So many companies try to emulate how Google works. There are multiple books, hundreds or thousands of articles. People speculate on the perks, the review structure, the hierarchy, the autonomy.
However, when other companies try to imitate Google they always fail because they're missing a crucial piece:
Billions of dollars in ad revenue
Google doesn't work the way it does to be successful. It works that way because it is successful.
I found this no more evident than when I worked on Google Search itself.
When you have a lot of money, a lot of things work because you have a lot of money. You often see the same thing with people trying to emulate pro-athletes training methods. A genetically gifted pro-athlete can often succeed in spite of their training, and not necessarily because of their training.
The endless spigot of cash from Steam is something that does enable Valve to take some very experimental leaps (VR, Steam machines, SteamOS, etc.)
In my opinion, Valve also has the same shortcomings as google: practically zero customer support, and an un-curated app platform full of shovelware (finding gems on the Steam and the Google Play & Chrome Web Stores can be tricky).
But there is still a ton to admire in both organizations.
Valve's platform full of shovelware is due to (perceived) consumer demand, not because of size or cost reasons. Steam used to be very selective in who gets in, and people complained that a lot of small developers were left out. So Valve added the greenlight system to let the community find the gems that Valve should let in. People still complained that too few games got in. So instead valve made major changes to improve recommendations and reviews and to establish a community of curators, and then opened the floodgates.
Over 40% of the titles on Steam have been added in the past year alone.
The floodgates need to close, now. As someone who has voted on hundreds of Greenlight titles, Greenlight is an abject failure IMO. It's flooded with garbage, the first few waves of approvals gave us some great titles that otherwise would have never seen the platform, but now it's a nightmare. There are no more approval lists. What's worse, it's the only way onto Steam. Your indie gem is just as likely to be lost in the shovelware noise as the latest idle game ported from mobile.
Anyone with $100 can post games there. Anyone with more than $100 can purchase a service which votes their pre-purchased unchanged asset pack "game" through Greenlight. It's ridiculous.
Tags and abandoned curator lists are not a solution to hundreds of shovelware titles clogging up the new releases section IMO.
Unfortunately, nothing will change until something comes along to replace the current system entirely. Valve will act when they are forced to act, not before.
Steam != The internet. No one is preventing people from marketing their crappy games on their own. I have to dig through a mountain of shit in hopes of _possibly_ finding something worth playing. It's bad for users.
>my point is that you should maintain openness while making it easier to discover good content.
Well, figure that one out and I'm sure you'll make a lot of money. Until that happens though, I'll take a semi-closed Steam ecosystem instead of the alternative.
I'm not proposing solutions. I'm saying that "restrict publication" does not follow from "I'm seeing low quality content".
Don't restrict other people for your own benefit. Instead a solution that lets them do their thing while you get the content you want is much more equitable.
One person's shovel of shit is another's gem in the rough; and Valve wins because it accepts this.
I have paid for, and not returned, numerous bizarre or niche indie games that are slayed in their reviews; whereas I've returned more than a few Overwhelmingly Positives heaping shovelfulls of mainstream schlock.
It's part of growing your userbase; you lose its initial narrow focus of taste.
The user review system for games is the best I know of and arguably more useful in deciding what to buy than critic reviews.
Steam is also constantly promoting new games to you and making suggestions based on what you currently play. There is also the social aspect in that you can see who is playing what, leading to new discoveries.
Why does it seem like every review I read is basically a joke by someone with 1500 hours in a game saying simply "it's pretty good" or conversely someone with 2 hours in a game that writes an entire novel about how let down they were when they barely scratched the surface?
I will admit that at least having the verifiable length of time a reviewer played a game helps, but I don't find the reviews themselves to be all that worthwhile for most games.
Why does there even need to be a full review when someone has spent 1500 hours of their life playing it?
If it was worth 1500 hours of the reviewer's time then it's probably worth 10-50 of a potential buyer's.
Inversely, I don't need to play a bad game for 1500 hours to decide that it's bad. I played 60 minutes of No Man's Sky and you'd have to pay me to play a single one more. Does that mean I should be discredited from voicing my opinion?
I realized I was starting to rant about NMS, so instead I want to try to be more constructive about the problem-space and avoid that game as a topic.
The return system and the achievement system should probably be integrated. Likely there should be some sort of achievement related to 'escaping the tutorial'. They might even call it "Almost bought the farm" or something.
Playing to that point should give a player a good idea what kind of game it is, and what sort of plot (if any) is happening in the game.
From /that/ point they should have maybe 30-60 min of 'game runtime' to return the game or not.
Someone said this on another forum and I disagree with them as I disagree with you. I've found plenty of games through Steam that I wouldn't have known about otherwise.
I also find games through Steam, but I do wish I found games through a different avenue. I've also had to promise myself that I'd strongly vet any early-access games I was buying. I've just been burned too many times.
This. Discovery is a rather unique activity that has a wholly different set of details / constraints / etc. Way more social and content driven. Every store & platform out there does its best to accommodate discovery (and sometimes succeeds), but this is secondary to things like maintenance/updates/cust svc, providing relevant product information, and managing transactions.
Steam isn't bad at discovery, but because they're not creating much original content and their UI is janky, they're also not that good at it.
Source: created comprehensive database of education technology products [1], and while we made best attempt at discovery, we learned pretty quickly it was secondary in importance to having comprehensive info.
I imagine that most people don't realize they are not Google customers. If you have paid Google money, then you are a customer. People using Google's 'free' services are not. Only customers will get good support.
