would set them apart.
I admire Brian Acton in this respect. He regretted the decision of selling WhatsApp and publicized it. Since then he has taken on the leadership of Signal while donating money into it.
Google! What a thing to have created in this world. Hats off to Page and Brin.
After the dotcom crash, and I don’t know if there’s any real analysis to be had around this or if it’s just sentimentality, but personally there was always a sense of hope attached to Google as they brought excitement back into bleak times in the industry.
Facebook was a sort of cheerleader in that way as well, during the 2008 credit crisis, way before the world turned sour towards the Facebook brand. Who will be the great business to drag us out of the next financial / tech-industry crisis?
It's a line-item hack, the way that Hollywood studios structure films to be separate sub-corporations with their own fixed budgets.
So if a film crew, say, accidentally blows up a small town somehow, there's a firewall between the assets that were dedicated to making that one film and the entirety of, for example, Sony Pictures net worth and capital.
I'm not sure that firewall is well-tested in American law, but it's a well-used approach and I've always assumed the Google / Alphabet arrangement was for similar reasons (so that worst-case scenario on any 'bet is always "Alphabet cuts bait and shuts it down, liquidates it, and debtors go after the assets of the 'bet" without risking the performance numbers of the Google cash cow directly).
It's a line-item hack but I believe it's for a different purpose: investors are asking for more details on revenue and expenses of the various units. Splitting the monolith Google into Alphabet + stuff provides line-items along "objective" lines that are still chosen by the company.
One of the things people were anxious to see was the financials of YouTube. Guess who's not a separate "bet"?
Also allows the other Alphabet companies to have independent investors who may not want to invest in "Google" itself. Niantic is the prototype for this: it's success with Pokemon Go couldn't have happened without the partnership with, and investment by, Nintendo. It's doubtful that Nintendo would've wanted to invest directly in Google, though, and Niantic's $3B in lifetime revenue would be rounding error for Google as a whole but is still a very substantial return on Nintendo's $30M investment.
Isn't it the opposite of a line-item hack? Instead of being able to hide the losses of their other bets in the profits of their ad division, the alphabet structure gives their investors visibility into exactly how much money the non-google parts of the company are losing.
The hack is (and I can't explain why because I don't get it) a lot of investors still look at Google and only Google and don't care how much money the 'bets are losing.
This has to be a green light for TK to take Cloud and really run with it.
There's no way Sundar can give as much attention to Google and all the other bets simultaneously. Curious what side projects of Larry and Sergey get turned down now.
I see a few comments praising Sundar. As someone who doesn’t follow closely, but feels that Google has deteriorated dramatically under his watch, does someone mind explaining the reasoning for said praise?
Honestly, I'm with you on this one. Sundar seems like a good maintainer of the status quo and that's probably wise since the business keeps growing (growing revenue, growing market cap and growing free cash flow), but Google's evolution on cloud infrastructure/services and hardware are honestly kind of lame.
I mentioned those two because they seem to be their big bets now.
When compared to Satya who is thriving with Microsoft, Sundar looks mediocre at best.
I don't mean that in a bad way. Perhaps Google doesn't need to have those tectonic changes to produce value. In that case, Sundar's reserved and low-key profile makes more sense, but don't expect a high profile, exuberant and innovation-driven leadership. I think it's clear he is not that type of leader.
To be clear - I'm not criticizing this particular post or person (whoisjuan, anyways? :) ), but I think it's worth noting these little hints that outgoing and extroverted are thought to be synonymous with "good leadership" (in the US, at least)
Leadership is a skill to learn, just like programming, writing, or most other things really.
People who are introverts at heart can learn to become just as good managers as those who aren't. It may come less naturally, I couldn't say, but it's definitely possible.
I think their point is that it's a hard skill for introverts to learn because they don't enjoy it. It values things they don't care about (or usually don't). In that way, when you have an introverted manager, it's usually the bad kind.
Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO. That's the simplest reason.
Personally I think a lot of their products have gotten better recently, like the experience of using voice-controlled Google Maps in my car, and Google Cloud is superior to AWS in many ways, but the company really offers so many different product lines that it's hard for personal experience to be a great representation.
> Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO.
It’s hard for me to say that this is because of Sundar and not just because the whole market has grown size and google already had a massive moat to capture it. Apple, MS, Facebook, Amazon all have grown massively in the past 5 years.
However Google seems to continue to be a one trick pony - GCP lags behind the competition despite the fact that Google invented cloud computing. Even Apple is weaning off its iPhone revenue with its fast growing services division.
I see this meme all the time. What does GCP lag on? What is it missing?
I see a proliferation of AWS services, yes, but many seem to be replicating things that GCP has had since the start, in multiple different formats without clear direction. Bigquery covers most of the use cases of Redshift, Kineseis, Athena, EMR, and others. It is at once decoupled from and well integrated with their object storage, allowing reads and writes with clear translation when necessary. I find myself reaching for Bigquery like semantics all the time and having to cobble two or more AWS tools to get similar. I see the same pattern repeated constantly - If I click "ECS" in the Amazon Console, it wants to sell me ECS, ECR, Fargate, and EKS - All of which overlap in non-obvious ways.
