Agreed that Google's facing a serious threat and that a CEO approaches things differently in that situation than when everything's booming. I'm not sure about the peacetime/wartime stuff though. First of all if you want to use military analogies, Google has been at war with Microsoft since 2005 or earlier, and with Apple for a few years as well; now they've got another major front with Facebook -- and they're losing. It's a very different situation than Intel's, so the CEO may need to have different skills and attitude.
And then the list of differences between a wartime and peacetime CEO is just silly. "Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture" ... hmm, seems to me that George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Winston Churchill all did a lot of culture defining, and so did Andy Grove.
It's interesting though to look at the list in light of his self-description that "One could easily argue that I failed as a peacetime CEO, but succeeded as a wartime one." To me it seems like he's describing the CEO he became, and arguing that it was optimal to become that way because they were at war. And quite possibly it was optimal for him and his company in that situation. But going from there to "these are the characteristics a CEO needs when at peace/at war" is over-generalizing.
I agree that FB is a threat to Google, but the notion that Google is loosing just due to the inane valuations and hype Facebook has received seems a bit far fetched.
Facebook's got over 500,000,000 users. None of Google's social efforts so far have been particularly successful and some have been disastrous. So even though I agree Facebook's over-hyped and the valuations are optimistic, I still think Google's losing in social.
At stake for Google is the question of whether it can achieve an additional 'generation' of growth, not survival. It's easy to imagine that it should have been able to get this growth, watching Facebook, and I think this is tantalizing, both to investors and people inside Google.
If it can't, it will go the way of Microsoft. What is that way? That way is the way of IBM. What is that way? Billions of dollars in earnings, dominant market positions carved out, buy over build technology decisions.
So, yes, it's nice (for some) to imagine Google doing it 'again', but they don't have to do it again, I wouldn't say. Just like Microsoft getting crushed by Google really just ended in Microsoft's growth slowing, and their earnings increasing, Google getting crushed by FB, or some new wunderkind is unlikely to evaporate all those billions of dollars in cash, assets and projects.
and a decade later, Google's been making billions of dollars each year, and despite massive investment Microsoft is barely breaking even.
so true, MS still has the Windows, Office, SQL/Excahnge, and XBox businesses. but its failures in the internet mean that it's not seen as a leader, and its stock price is justifiably suffering.
There are some insights in this article. In fact modern time companies were originally formed in a very similar way as military units. Although in military when losing a battle, an incompetent general can lose his army and/or his life, a CEO failed a company likely still took a nice package away.
agreed. there's a lot you can learn from "business as war" analogies -- when I was doing competitive strategy at Microsoft I worked a lot with Robert Greene, who sent me an early copy of a chapter from his "33 strategies of war" about how FDR got his allies into key positions throughout the government in order to transform things organizationally. It was extremely useful, and books like Robert's and Sun Tzu's should be mandatory reading for anybody doing strategy at a large company (or small company that wants to grow large).
But yeah, the analogy breaks down at some point. Yes, there are billions of dollars at stake here ... but in the real world, soldiers put their lives on the line and civilians get caught up as collateral damage.
In the 1990s it may well have helped contribute to an attitude where nobody stopped to think whether business practices are anti-competitive.
It also contributed to some really horrible software. At one point in the early 2000s I was meeting with Windows architects about one highly-vulnerable part of IE that was causing all kinds of security grief, and the challenges of rewriting it because its API was badly crafted. Somebody explained it like this: "You've got to understand the history. We took a lot of short cuts because we wrote it during a war."
I imagine being a wartime CEO is going to get increasingly more challenging for public relations since the company is already so dominant. Even here on HN, people don't see the urgency of Google's situation. It's not enough to be on top. You've got to be way ahead.
I'm not sure about that. Many startups are either creating markets, or going after brand new markets. Expanding / educating the market is more important than destroying your competitor in these cases. I find it ridiculous when two tiny startups in a market that the mainstream doesn't even know exists start bashing each other. That energy is better spent expending the market.
Apart from a CEO shift, what evidence if any exists that Page will be a Wartime CEO? The analogy with Jobs looks baseless to me, Google is making huge profits and with 6000 new employees coming in 2011 they are hardly in a war. Obviously they have their challenges, like being late in the social game, but their core product is still unendangered.
The whole text, while captivating and well written, feels like a plastered on narrative.
I think if you look at it from a competitive aspect it makes more sense. During Schmidts reign, competition was mostly irrelevant for google. They came on the scene and just won everything. Search, huge market share from nothing very quickly, introduced gmail and people quickly abandoned yahoo and hotmail. They bought YouTube and instantly owned the video market. They haven't really been a competitive company until the last few years.
Now Bing is making inroads into Google's search market, and Facebook is in some ways re-wiring the way we manage information (Googles goal). Though they may be leading in numbers with Android now, they have some very serious competition.
About 7 years ago Google was the rising star, and there were stories all over the place about them poaching employees from the previous generation of tech companies (ie Microsoft). Now Facebook is the "star" and you hear about Google making outlandish salary offers to keep the best and brightest on board. While Google is not at the level of stagnation and decay that Microsoft is in, one doesn't have to really look too deeply to see that Google doesn't "get" social and that's the world we live in.
I guess the TL;DR is: You don't have to be at the doorstep of "war" to move in that direction. I guess Page sees it on the horizon and is moving to prepare now, instead of when it's upon them.
While I agree that Facebook is commonly perceived as "star which smart people gravitate towards nowadays", I really fail to see why that is.
Did suddenly all the techies buy in the "social" buzzword?
I don't really think so: what infrastructural and, in general, technical challenges would Facebook be facing which aren't faced at Google too?
I tend to perceive Google as the technical innovator, bringing magic (1 gB email??? watching the world from above??? and free???) to the real world, whereas Facebook, despite it's cool API and Cassandra, is just vendor lock in.
But I digress: maybe the problem is that Google's already solved the problem leaving no space for new ideas?
Agreed. It's hard to see Facebook's vision for the future. Is it their notion that privacy is overrated? Google is organizing the world's information like it said it would.
Most of the draw of Facebook is their 500mil users. I see popularity more than greatness. Google has and continues to do amazing things (unfortunately none of them in social).
Google moving into "social" is like a nerd learning to dance. With enough work they can do it. They'll be awkward at first. Facebook is hosting the dance because they have the biggest house. Facebook is good but mostly because it's the biggest. They don't offer many reasons for users or advertisers to be there other than "everyone else is". They can still become a lesser version of their current glory a la Myspace.
And then the list of differences between a wartime and peacetime CEO is just silly. "Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture" ... hmm, seems to me that George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Winston Churchill all did a lot of culture defining, and so did Andy Grove.
It's interesting though to look at the list in light of his self-description that "One could easily argue that I failed as a peacetime CEO, but succeeded as a wartime one." To me it seems like he's describing the CEO he became, and arguing that it was optimal to become that way because they were at war. And quite possibly it was optimal for him and his company in that situation. But going from there to "these are the characteristics a CEO needs when at peace/at war" is over-generalizing.