If you've paid Google enough money. I have to keep paying $6AUD/month unless I want to lose $300+ of Android apps forever (Google Apps for Work). No chance of transferring them to another account (I'd pay $100+ for this)
That doesn't seem so unusual to me. I've been using Android for about 6 years now, and I'd estimate I spend $2-5 a month on apps - the occasional $10 utility, some $1 games, etc.
They have a gem game called Counterstrike Global Offensive which is their 2nd biggest game after dota2(which is free), and up to a half a year ago that I was playing, we all thought (me and reddit) that they had 0 devs working on it.
Bugs were all over the place, noone was taking action into fixing them, releases were every once in a blue moon including just new skins that were content created by players etc.
Now of course the game has evolved and there are some new developers trying to do something with it but its funny to think that a game of that calibre that returns prolly billions in revenue has pathetic support.
The only gaming company I've seen keeping up with what they make is Blizzard.
Are you kidding me about Google customer support? They're the only company that ever solved my problem with a Linux question, and later helped me when I purchased a movie on YouTube on an account I didn't intend to purchase on. They might not provide great customer support to some market segments, but when it comes to the end-consumer, they go above and beyond.
I'm kind of astounded to hear anyone speaking positively of Google support, and certainly my experience trying to get support and even pre-sales on Google Apps has been miserable - a lot of filling out forms (often slightly broken ones) and never hearing back. Most notably, someone once started spamming an organization I worked for from Gmail by just pasting hundreds of addresses into the To:. Over a year of multiple abuse reports from multiple people and they were still going, and the abuse report form had broken validation so that having the headers too long (because of the over 300 recipient addresses) resulted in a message that the headers field was empty. This is where oddly typical of my experiences with them.
This makes me think that it's rather particular to the product. YouTube was acquired and now has a significant focus towards consumer sales via movies and Red, perhaps these two factors have lead to a significantly different culture surrounding support?
"In my opinion, Valve also has the same shortcomings as google: practically zero customer support..."
This strikes me as something you can afford because you are in a factual monopoly ("You are not OK with our service ? Find an alternative... whooops :)"), rather than just having a lot of money.
Steam benefits from the fact that even people not completely happy with it (personally I have no complaints, but I use it exclusively as a store/launcher) are already invested in the platform, and do not want the hassle of dealing with two or more similar services, so they are wary of any alternative that might surface (see Windows store or proprietary stores like Origin).
Valve also has the prestige of being a high-profile gaming company, which brings with it choice pick of engineers. A "normal" enterprise app consulting shop doesn't have the luxury of every computer geek clamoring to work there.
If you have first-pick of incoming talent, it makes sense that you can get away with giving those employees an extremely high degree of autonomy.
Is that really true though? I remember when me and my engineering peers were in our teens, some of us dreamed of working for a gaming company, but now that we're older no one does. Most actually have a very negative perception of employment conditions in that industry.
The reason why there is a negative perception of employment conditions is because employment conditions are not very good, and they're not very good because a lot of people want to work in the industry.
Yes, but that demand isn't coming from everyone, it's coming from a certain demographic (young people that are into games). Having your pick from that demographic is far from having "choice pick" when it comes to the overall talent pool. And we haven't even talked about attrition.
Game development is what gives the games industry a bad name. While valve is supposedly working on a few new games now[0] and updating 3 of their older games (tf2/dota 2/cs:go), it would be entirely possible to work exclusively on Steam (their online store) and never touch game code, especially with their rolling desks that literally roll so you move to whatever department you want, whenever you want.
My perception is that Valve are the exception to that rule. They've got the money on tap from Steam, meaning their game development side is more of a hobby than anything else, giving a lot of freedom to the teams working on new games. I could believe it's a bit less rosy working on new hats for their Avatar Dressup games.
It's very tempting to look at successful companies and identify their traits as key success factors. There was a very popular business book in this vein in the eighties called In Search of Excellence. The problem is that for every success characteristic you can usually find another successful company with a diametrically opposite approach or a company with a similar approach that's going bankrupt.
They aren't missing that point. They are making the opposite point. Google had a great product at the right time and they executed well. Now it makes billions. All the other stuff is most likely incidental.
How many successful companies do the exact opposite of Google? Have you done any research to determine which company succeeded: in spite of, because of, or no effect, from these models? What about the - surely - hundreds or thousands of companies that failed with Google (or not Google's) model?
Trying to imitate success seems to turn into a cargo cult. For whatever reason people seem to shutoff their brains when talking about this.
Most of the attributes in question (office environment, perks, etc) are just semantics around the product/market. The semantics matter a lot especially when your team is critically dependent on a high-turnover potential staff and require talented smart people to stick with your company, or they need an environment that helps them be creative and think out hard problems.
It's similar to questions of programming language, infrastructure options, etc. They are important supportive aspects to the core business but mostly the core of the business could still operate even if those supportive aspect were mediocre/non-optimal - just not as effectively. On a longer time scale that stuff starts to matter in a highly-competitive market.
Most startups and small businesses don't really have those issues, or at least they aren't critical at that stage of the company when the core business hasn't been figured out. So emulating them at a high cost is a bad idea.
The context of everything is important. Sadly most advice dolled out in business books is extracted and formalized without considering the context of where it worked and why.
>How many successful companies do the exact opposite of Google? Have you done any research to determine which company succeeded: in spite of, because of, or no effect, from these models? What about the - surely - hundreds or thousands of companies that failed with Google (or not Google's) model?