Disclaimer: I'm Ex-google, and was a poweruser of dremel
I used GCP before and liked it better than AWS. The current startup I work for has a prior business relationship with AWS, and every month, it gets harder to move off to GCP. AWS gave a generous credit to the type of startup we have, and with the relationship-building from the solutions architect and account manager, this probably won't go away.
There are a lot of technical refinements in GCP that makes life a lot easier than AWS, but nothing strategically compelling enough for the cost (in cash, developer time, and burning relationships) to jump ship. So I make-do with the not-as-great technology. They are pain-points but not deal-breakers.
I think if our startup were doing AI/ML, or even heavy data processing as our core technology, there's probably enough compelling reasons to invest in a move to GCP. But it isn't.
If I were greenfielding a new launch at a new startup, I'd push for GCP.
I've seen this several times by now. It's pretty ridiculous. One of my clients was an AI startup. They got $100K in AWS credit. So yeah, of course they aren't going to move off AWS until that credit runs out, even though GCP's offering for GPU is much better: for one thing on GCP you can vary the number of cores allocated to a machine with a GPU (or several). Inexplicably on AWS you can't do that. One GPU - you get 8 cores. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. As a result, you can't use that V100 fully if you do any significant data augmentation - CPU is often a bottleneck. IO and networking are faster on GCP as well. And if your GPU is not "free", you can cut costs by running on preemptible instances (few of their training runs are longer than 8 hours). On top of that if scale is needed (which it was), you can wrap it all into k8s, too.
Disclosure: ex-googler (left 4 years ago), own no GOOG, use GCP to run my own business. Clients use whatever they want.
Totally agreed. Many places don’t even run their AWS environments particularly well, but talk themselves into a most of their own making.
AWS is just another IT vendor. The weird dependency, reminiscent of 1980s IBM thinking, is bad for any company, at some point you become more of a vassal than a customer.
My understanding is that GCP lags on developer trust, specifically when it comes to support. Several years ago I was excited about GCP, but have mostly lost interest after reading various stories about account lockouts here on HN.
This is accurate form my perspective. I work for a company that made a big bet on Google Cloud and we spent the last 4 years building on it. We are now moving to Azure because of the number of times Google kept dropping support for things forcing us to rewrite our libraries. We should have never went with PaaS (App Engine) but thats a different issue all together. App Engine Flex was a nightmare to work with because Google couldn't help themselves with the constant urge to change things by ripping out things and replacing them instead of having a vision and improving on the existing offerings.
This. Unless you are a big, important account, do not put anything you value on any of Google's platforms. There is a small, but non-zero, chance they'll randomly destroy it and ghost you.
I was a user of GCP. Documentation lied to me back in January and cost me over $1000 of my personal money. I got assigned a support case, and had absolutely no reply until April, when I had confirmation that there was indeed a bug in the system from Google engineers, and that they planned to fix it. In the meantime, I switched off of GCP. Their only consolation was a coupon that insisted that I keep on using GCP, which would have eaten through my money again.
I somehow got CC'd to an internal Google system, Buganizer, which has done nothing but leak a bunch of internal communications, including some small code patches to GCP infrastructure itself.
My support request has not been updated, but Buganizer has let me know that they supposedly updated the documentation mid-November to fix it, but the rephrased advice still was not correct based on my interpretation of the issue. The bug is still open.
I think that GCP is obviously better for people working inside Google. I was amazed when on my third day I took the all day end to end class and was blown away by how “not difficult” it was to use Borg, the global file system, web based dev tools, etc.
But, I have always enjoyed using public GCP more that AWS.
I can name only one: mobile. OTOH Ballmer spearheaded Azure and Office/Exchange as a service, both of which are the major reasons why MS is a trillion-dollar company on an upswing today. No amount of Satya would save it, if Ballmer didn't beat the internal Microsoft "deep state" into submission on Azure and SaaS first. And a serious beatdown was required before Office and Windows apparatchiks received the message.
I think you're confusing him with Gates. Although Ballmer did refuse to buy Google when he could. Would have been a drop in the bucket. I forgot, BTW, he also spun up the ad and search businesses: the only reason there's any alternative to Google at all.
Arguably, if he would've bought Google, we wouldn't have the internet as we have it today: people would've payed for search, as for the OS and Office suite: $10 per 1000 queries per month.
But hadn't it grown more in the preceding 5 years than in the 4 years headed by Sundar. Looking at the share price, it seems it has roughly doubled every 5 years since 2005.
I have also been appreciating their products lately: Play Books and Movies, the Google iOS app that does a good job of showing my article that interests me, and until I retired (just writing now) I really always preferred Google Cloud over AWS. Even with potential privacy issues, YouTube, GMail, and Calendar are also good.
In the past have been I have been a vocal supporter of FSF (still am, but...) but I look at the world situation now with people in China quickly losing freedoms but excelling in AI and other tech, here in the USA corporate fascism is unstoppable. With the political problems around the globe getting crazier and with chaotic climate change, I think now that people in different countries should do two things: embrace their own culture and values, and to do what they can to make their countries competitive in AI and other tech, especially tech that will help with climate change and generally increase productivity. Those on top will get bigger and bigger pieces of the pie, so we better grow the pie rapidly so regular peoples’ share is sufficient for a good life.