Do you know of any examples offhand? Definitely agree that it's a virtuous cycle of talent -> revenue - > perks -> talent
>Trying to imitate success seems to turn into a cargo cult.
The model of trying to land smart people with perks like kitchens, foosball tables, Aeron chairs and all the rest and hope that they come up with something that makes lots of money was what many companies tried in the first Dot Com boom.
I don't think that's quite right, though the message ends up being the same.
It's not the genetics that matter, it's the years of training leading up to the current workout routine, not to mention the pro athlete's knowledge and understanding of his/her own body, as well as the dedicated free time to put into a workout that needs that kind of attention in order to succeed.
When you have all day, and you like working out, you can do things that don't normally make sense and still see results.
This is exactly correct. If you have a printing press that is dumping a couple of billon dollars into the basement every quarter in spite of what you're spending, you have the luxury of trying all sorts of novel things from a business perspective.
That said, the margins on the search advertising business are shrinking, and have been for years now. You can cover for that by eliminating profligate spending and then eventually you can't. I think Ruth is the right person to handle that transition but its going to hurt in terms of people feeling that "the magic is gone."
When that happens, Google is going to have to start rewarding operational efficiency gains at least as strongly as they currently reward popular science project type gains. And then it will be very interesting to see how they change and if the era of "but Google offers its employees ..." will be over.
Not only is the magic gone, but the boring, day to day fabric of functionality is gone.
Have you tried to really search for anything with google in the past five years ?
I don't mean meandering, aimless, consumer-centric searches like "new fitness watch" where any result tangentally related is useful ... I mean a specific, meaningful, concise search with multiple keywords, all of which are key words ... and the resulting pages do not contain one or more of those words.
I know all about allinsite: and quotation marks and so on ... those are, as far as I can tell, randomly interpreted by google. Who knows if they even work, ever.
A front page item on HN a few days ago asked what people would pay $1000 per month for ... I would pay that to have search with full control over search results with logical operators that actually worked.
I know exactly what you mean. "Half" "of" "my" "searches" "look" "like" "this" "these" "days". I can understand throwing out one of many keywords when I'm down on page 6, but when I search with only 4 terms and the very first result has 2 words s̶t̶r̶u̶c̶k̶ o̶u̶t̶ I start to wonder who exactly this search box is for.
True, and one other thing I've noticed is e.g. "Half of my searches" can bring say 200,000 results, but "Half of my" yields 50,000. A few other weird things that's been there for years and nobody seems to care. As long as consumer-level searches work and ads are clickable, Google's clock is ticking.
> A front page item on HN a few days ago asked what people would pay $1000 per month for
Somewhat meta, but I cannot find this item on https://hn.algolia.com or using a Google search ("site: news.ycombinator.com $1000 for") can you post a link if you have it?
i share the same experience. i have been using google to find articles that share a specific opinion so i do very specific searches in hopes of finding editorial opinion pieces. what i get back are lame how-to guides and wikipedia articles.
Earlier they had a blog search option which I used a lot to find pages written in a personalised style, but they shelved this. Now there is no way to find such pages under the current system other than trying yor luck with searching for site:blogspot.com and site:wordpress.com; but these two blog hosts are not even half the universe of all the blogs out there.
What I do now is to create a Google Custom Search Engine with all my RSS feed subscriptions; it resembles this earlier feature as I feed it lots of personal blogs that I read, but it is not even close to the earlier blogsearch.
Similarly there was a discussion/forum search which was also useful; that too was removed.
For those that are not aware of the reference here, you will enjoy reading Steve Blank's post entitled "The Elves Leave Middle Earth - Sodas Are No Longer Free."
Wow, thank you for the article, I've never read it before.
This happened at the Bike Cooperative I used to work at; everything was informal, but we were able to focus on weird types of bikes and recycling projects that were interesting to us and subsequently we'd dedicate hours to do them. Unsurprisingly, the management came in, and we were wrench monkeys like everybody else; not so say that we were whiny because we didn't feel like "special snowflakes. We lost freedom to focus on our strengths in the cooperative.
>When that happens, Google is going to have to start rewarding operational efficiency gains at least as strongly as they currently reward popular science project type gains. And then it will be very interesting to see how they change and if the era of "but Google offers its employees ..." will be over.
One has only to look at Microsoft to see an example of what might happen. Things were very carefree there as well back in the '90s during their heyday when growth seemed limitless.
It's also interesting to contrast Google / MS with Amazon, where Bezos has kept a tight rein on operational efficiency all along. They probably won't suffer as much when they reach their growth ceiling.
Agreed, and studying companies that have come through the transition to the other side is very useful. Particularly telling is how people describe what they "like" about work.
Do people in Google still think the magic is there? It seems like a great place if you want stability and a nice salary, but obviously (unless you're in the comparatively tiny X dept) you're going to be a very small cog in a huge machine?
I work at Google Cambridge, and I'm easily working 50+ hours a week. I work in Technical Infrastructure (on our storage systems in our data centers) and one of my 20% projects was to design and architect the underpinnings of what an Android Product Manager has claimed to be one the most important features of Android N (file based encryption), the open source incarnation of which (ext4 encryption) has turned into a generic file system encryption mechanism that has enabled encryption for f2fs and soon ubifs, and has inspired the btrfs and xfs folks to look at file system based encryption.