He's a Type-2 CEO [1], a Ballmer, Sculley, or Cook figure. These types of personalities are generally incapable of innovating, but they're very good at maximizing the growth, efficiency, and profit potential of existing product lines. Wall Street loves them because they lead to higher EPS; the general public generally considers them mediocre because they don't lead to awesome new toys to play with.
Personally I thought Sundar was a very good manager (much better than Larry, who honestly sucked as a CEO) but a poor innovator. As a HN commenter you're probably looking for an innovator. The average user (who just wants Google to stay up) and the average investor (who just want to make more money) are quite happy having a good manager who can optimize operations, though.
It seems most people are probably praising him for bringing up the Google stock price, whereas people who actually care about products/culture/technology realize he hasn't actually contributed anything worthwhile. Yet another classic case of a CEO riding out momentum set forth by predecessors and maximizing value to fiduciaries while selling out the user base.
He's a good businessman, but that "deterioration" that you (and me and many many others) see is because he's not driven by the same morals and beliefs that Larry and Sergey had when they were running the company. The "old Google" everyone loved was the pre-Sundar Google.
I can't really blame Larry and Sergey for wanting to do something else, and leaving the company in the hands of someone that they know will maximize profits. But that doesn't change the fact that modern Google does a lot of scummy and downright evil stuff today that likely wouldn't have happened during the "old Google" days.
Perhaps Tim Cook-ing forward is a more modern/relevant way of describing the phenomenon? (Pichai and Cook are both competent empire caretakers. Innovation is suffering though...)
They've done very well from a product perspective as well as dollars and cents. And I think he hasn't absorbed much blame for the culture problems. At least not yet.
It is clear that Sergey and Larry (and Eric) have been asleep at the switch in shaping Google's culture, which now looks like the campus of Evergreen State College. Both he and Sergey have seemed checked out for years. Being the CEO of this company, especially given everything they've accomplished, doesn't seem very fun. I couldn't tell you what Sergey's been doing there or if he even works at all. This company's culture is trending towards being toxic but that they invented the world's greatest money-making machine has been able to paper over a lot of the rot.
> It is clear that Sergey and Larry (and Eric) have been asleep at the switch in shaping Google's culture, which now looks like the campus of Evergreen State College.
Evergreen State College is (in)famous for its lack of traditional grades and curricula: "non-traditional undergraduate curriculum in which students design their own paths of study...Faculty write narrative evaluations of students' work in place of issuing grades."
I wish both Larry and Sergey well in their future endeavors. It is clear that the mess that Google is in, the investigations, the internal revolts, the general slide from being "good guys" to "bad guys" weighs on those who are nominally tasked with addressing those issues.
By stepping out now they have no doubt made their lives easier but it puts Sundar in an fairly challenging place. I hope he is up for it.
I'm sure the legal implications of this so-called "restructuring dance" remain and are certainly not rendered pointless because of these title changes.
I find it amusing that, if you comment on a thread on Hacker News, about Google's censorship, relevant to the posted article that states google is 'unbiased'...you're...censored
I think this is good news. Google has sometimes felt like it was pulled in two different directions - making the core business successful, and providing spinoff cash for the crazy projects. Having the same person run both of them seems like it will make management more efficient.
It probably means that a number of Larry and Sergey "pet projects" will become deprioritized. Good. Self-driving cars seem like they have great potential. I think that technology has the potential to make the entire Alphabet structure worthwhile. But it also seems like it should no longer need the Alphabet structure to protect itself.
Absolutely nothing about the structural discontent emerging in staff.
And nothing about the increasing sense of a loss of claimed ethical stance. I stress claimed, because the lack of concern at the top at its obvious demise makes it less likely it was actually held as a core belief.
Unless it there is more behind the scenes, the letter is basically saying:
We don't want to deal, or like/enjoy dealing with this pesky employee stuff. We don't have the time, energy, or enjoy it, and they'd rather do something else with their time and money.
They are in a position where they either crack-down on their culture to more of a corp like, and appear to go full evil, or be even more lenient, and risk small 'intolerant' groups or activists taking over and creating disruptions to the business. Whatever they do at this point, they will be either painted as the bad guys in the media (if they go full on evil corp); or the 'dysfunctional' company, if they allow even more discontent and become more 'college/academic like'.
Basically, their employees situation is becoming such a PITA for them, they'd rather not deal with it and quit the company and do something else, more interesting, instead....
They realize that they just don't enjoy dealing with the creature/organization that they created.
Basically, it is the CEO's version of: "it is not you, but it is me" line of break-up, and we all know what that line means.
I think that's a cynical view of the situation. These guys have grown a college startup into one of the world's most valuable companies. They're rich beyond imagination. More importantly, they're getting close to being 50. Would you want a day job if you could retire 15 years earlier than most, especially considering Google has served as a vehicle to explore a ton of other projects they've been interested in (since maybe people would think, why not start another company?).
Makes total sense, I'm sure they're looking forward to spending time on their yachts with their families and not in meetings 8 hours a day.
I think they will regret it. Google was once a real special company. Their IPO filling, their stance on China, those were principled, courageous stands that came straight from Larry and Sergey. To see their beautiful baby turn into another mega-corp, as hypocritical as any, colonized by activists and careerists bent on distorting the social fabric to advance ideologies and profits? Contemplating that turn of events when you had the power to stop it but chose not to? That has to suck, even when you are doing the contemplation from your yacht.
I think what they learned in the intervening 15 years is that there are very strong structural forces pushing corporations towards the "traditional company" form that everybody hates, and that even as CEO, even as controlling shareholders, they were powerless to stop them.
At least, that's what I learned, having worked at Google during the period where "Don't be evil" was still taken seriously, engineers could still propose & develop their own projects, the public still liked them, and Larry was just beginning to take the reins.
You're right. One of these forces is how in a sufficiently large organization you're practically guaranteed to attract a critical mass of bad actors, people with rare but extremely harmful personality types. In an open culture, these bad actors can find each other and coordinate, creating massive problems for the whole organization. Traditional big companies are robust against these bad actors --- unfortunately at the cost of many other desirable characteristics. Smaller companies (maybe up to 10k headcount) can get without the necessary safeguards because, due to their small size, they don't attract a critical mass of rare but extremely harmful personalities.
Google tried to remain an open, high-trust place well beyond the point when it became obvious that the company had attracted exactly this sort of toxic element. Now the company is paying the price.
For the stuff that actually sucks about Google, yes, they were powerless. I think they'd still be on top if they felt they could actually make Google into the company they want it to be. Larry in particular does not give up easily.
Take stock price obsession. Everybody knows the dangers of having quarterly earnings targets dictate the company strategy, and the moral compromises that companies make to meet those targets. Google's initial founders' letter said "If our earnings are lumpy, they'll be lumpy" (ironically, they were not - earnings went up monotonically and consistently exceeded analysts' targets until about 2013, for reasons I'm not going to get into here). And they took a lot of steps - like the dual-class share structure that gave Larry, Sergey, and Eric voting control over the company regardless of what Wall Street wanted - to avoid that.
The problem is that stock price affects a lot more than just investors' pocketbooks. When the stock was low, Google had trouble attracting talented new engineers, which is critical to making new products that are really excellent. Low stock price means negative PR cycles; the press is always happy to write glowing reviews of fast-growing rocket ships, but as soon as they start to flounder, the press will kick them when they're down. (For more recent examples of this, see Theranos, WeWork, and Facebook.) The press cycle in turn affects consumer attitudes towards the brand, which is the source of both power and revenue.
There were many other examples like this - another big one is the negative effect of company size on innovation, where once a company gets big enough new product ideas will always get killed, regardless of how good they are, because there is somebody with veto power or just enough social clout to discourage the innovator. I suspect this in particular was disheartening for Larry, who both identified with would-be innovators and had protected them when Google was smaller.
I think you are misreading it, I am not judging Sergei and Larry negatively....
What I am saying is that their decision makes total sense, and there is no reason to chide on them on 'why they are not dealing with the employe' problems, but quitting' as the OP did.
Really, this is just a: Peace out guys, we are moving on...
And there is nothing wrong with it, as google is not really dealing with an existential threat right now....
Same as somebody quitting their job, when it is not enjoyable anymore... and they have been doing the same thing for years. Billionares are people after-all....
I judge them pretty negatively. People like Bezos, Jobs, or even Gates never really spent so much time building this PR image of being for the greater good, holier-than-though, "making the world a better place." Everyone knows "don't be evil", but how about their recruiting catch phrase "do cool things that matter." Even the "not a conventional company" tag line is relevant here.
Hypocrites just irk me more than people open about their intentions and motivation, and to me Larry and Sergey belong in the hypocrite category. They ultimately were billionares with total control over Google, this idea that somehow things just got out of their control is absurd. It didn't get out of their control, what happened is that whenever push came to shove on difficult issues, they always went with the decision that they felt would lead to the higher stock price. After years of telling everyone who would listen they were non-conventional leaders interested in more than just money, they always purely pursued the lucre. And why? They are literally amongst the world's richest people already.
I was at the TGIF where Sergey tried to sell the company on Maven, and then what happened was, internal google groups are a bit like public URLs, in that they were basically visible to all full time employees if you knew the link. So Sergey would say one thing on stage and then someone would stumble up on the link about the real strategy, and that what they said on stage was "messaging" to appease dissenters. It was total dishonesty, and it was all for big fat contracts, that's it. They did not care one bit about the dangers of weaponized AI or the dangers of being an international company building military technology for one company, or the general growth of the military industrial complex and how the biggest tech company becoming part of it it could snowball its size and dangerous impact on society. And Maven is just one example, but censorship in China is another, and there's many more. I do get that they struggle with some truly difficult decisions that are ethically ambiguous and they can't please everybody, but there are plenty of spots where it was abundantly clear that the only thing Larry and Sergey cared about was filling their already overfilling coffers with more gold. And when Bezos does that, at least he never pretended otherwise, but when Larry and Sergey do it, they are totally backtracking on a public image they spent years selling to people.