For my "official" 80% project, in order to get approval to go into the planning phase for a complex, multi-year project, we had to demonstrate how it would save hundreds of millions of dollars on an ongoing basis, and show how the TCO savings would be many multiples over the software engineering costs to implement said project. So in Technical Infrastructure, we do very much care about operational efficiencies --- that's how Google Compute Engine (which is driven by TI) has been able to cut its prices and inspire the market to follow suit.
And this is not new, by the way --- the whole time (coming up on 7 years) that I've been at Google, we've always been very interested in bringing costs down, and the team was amply rewarded when we rolled out ext4 across the production fleet, because we could accurately quantify the performance benefits, and how that translated to dollars saved to the company.
And so no, I'm not bored. In fact, one of the great things about Google is that I have flexibility to do things that help move the industry, both in Google products and in the Open Source world. This includes serving on program committees, working with a graduate student on a paper which we've submitted to the Usenix FAST conference (fingers crossed, we'll hear soon if it's been accepted), do presentations of my work at LinuxCon, etc. etc. Of course, I probably should be carving out some time to hit the gym, just for personal health reasons....
I just love the dissonance of "I'm easily working 50+ hours a week." and "one of my 20% projects".
When you say it "You'll be working 40 hrs a week and to be successful you'll need to spend an additional 25% of your time coming up with other stuff that helps us." it doesn't sound quite so magical :-)
That said, when I worked there I quickly realized that with no trouble at all I could spend all my waking hours in the office playing with the neat things that are made available to employees. It doesn't feel like overtime when its something you would do in your free time anyway.
The sticky bit is that you don't get profit participation in the financial upside of those extra projects.
Sure, but a lot of these things are things I was doing anyway when I was working for MIT and earning a five figure salary. When I moved out to a startup (VA Linux Systems), I more than doubled my salary; and when I went to Google I took a significant step up in compensation over my previous job at IBM --- and yes, I'm still doing the things that I love to do.
So it's not a matter of doing things because it's needed to be successful (although they won't hurt when I'm next up for Promo, I'm sure), it's the fact that I get to help influence the industry. As far as profit participation is concerned, I'm paid plenty enough to be comfortable, and I'm used to the concept of the financial upside coming indirectly from what my open source activities (e.g., ext4 maintainer, being on the program committee of ATC and FAST conferences, etc.) do for my personal brand. Yes, I'm not going to have the money of say, a Peter Thiel or a Larry Ellison. I also don't have to worry about having all of that money turning me into an *sshole, either. :-)
Am I aware that I'm trading off potentially being able to earn even more income in exchange for more security and the freedom to choose what I do (and the fact that I can find choices that help out the open source projects that I care about _and_ which result in benefits to my company is something I consider a feature, and part of the value I can bring to my employer)? Of course. Sure, I could probably earn more by working for a high frequency trading firm. But I'd lose a lot of freedom. More importantly, what working on moving the poles of the US financial system to the right-half plane would do to my soul isn't worth the extra money it might bring in.
Last year, when I was attending our Storage Infrastructure roadmap/planning meeting, it was very humbling because there lots of people in the room that were way smarter than me. Which is the other really great thing about working at Google; unless you're someone like Jeff Dean, there will be lots of people smarter than you that you can learn from, and the default assumption that you can make is that your colleagues will be very talented.... so I'm not sure how much of an outlier I really am!
Already 5+ years ago, I talked to a director at a recruitment company in London that loved Google, because they were easy pickings to find good candidates to place in the roles he had because they were all - in his words - disillusioned - and at the same time the "Google" on their resumes still made his clients all starry-eyed. He saw recruiting people out of Google as easy money.
I first went to work at Apple in January of 1988, at the end of the era that Woz described as making whatever they felt like and throwing it over the fence to ravening crowds who were throwing bales of money over the other direction.
Some time in the first few weeks I was there, my department head convened a staff meeting to explain that they were going to try a new concept that Apple had never tried before. "It's called a 'budget'," she said. "We try to guess ahead of time what our plans are going to actually cost."
At some point someone asked if that meant that regular meetings would no longer be catered. The answer was, "of course not. We have to have some way to get people to show up."
What Punch said, basically its a maturing of the Internet Advertising market, the early enthusiasm for lots of metrics on engagement being dampened by a gradual understanding of click fraud. This is reflected in Google's financials as a falling 'cost per click' (what Google gets for an ad click).
The other factor is that Google search has been slowly losing its quality edge on its competitors and so services like Microsoft's Bing start developing more significant inroads, the combination of more market share and higher CPCs on Microsoft's service lead it to be profitable last year[1]. And the reason is in part because Microsoft can preferentially send search traffic to their properties, but it is also tied to the fact that consumers don't then switch their search provider later.
To counter-act that Google has been paying more and more money to third parties to send search traffic their way (this expense is called 'traffic acquisition costs') and Google was horrified when Oracle's lawyer disclosed that they were paying Apple a billion dollars a year for their search traffic[2]. They paid millions to Mozilla to send their search traffic to Google [3] and had a material dip in traffic revenue when Mozilla cancelled that deal[4]. What the author of the article in [4] did not realize is that all of Yahoo!'s search traffic is in fact served by the Bing index and servers. Yahoo! hasn't had a native search service since they agreed to send it all to Microsoft. So Bing+Yahoo! market share is really just Bing market share. That money paid, their TAC, comes right out of the profit margin for their ads
At the end of the day this is neither good nor bad, search is being commoditized. And as it commoditizes that puts pressure on margins since discrimination based on cost always puts pressure on margins. Eventually Bing and Google will be equally expensive from an advertiser point of view and the one with the best operational efficiency will make the most profit. Neither of them will be able to use "excess profits" to fund moonshots.