The difference between Amazon and Google is that google controls access to information and in some respects can shape public opinion. When Bezos gets greedy, its through some better product like faster cheaper shipping.
Reasonable people differ on all these projects. It's not "abundantly clear" at all. What you feel strongly about might be another's subtle trafeoff. You don't get to decide which disagreements you'll allow and which you'll prohibit. That's the privilege of the people who own the company. The main problem with Google over the past few years is this idea among a small but vocal group of employees that they have the right to run the company merely because they feel strongly about certain issues.
I think it's impossible to be cynical enough about a guy who blacklisted a company from his search engine because they used his service to show a picture of his backyard as a way of illustrating the privacy violations his company enabled.
Does a CEO of a 100,000 employee company ever have this kind of low level management?
Larry and Sergey have been obviously taking on less of a role since Sundar took over as CEO of Google. They've been at Google for more than two decades and are mega billionaires. Do people really think that this has anything to do with agitation among employees?
As a former Googler who stays in touch, there doesn't seem to be structural discontent emerging in staff. There were a few news stories about people complaining, but Google employs about 100,000 people, so any news story involving less than 1000 of them being unhappy can't really count as "structural discontent".
The walkout referred to was over a year ago, so I wouldn't call that discontent "emerging". If anything, that demonstrates that discontent is diminishing, because there hasn't been another similar walkout.
I don't get the constant critiques of this. They fired employees who encouraged others to leave their jobs. That's not really "retaliation", is it? Were a competitor to do that, Google would have a case for tortious interference. Why is it any different when it's "organizing"? It's not like this was a unionization attempt, which might have some legal protection.
Actually, organizing around workplace conditions (in this case, alleged sexual violence by Google executives) is a protected action under US labor law. So, yes, it would be retaliation and no, they’re not allowed to do that.
You posted that someone needed to demonstrate "structural discontent" via a news story involving at least 1K employees. They linked to one involving 20K. And your response to that is: "This proves that discontent is diminishing?"
You set the challenge, they exceeded it 20x, and you've not made a believable case that this shows "content is diminishing." In fact exceeding your original demands by 20x seems to thoroughly show that the basis for the claim is true.
For anyone pointing to "structural discontent" at Google, you guys seem to be very out of touch with reality. Compared to 99% of other large corporations (in US, or worldwide), Google is heaven on Earth as a place to work at. $200k entry level comp, lots of perks, very smart people all around you, open culture, coolest stuff to work on, cutting edge tech stack and great tools, future technologies being invented right next to you (or by you!), etc, etc. There are problems, or course, because you're bound to have problems in any 100k organization, but at other places it's so much worse. Try working at any company on Fortune 500 list, other than FAANG, or at any government agency, and see how much tolerance for "discontent" is there. The amount of BS per $ you will have to endure there is simply incomparable.
Or maybe you want to hold Google to higher standards just because it's Google? Why exactly?
This has nothing to do with the post you replied to.
Plus this retort essentially boils down to "Google pays well and other companies are even worse so quit complaining!" Restating the compensation argument multiple different ways, and the cutting edge argument multiple times doesn't really address the actual underlying complaints being made (Google's partnership with distasteful foreign governments and other corporate immoralities).
If you want to talk corporate morals, sure, relevant. If you just want to brag that Google pays super well and is less evil than [more evil companies] this seems like a whole other discussion that sidesteps the issues. Which isn't to say it is untrue, just irrelevant.
Ok, let's talk about specific issues that cause complaints. Google is a for-profit company, and it answers to shareholders who want to make money. Why would Google not engage in those practices you deem immoral if that's what the shareholders want? I use Google products daily. So for me the question is - does Google need to engage in "partnership with distasteful foreign governments and other corporate immoralities", in order for me to enjoy using its products in the future? Will such activities hurt or help Google in the long run?
I would hope that every single person - including shareholders, managers, and employees - holds our fundamental values like peace, freedom, or justice higher than their desire to maximise profits.
The top question is not: will it hurt the company. The top question is: will it hurt humanity.
We liked Google because their founders did the right thing for a long time, and fended off profit-maximizing shareholders.
Sure we can hope, but in reality if Google is not profitable someone else will take its place. If Google does not cooperate with Chinese government someone else will take its place.
Will humanity benefit if, say, Comcast buys the morally pure but financially struggling Google, or if no one is challenging Baidu in China?
As long as Google cares, it is a net win for humanity. Even the worst-case scenario that Google is later bought by an immoral company is a better outcome for humanity than Google immediately becoming immoral.
I also find your argument about Google becoming unprofitable unconvincing. They were very profitable while they held the standards high in the past. Maybe not maximally profitable, but very profitable.
The walkout was a bait and switch. It was organized (using underhanded means --- for example, a rogue employee force pushing a desktop background update to everyone without authorization) on the basis of protesting Google's payout to Andy Rubin. Fine.
But at the same time, a small number of employees put together a document (without public input) making "walkout demands" and ever since, this small but very vocal group of employees has been going around claiming that 20,000 people support the list of demands in this doc. Not the case. Total lies, in fact.