That is why it is so critically important for Google to find additional viable businesses to augment its search advertising revenue.
The current road leads to a very un-fun place to work, long hours (maximize work done for salary paid), few benefits (reducing costs), and little room for new development. They won't end there, it's like saying if you drive west in the US and never turn eventually you'll drown in the Pacific ocean, it's true but there is always a turn before that point. But if Google of 2003 was one end of the spectrum, Google is inexorably moving toward the other end. Ruth is there to make sure what's left is still a viable business that deserves a high stock price.
Here is Google's net profit margin for past 4 years [1]:
2013: 22.9%
2014: 21.4%
2015: 21.7%
2016 (9 months): 22.0%
It doesn't look like profit margins are under strong downward pressure. But a better metric would probably be 'revenue per search query' - I don't have any recent statistics, but if Bing can close that gap it will reduce Google's margins when bidding for search traffic from Apple and Firefox (and maybe force Google to increase the percentage of AdSense revenue they give to website publishers). But even then, Google will still have three significant advantages to avoid the complete erosion of their margins: (1) Android; (2) Chrome; (3) The Google brand (I'm sure that more people try to change the default search engine on their new Windows computer than try to change the default search engine on their new Android phone).
Also, Bing would probably not be profitable if it was a separate company and had to pay Microsoft for the privilege of being the default search engine on Windows. Bing+Yahoo seems to be growing market share, but I wouldn't expect them to completely close the gap with Google in the next 20 years because Google's ownership of assets like YouTube, AdSense, Google Maps, Android and Chrome.
Google has all my search history, a list of all the AdSense websites I visit, my YouTube history, my location history, ten years of my email history and my Play Store purchase history. And for any given search query I perform, Google can access a larger pool of similar search click history from other users. How will Bing ever overcome all these disadvantages?
It is so much more nuanced than that. That number is essentially manufactured for the street (and before anyone jumps down my throat about being some sort of conspiracy nut let me explain).
Early in Google's life there was an article which asked the question "Is Google's gross margin 100%?" It went on to observe that Google had overhead, staff, facilities, and monthly recurring costs like electricity and phone bills, but every advertisement they 'served' cost them essentially no delta in their overhead, so their "cost of goods" when looking at the business through the lens of the goods economy[1] was zero. And any revenue they generated by selling a "click" (their stand in for a widget) was 100% gross profit. As a result, using old school goods economy accounting rules, profit is entirely a function of how many clicks they "ship" and there are many knobs to adjust which boost how many clicks they ship. They include, but are not limited to, putting more ads on their own pages and buying traffic to point at their pages with ads on them.
But when you evaluate their business using the principles of information economics[1] you see that they do have costs and their core product's value is eroding.
To understand that statement, you have to ask "what does Google actually sell to advertisers?" An 'ad unit' or an 'ad word' is the name but what is it really? My claim is that what they really sell is a piece of very valuable information that is hard to get. They sell "this person has just looked for this good or service, now who wants to respond?" They create that information by providing a portal that people can write in a question.
This "solves" for advertisers their biggest ask, that a consumer looks at their advertisement exactly when they need the good or service that advertisement is promoting. You can put an ad for a sports car in a magazine about cars, you can put an ad for a sports car on a television show about cars, but that pales in comparison to the idea of putting your ad for a sports car in front of someone who has just asked "What's the best sports car?".
I think that it is pretty easy to see the value there to advertisers, they would rather spend money advertising to people looking for their products then advertising to everyone and hoping that some of them want their products. What is more is that it works well and that is why it has become a major force in advertising. It is also an interesting measure of the value too advertisers.
Advertisers will constantly evaluate what it costs to advertise against product sales or market penetration or market visibility. They have a limited budget to spend and they want to make it count. That sets up the traditional economic forces which demands they allocate their ad spend capital wisely to get the most impact. Google, unlike a television network or magazine, brought into wide use the notion of an auction that happens at the decision point, between potential advertisers on what they would pay to have their ad shown, and where it would be shown, in the search results for a given query. In an information economic sense this gives us the fundamental value of the information that Google sells.
The key being that all of the knobs that Google has at its disposal will eventually be turned to their maximum point, and if CPC keeps falling their profit margin will too. Because Microsoft's CPC number is going up their margins will continue to increase. At Google's current rates they will eventually be buying so much traffic and putting so many ad slots on their own sites that non-"free" services will appeal to more and more people which reduces the number of eye-balls on a Google ad which reduces its value to advertisers still further. If Google reaches the point where they are no longer able to adjust their traffic mix to achieve their numbers, they will be in a very tight spot.
[1] The "goods economy" is the system of directing capital into the production of goods. The "information economy" is the system of directing capital toward the disclosure of information.
I agree with your analysis that Google basically sells "this person has just looked for this good or service, now who wants to respond?". But you seem to be ignoring the large, persistent information advantage that Google has over Bing.
Consider 3 scenarios:
1. Person A just searched for "What's the best sports car?".
2. Person B just searched for "What's the best sports car?". He's a 45-year old man who works for an insurance company in New York. He has a wife and three kids, but he recently started seeing a 28-year-old psychology grad student in Chicago twice a month. Two years ago he bought a $6,000 watch for his wife's birthday.
3. Person C just searched for "What's the best sports car?". He's a 23-year old man who lives with his parents and does not have a wife or girlfriend. He works for Walmart and has just been promoted to manager. Nine months ago his friend bought a Subaru WRX.