Hey Lacker. I'd be curious about whether there is a bias around the seniority level/situation in the pool of people you keep in touch with. People I've talked to, ranging from new hires to old timers, have generally trended toward being more discontent and cynical about the company as a whole.
It is literally the job of PR people to write things like these. I’m confused by your statement. This is effectively a press release, of course it was written by a PR person.
I agree that ideally you wouldn’t notice that … however I do think there are pretty clear constraints around how you can announce such a thing to avoid harm.
You will always end up with a text like that. It tries to reduce risk and harm and companies will nearly always want to pick that trade-off: rather sound bland and cliched instead of risking undue negative effects.
Well it isn't everyday you hear the original CEOs of FAANG companies stepping down these days.
First you heard Gates, then Jobs (Twice) and now Page and Brin. We'll see if whether if Pichai can continue this now that he has been crowned King of Alphabet and Google.
This is probably an admission that bets outside core Google [YouTube, Maps, Photos, cloud] & Android haven't paid off. Time to run alphabet in a more disciplined, less "risky" manner? I'm expecting cuts to come in Alphabets' "bets"
Wow, people are taking a press release at face value. Not just any press release (all are PR garbage) but one from Google, a master at corporate doublespeak.
This is an ouster at worst, a forced resignation at best.
Were I to guess, the politics-at-work thing as gotten out of hand. Larry and Sergey built the company in their image, in that specific way. One can easily imagine them bristling at the notion of having to take away employee freedoms.
Because they are not willing to do what needs to be done to quell the uprising, rather than see their company spiral down to darkness, they are stepping aside so that others may do what needs to be done.
Problem with google is that they are losing data game.
They own the web but meanwhile web became only one medium among many and a lot of companies build their own "web"
Instagram app is essentially a browser to use IG's private "web" of content google has no access to.
Same goes for twitter, even Snapchat.
So attention wise, google is loosing dominance as other companies are building their own protocols on top of web.
Speaking of data,they own search intent (via Google) and web content (via Google analytics).
However I'd say Facebook is ingesting way more data on non-content usage. They made much easier for advertisers to connect into FBs audience graphs and cross reference and retarget based on first-party visitor profiles.
> Instagram app is essentially a browser to use IG's private "web" of content google has no access to.
Search engines are meant to index the open web. IG's public profiles are still being indexed by Google. Google is winning the data game from an ad-tech point of view but not loosing it.
If you go with that kind of thinking, then I would say that they also mostly own location data. I'm more and more regularly seeing ads on my Google Maps, so it seems they are gearing up on monetizing that too.
Even with being locked out of that silos, I wouldn't be too worried about Google, as it seems that it barely hurt their income streams.
Somehow it feels like Google’s soul died years ago, but was hooked up to life-support. Reading that Larry leaves Alphabet would be the equivalent of just unplugging the life support on Google’s soul.
Sundar seems set on track to cause a large part of the google workforce to question the ethics of their work, unless I've mis-read the headlines (entirely possible) since he's taken the reigns.
Am I the only one who recoils when hearing "Nonetheless, Google’s core service—providing unbiased, accurate, and free access to information—remains at the heart of the company.". This is more or less the complete opposite of how I view Google (Apart from accurate maybe). Google delivers results which are highly biased based on what they think you will like and what they will make the most money from and you pay a high price for it, giving up all your personal integrity.
Having Pichai in charge is deeply disturbing to me. If he has had a public moment that demonstrated deep moral convictions that were put before the obvious market benefit of the company I haven't heard about it. (But feel free to provide links)
> Nonetheless, Google’s core service—providing unbiased, accurate, and free access to information—remains at the heart of the company.
How is it ok to just say clear lies like this?! Without making any value judgements at all this is blatantly false. The ranking algorithms specifically encode a bias into search results. This is actually explicitly what users want, too! To be clear this is distressing to me because very powerful people can throw around words uncritically in this way for niche political points without being challenged.
EDIT: It seems people are taking this comment in a way I didn't intend for it to be taken. Another example is that they are applying biases by sorting and displaying results on news.google.com. Personally I really like how this is done, but I think we need to be honest that it is a bias so that we can move on to a more productive conversation about what is or isn't a good bias.
Don't be too pedantic. By your definition, what even is unbiased? A list of all the sites on the web, A to Z? Words are what we make of them, and there's clearly some distinction between Google and, say, Baidu that is entirely appropriate to capture with the word "unbiased".
I dont think this is pedantic and my point is exactly as you describe! There is no such thing as "unbiased" and people who are in search of that are living in a dream world.
but surely people mean something when they say "unbiased", right? (I'll take a stab at it: something like "conveyed without the intention to deceive me, especially politically/financially/etc...")
I get your point, and it's an important one -- but ime conversations are a lot more productive when they're about the ideas, not the words. :)
> something like "conveyed without the intention to deceive me, especially politically/financially/etc...")
That isn't even close to the definition of "unbiased" that I use. To me, something is "unbiased" if it based on facts without being interpreted in accordance with some preexisting belief or worldview.
For what it's worth i agree with this. A realistic example of what i would describe as unbiased is, say, telemetry data from a radio telescope, or a neutral reading of a poem or story.