Now consider what types of advertisers will bid for each search. And perhaps more importantly, what types of ads and landing pages will be offered for each search. Clearly, having detailed personal information is a significant advantage when deciding which ads to show to a user. Google has that advantage and doesn't look like giving it up any time soon.
However, I can think of two pieces of evidence against this argument: (1) Bing was able to outbid Google to be the default search engine on Firefox; (2) Outbrain and Taboola regularly outbid Google AdSense to advertise on Time, Forbes, Bloomberg, etc. In both of these cases I would have expected Google to prevail, so perhaps Google's personal-information advantage is not as strong as I think. Or perhaps Google isn't taking full advantage it.
I don't disagree, but consider that person B is a 45 year old man working for an insurance company he is probably running Windows 10, and Microsoft knows quite a bit about him.
My point is that in my opinion you are over valuing Google's user information advantage. Most purchasing and buying habit information is collected using web page based analytics to an advertiser rather than coming from Google directly.
When Blekko was operating at a consumer search engine we got a great inside look at what tools advertisers have at their disposal to "qualify" their ad bids. If you send the query's source IP to the ad network when you request an ad they match that up with all sorts of cookies and beacons that have fired off that IP address. None of that comes from Google, it comes from all the trackers that are running all over the Internet.
Yes, I could be overvaluing Google's access to all that personal data - particularly since I own shares in Google.
I wonder if there is some concrete way to measure that value. For example, imagine if we could find the "revenue per US user per month" for Bing and Google Search (ie. the search engine part of Google). Would that say anything about the value of personal data?
>The key being that all of the knobs that Google has at its disposal will eventually be turned to their maximum point
I wonder what this would exactly look like. As a side note, I wonder what would happen if for example an economic collapse happened and Google's ad revenue was significantly reduced.
I see early signs of knobs at the extreme in the news, harder to get projects approved, people being told they can't do 20% projects any more, groups losing people that don't get replaced, web properties that are hard to monetize (I'm looking at you finance.google.com) getting starved.
I would expect that once a quarter there is a meeting which goes like this, "Ok folks our profit margin is going to be 22% and our revenue is $xxx. That leave $yy in expense we have to get rid off or revenue we have to develop. Who wants to go first?" We've seen both efforts on the outside, more adds on search pages, pay to be in the 'Google Shopping' bar, Etc. for revenue enhancement, and cancelling things like Reader, Wallet, Glass, and other projects or ideas that haven't added to the bottom line. You can see the moves in Youtube (the latest being you can't keep a video running in the background tab unless you have "Youtube Red" as an example) to either get profitable or die.
As for cash flow? I can tell you that I was there when the Mortgage Crisis hit and it scared the crap out of them. That crisis killed TechStops[1] and that did way more damage than the financial crisis did.
[1] Techstops were Google's tech help on demand group that, when they were employees, was a really awesome service. When it got switched to a vendor it really lost its utility.
> This is reflected in Google's financials as a falling 'cost per click' (what Google gets for an ad click).
But what is not known is the cost of a _similar_ click. Since the number of clicks increases dramatically quarter over quarter, it could be that it's the new clicks that are bringing the cost down.
Chuck, just want to say your detail and insightful comments are a tremendous asset to the community!
I do have to disagree though: MSFT has office and windows as major cash cows, maybe azure will also start turning some big profit in 2017 as well (tbd). So they can afford those r&d style projects without nearly as much risk as "Alphabet". I do agree with your assessment of goog though: the heat is turning up and I don't doubt belt tightening is their future.
I agree, Google really needs their version of 'office' or to make their cloud offering competitive in order to survive long term. I see them trying to extract more and more revenue from Android as one of their strategies.
I hope they strip the stupid tape over their fridges that cover the sodas "because a 200-calorie coconut water drink is SO MUCH BETTER for you than a ZERO CALORIE soda."
I don't buy it. Many companies are able to get the perks, culture, and autonomy right without being a multi-billion dollar company. It does enable Google to do certain things (like moonshot projects) that smaller companies can't do, but a lot of the perks I've seen are replicated in other companies.
In fact, I think your comment "Google doesn't do what it does to be successful, it does it because it is successful" is completely ignoring how Google came to be successful in the first place, which was doing what you're saying it does because it's successful. Reading something like "How Google Works" goes over this exact thing in detail.
I tried to clarify the wording. I'm specifically trying to call out the structure of Google's management and the general way they approach problems.
For example, even within the profitable Google portion of the business, they often have many competing projects. There will be competing search features, competing chat applications, competing cloud services. Google will make big speculative bets or internally competitive bets because it can afford to just let people build things and see what happens. Google, as a company, doesn't really seem to have any idea of what most individual engineers are doing week to week.
Many companies can't do that. If you are a medium-sized company you probably don't have the market position or revenue to afford to be unfocused.
> Google, as a company, doesn't really seem to have any idea of what most individual engineers are doing week to week.
Correct... but also correct if you replace Google by any company.
I've worked from zero management company (ala. Valve) to large fixed hierarchical structure (government).
The company never knows what people are actually doing. If it tries to find it, people will either game the system or waste time to justify they're doing instead of doing it.
>For example, even within the profitable Google portion of the business, they often have many competing projects. There will be competing search features, competing chat applications, competing cloud services. Google will make big speculative bets or internally competitive bets because it can afford to just let people build things and see what happens. Google, as a company, doesn't really seem to have any idea of what most individual engineers are doing week to week.