Tools are unbiased.
I think the real danger is actually in the notion that "bias" is something done to deceive, and I have encountered people who imply this quite a bit in real life
By way of example: I have a strong bias towards the nationalization of infrastructure. Many of my opinions and arguments are designed to support this end because, for reasons I would love to explain I believe it's the best course of action. I am, if anything, prone to never letting anyone leave my company without droning on and on about this! There is not deception involved. People certainly do hide their biases, or lie about things in order to support their arguments, but this is not something inevitable with bias.
Ultimately I think everyone needs to deal with the reality that we ALL have biases and we ALL inject them into our work. This is actually ok, because its part of how we work to build the world we want to live in.
> I think the real danger is actually in the notion that "bias" is something done to deceive, and I have encountered people who imply this quite a bit in real life
I agree entirely. Bias is typically not something that is intentionally done in an attempt to deceive. It comes naturally to people because they look at the world through the lens of their own experiences and beliefs.
Everybody has a bias. The trick is to understand what sort of bias people (including ourselves) have, so we can properly understand what they're saying.
You're reading far too much into what im saying. I'm not calling google a bad actor (though certainly I think they can be for reasons that have little to do with the search algorithm.) I'm saying that there is bias encoded here and, further as i thought was clear, im not saying this is a bad thing.
I would have accepted this, yeah. The difference is important because there is a relevancy calculation that determines what's on top of news.google.com at any given time and that encodes types of bias. Personally, in fact, I believe they're mostly good sorts of biases in that they wont generally show you InfoWars or something like that, for example. But we need to be honest when we talk about this stuff.
I think people are missing your point. As we all know, removing unbiased and false information is an unsolved problem, so I find it a bit odd that they claim to be able to do this. Not only that, but now they will be held accountable in this regard. I can't see how this statement made it through PR.
Unbiased ? LoL, things are so absurd these days. Google gives Search Optimised results aimed at Ads. It was never about unbiased and it is a very silly and unnecessary point to be added there.
Wow - big news! It seems better to have a CEO who is “All in” rather than one who is and one who isn’t. This is more work Sundar. I hope he has a strong bench.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page were terrible to women. They engaged in, promoted, and paid for sexual harassment. Shortly after the Alphabet board is investigating misconduct, Larry and Page are "retiring". And of course, they're still worth billions.
This news story is talking about an investigation of David Drummond. I'm not going to rule out harassment claims against Page and Brin, but do you have a better source?
The article mentions investigations in conduct of executives from various lawsuits. Drummond is mentioned specifically in the article, and the investigation 'encompasses' that story, but others are fairly well known.
I cited an example in response to another comment here.
This article says David Drummond was involved in an extramarital affair with an employee, it doesn’t say that Page or Brin are being investigated for sexual misconduct.
Where’s your evidence that they’re stepping down over some personal scandal? This seems like a rather bold claim.
Stories about Sergey and Brin are longstanding and easily researchable. And Larry Page is who paid Rubin $90 million without approval before it got out why Rubin was leaving. But here's an example for Sergey as well:
> Ayers said in the excerpt that when the company's human-resources department raised eyebrows at Brin's behavior, Brin suggested he was entitled to engage with his employees in whatever manner he saw fit.
> "HR told me that Sergey's response to it was, 'Why not? They're my employees,'" Ayers said. "But you don't have employees for f---ing! That's not what the job is."
The boys club at the Alphabet C-level goes to the very, very top, and it would be impossible to address Drummond without addressing Page and Brin.
> Stories about Sergey and Brin are longstanding and easily researchable
And all happened a long time ago, e.g. Brin's dalliance with Hugo Barra's girlfriend, so why would he resign years after this happened?
> And Larry Page is who paid Rubin $90 million
Again, Page didn't personally pay Rubin, this was part of Rubin's exit-contract, approved by the board, and why would this cause Page to resign specifically, and not Sundar?
> The boys club at the Alphabet C-level goes to the very, very top, and it would be impossible to address Drummond without addressing Page and Brin.
Pretty much the "boys club" extends everywhere in corporate America (and politics), pretty much anytime men get a lot of money or power, they tend go off looking for lots of sex.
But you're alleging that they are both resigning simultaneously because of some scandal that's about to be unearthed related to sexual harassment. Everything you've brought up have been known for years and are not revelations and so are already 'priced in' to the board reputation.
Most Googlers know and have felt that Larry and Sergey have been 'checked out' for years and are no longer interested in the day to day direction of Alphabet as a business. They barely ever attend company events.
So what's more likely:
a) They're rich and bored and want to go off and do other things
or
b) they's suddenly resigning for behavior that was documented years ago (Brin's affair while married, Page dating Marissa, etc, or paying off C-suite execs). In fact, rank-and-file Googlers didn't even demand their resignation when the Rubin $90 million exit happened. There's no pressure on them to resign over that.
or
c) some secret scandalous sexual escapade that happens to involve both of them is about to be unearthed but yet is unsupported by anything you've linked.
I think you have to admit that your claims are both salacious and exceedingly unlikely, and this is very likely a bunch of multibillionaires long bored with management. You've made very specific claims that their resignations are being driven by some sexual harassment claim.
This claim is baseless until you present evidence.
Leaving just when there are the first real signs of existential trouble for Google ...
Google was fairly succesfull right from the start, they deserve a lot of credit for that, but anyone with experience knows how different the climate is when things are up vs. down; When things are up, everything is easy, when things are down, everything is hard.
As much as I kind of loathe Ellison ... at least he's there 'in the control room' the whole time.
Yeah it also seemed like an Irish exit to me. Especially with all the scrutiny over data collection policies and other political issues happening internally.
Eric Schmidt had step down long before that, and Larry Page was the CEO. In 2015, Alphabet was formed and Page became the CEO of Alphabet, leaving Sundar as the CEO of Google.
I find it stunning that of all of the communities it seems to be HN that has jumped on this idea the most. Surely people entrenched in the startup world understand the value of pivoting and dropping products that aren't working.
Yeah it's just not that valuable for the end users to be dropped. Just like a startup. Why would anyone add startup or startup-like products to your workflow?
Honestly, part of Google's approach is to kill products. They're a company with a startup-incubation-emulator running inside them. Things that seem worthwhile get resources, but if a product can't make its way to profitability in some amount of time, it dies.
They should probably be more up-front about the messaging around this, but if you step back and look at their practice, that's how it appears to work. User numbers don't matter; profitability matters. Not unlike startups in the long-run.
I'm also not sure what the news is. The (in 2014) new CEO of Microsoft apparently got rid of an entire management layer, that seems like news. Without an intention like that being announced, this is celeb news for nerds and really only tells me it'll be new face same story -- at least until we know more.
A well deserved congratulations to Sundar's promotion!
Larry and Sergey have spent the majority of their time on Other Bets for quite some time now, and it's good to see that this is finally being solidified / recognized within Alphabet's management structure.
Indeed one of the things that has always baffled me in my eight years at Google is the culture of bottomless "Congrats!" reply-all emails that come out at promotions, product launches, etc. And here we see one on HN :-)
It just looks like a congratulations to me to be honest, but perhaps that has to do with the fact that German is my native language.
Would you mind explaining what you mean by ‘corpspeak’ with that person’s comment? I wouldn’t be surprised if I wrote something like that in a similar tone.
Can someone please explain why it is well deserved? For example, when I was at MSFT it was very clear why Satya deserved to be the next CEO - for leading and growing the cloud business from irrelevance to a major pillar of MSFT. What about Sundar? Is this all because he led Chrome?
I don’t get it either. Google’s reputation has been lousy, there’s something weird going on among employees and the company isn’t clearly advancing in any particular area. Sundar strikes me as Google’s Ballmer.
Satya, on the other hand, has been outstanding. Microsoft has transformed and looks like a company that will be dominant for at least another 20 years.
I cannot believe the transition Microsoft has pulled off.
Living in Seattle, a notable % of my social circle was at Amazon for the last decade, but more and more are heading across the lake as MSFT reshapes itself.
Ballmer was good at business and running the day-to-day housekeeping. But his legacy will always be that of Windows 8, of Surface RT, of dismissing the iPhone; frankly he didn't understand enterprise customers either. He was never the visionary leader.
I agree with your statement, but I'd say that at least Google has been advancing their machine learning/AI front under Sundar. But that's about it. You can clearly pinpoint the moment Google started going downhill the moment he took over, whether this has been the result of his leadership or due to the Alphabet restructuring, I don't know.
I won't make any comment about going downhill or not, but the Alphabet restructuring you're talking about came after Patrick Pichette left and Ruth Porat took over as CFO but before Sundar became CEO.
If there was a clear boundary between old and new Google I'd say it is around the time that Patrick and Alan Eustace left. Other changes in senior leadership happened in that same couple of years.
He's been leading Google now as CEO for multiple years.
As I said in my original comment, Larry and Sergey have devoted the majority of their time to Other Bets for a while. Sundar's promotion here is really just recognizing the role he's effectively had for some time at this point.
Look at Google's growth and sharehder value under Sundar. While Satya transformed Microsoft and made hard decisions like divert resources away from Windows to Azure, Sundar with the help of his CFO steadied the Google Ship and increased the monetization of their ads on Mobile when everyone thought Google have a hard time on Mobile.
The amount of advertising (every single youtube video for the last 3 months), and lack of any excitement amoung gamers, hardcore or casual, does seem damning.
The launch at least is a very clear failure. The product is hopelessly broken. By far my worst experience to date with a google product. They really should give everyone a full refund as a gesture of goodwill.
Google has done some things well, but some things very poorly. First, fire whoever decided to prevent syncing Google Photos to Drive and not having a compatible Photos API for syncing original backups.
Next, invest in and add features to Google Music or stop charging for it.
Last, Google News sucks. No matter how much I dislike content it keeps showing me more of the same. Reminds me of YouTube. People should get heated on Google curating propaganda.
Slightly more organized info in the intro bullets.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the CEO and President, respectively, of Alphabet, have decided to leave these roles. They will continue their involvement as co-founders, shareholders and members of Alphabet’s Board of Directors.