This sounds exactly like how Microsoft works. They (famously) even had 2 versions of Windows 95.
Yet, free markets beat out top-down managed economies because they have competing teams seeking to provide the same services.
Tech is, to an extent, a winner-takes-all market. If you build out two competing products internally, in the long run, it will cost you less then building one product, and having an outside competitor fight you for market share, by building that second product.
Case in point: I'm sure that Facebook would have loved it if one of their teams built Whatsapp. For 20 billion dollars, they could have funded a hundred competing internal products.
For most companies, having two competing products internally does not also prevent you from having two competing products externally. There's no law preventing an outsider from starting a competitor just because you've already got two alternatives.
Whatsapp is a great example - Facebook already had Facebook Messenger, and Facebook Chat, internally. Google had GChat and Hangouts and whatever else they're working on these days. It didn't prevent the outside company with half a dozen employees from eating their lunch.
The parent's point is that because of their core markets in search & social networking, Google and Facebook have the luxury of no major competitors, and so they can afford the internal competition to advance the state of these markets. The market structure came first, not the corporate structure. And if you try that in a market with few barriers to entry (like mobile chat, before everyone had built their network effects), it's just as likely that a competitor outside the company will eat the market, not one inside the company. Probably more likely, since internal projects are hamstrung by things like executive approvals, PR worries, and potential legal issues while startups can just take their product to market and see where the market takes it.
No, it's not a free market. They also don't try to poach other teams' employees with higher salary offers, push bad press about the other team, try to be ramen-profitable, etc.
But you can get some of the benefits of a free market by having teams work on multiple solutions to one problem. You can also squander them by making the wrong high-level decisions.
Pretty much _every_ google product is in maintenance mode from when it is first released, and never improved much.
This may be part of the strategy, those that somehow turn into 'profit' are the ones that actually have full-time engineering assigned to them, and get improved? I couldn't say.
For example that I ran into recently, Google Custom Search/Site Search theoretically _has_ an API for creating/modifying custom searches... but it's completely inaccessible, because the only auth method it supports is one that no longer exists. I suspect it is still running on a server somewhere with zero traffic though. If you Google around, you can see for at least a year, _some_ people (prob those with the paying 'Site Search', not the free 'Custom Search') have managed to get answers from this from google support -- the answer is "There is an internal feature request ticket to add OAuth 2 support to this API, but I can't give you an ETA".
It may end up that even Google can't afford to be unfocused - if they do end up losing their search engine ad revenue because it and standard websites become less relevant it'll probably be what's pointed at.
You can see their disorganization in their software and products - letting ideas like Google Voice that were ahead of their time languish until iMessage comes and takes over, lots of failed software launches etc.
The post I responded to mentioned (and naturally I mentioned this as well) perks, autonomy, structure, etc... and then says that the missing piece is billions of dollars in ad revenue.
So I pointed out that many companies are able to get these things right (/imitate Google), without billions of dollars in ad revenue. It's not the ad revenue. That's my contention.
What I meant is that "perks" are just an outcome of a certain organizational structure designed around a set of values.
There are multiple structures that allow for "perks", or are designed for autonomy. And, as you said, others have produced structures with similar results or based in similar values.
But, he's talking about the specific structures at Google.
>Many companies are able to get the perks, culture, and autonomy right without being a multi-billion dollar company.
You're right but I understood what Periodic intended to explain. Unfortunately, he phrased it as "billions in ad revenue" instead of a less common metric of "profit-per-employee".
If the company generates enough profit-per-employee, it can afford to pay for lavish perks.
Consider 2 different companies' revenue,income,#employees:
Walmart: $482b, $24b, #2300000 -- ~$10k per employee
Google: $74b, $19b, # 69952 -- ~$276k per employee
Take one example of a perk such as free catered food which is estimated to cost $20-per-employee-per-day.[1] For Walmart to offer this perk multiplied by 2.3 million employees, it would cost ~$11 billion which is almost half the $24b profit. Google's calculation for 69k employees is ~$349 million which is less than 2% of the profit. And the free food is just one perk... there are also massages, haircuts, laundry, daycare, etc.
Yes you don't have to have a billion in revenue to offer perks like that. SAS Institute of North Carolina in the 1990s didn't yet reach $1 billion in revenue but they offered lavish Silicon Valley style perks.[2] They could afford it because they sold statistics software with high margins (profits). Although they are a private company, we can safely assume they are generating much more profit per employee than Walmart.
So, if we have a hypothetical medium-sized company that has a revenue of $400 million with income of $100m ... to afford lavish perks, we need to generate that $100m with ~360 employees or fewer (Google benchmark). If it requires hiring 9500 employees to generate $100m (Walmart benchmark), it means we will have to pinch pennies and charge the employees for each pen taken from the supply room.
Direction of cause-effect: create a great high-margin business so you pay for free gourmet food.
Attempting the reverse of subsidizing $20 for each employee doesn't mean you'll end up with a high-margin business.
We can generalize the free food case study to other "Google perks/methodologies/culture" to see if we really have the direction of cause & effect correct.
So I understand what you're saying here, and it makes sense. At the same time, I see career section after career section offering the same kind of perks with much smaller companies. Maybe it's not 3 meals of gourmet food, but free catered lunches, great 401k matching, unlimited vacation, great health and dental benefits. I'm not saying the perks are matched tit-for-tat, but I still stand by my statement that you don't have to be a multi-billion dollar company to afford those perks.
Likewise, Walmart can offer those types of perks. Just not to people working on the floor or in distribution centers.
> I see career section after career section offering the same kind of perks with much smaller companies. [...] you don't have to be a multi-billion dollar company to afford those perks.
Many of these smaller companies are VC-funded startups that have zero revenue and are burning VC money to provide these perks.
These are by no means the norm outside of Silicon Valley VC funded companies where they have become table stakes. Good health and dental in many cases but not the rest. And unlimited vacation, where offered is, even ignoring the more cynical interpretations mostly about eliminating liabilities especially under California law.
Yes. Many management books and theories confuse correlation with causality.
Another common example, "Companies with happier employees are more successful." But perhaps causality is the other way, "Employees become happy when their companies succeed."
Enter the stock market and suddenly the cargo culting that results from causality mixups can successfully increase market capitalization for a while as long as enough people literally buy into the shared misconception.
It must be hard to think straight in a domain where one of the most visible success metrics can be so misleading.
The most pointed quote in the article is “No one wants to face the reality that this is an advertising company with a bunch of hobbies.”
But without search, without Gmail, without Chrome, without Android, without the moonshots and all the "hobbies" Google's brand would wither, and its access to data at massive scale would be crippled, and its access to eyeballs would be curtailed, and the talent would walk. Others have built advertising businesses, but Google's dominance in advertising couldn't occur without the product mix.
All of Google's products are complementary products that create lock-in.
For instance both Chrome and Android have been created with the purpose of controlling the underlying platform that people use, in order for them to not be at the mercy of the other platform owners, like Apple or Microsoft. And it worked.
This is very obvious to anybody with an interest in how microeconomics works. For example this is why open source can exist in a world where people need to struggle to put food on the table. It's basic knowledge: complementary goods and services are meant to increase demand for your cash cows.
"All of Google's products are complementary products that create lock-in"
I disagree. Chrome was created to be a standards based browser, Android to unify the different phone operating systems circa 2004. I picked Google products because they allowed me to get out if I needed to. Gmail provides IMAP, POP. Docs and Music let you take out your data as needed. Google intentionally creates a way to get your data out. All of these things require foresight and work to pull off.
Does the lock-in exist because no one else is offering the same service? Potentially. But the intention of the company when they created these services was to create the best service, not a lock-in service.
Well, actually Android is the most friendly mobile platform for ad-blockers, or other hacks.
What you're complaining about is Chrome for Android, but then again Android is also the only mobile platform supported by a real Firefox implementation that has plugins, including ad-blockers.
You're talking about rooting the phone, I guess you want /etc/hosts or something, but you know, even on the desktop that kind of solution requires sudo rights. This one is entirely about security and really, Android is not that hard to root.
And even though I'm a Firefox user on the desktop, I've also used Chrome with AdBlock Plus and then uBlock Origin and never had any problems.
> You're talking about rooting the phone, I guess you want /etc/hosts or something, but you know, even on the desktop that kind of solution requires sudo rights. This one is entirely about security and really, Android is not that hard to root.
You don't have to root your phone. You can install an Open Source VPS app which filters ads, no root required (and data stays on your phone).
I've been using plugins on Firefox on Android for a lot longer than that -- there might not be so many plugins, but many of the important ones were there.
For example, AdBlock Plus added mobile support in version 1.1.2, supporting Fennec 1.0 Beta 6, released 2009/12/12.
I've audited literally every line of code in it myself and it's not a novelty. It works and works correctly. You're just wrong--and desperate, because fictional nerd cred, to not be wrong. It's an ugly look. Be better.
My mother doesn't have a smartphone. If she did, I would install it for her and be done with it.
An android project that got its first commit 6 months ago is called a novelty whether you like it or not. You're just refusing to admit it, because fictional nerd cred, to not be wrong. It's an ugly look. Be better.
I use an adblocker on Android all the time, and I've never bothered to figure out how to root a phone. It was not at all difficult. Maybe it's hard with Chrome but that's no big deal - just use Firefox.
Competition is good. You can make a standards based browser and then add additional features that others can't or won't provide. Building it in house gives them more control. Do you think Mozilla would have developed V8 if google just threw money at them?
He's got a great prescient paragraph at the bottom:
> Sun is the loose cannon of the computer industry. Unable to see past their raging fear and loathing of Microsoft, they adopt strategies based on anger rather than self-interest. Sun’s two strategies are (a) make software a commodity by promoting and developing free software (Star Office, Linux, Apache, Gnome, etc), and (b) make hardware a commodity by promoting Java, with its bytecode architecture and WORA. OK, Sun, pop quiz: when the music stops, where are you going to sit down? Without proprietary advantages in hardware or software, you’re going to have to take the commodity price, which barely covers the cost of cheap factories in Guadalajara, not your cushy offices in Silicon Valley.
Indeed Sun got eaten alive by commodity hardware while not having any viable strategy to make money on software.
On a side note, I'm glad to see Joel has re-themed his blog posts but kept them hosted at the same URLs.
Many of these posts seem timeless and often very prescient.
In fact, at the bottom of this one, he points out the strategic dead-end Sun was heading down with commoditizing software while also making/promoting Java that commoditized their hardware...
Because antitrust law is made of words that mean things. There is no field, anywhere, in which Google has the monopolistic position necessary, or has been shown to be in an oligopolic group necessary, to invoke antitrust law against the company. Not search, not ads, not mobile, not e-mail, not anywhere. They have competition, and healthy competition, in literally every field.
I answered the breathless and silly question you asked here instead of punching in your surely-not-Google search engine of choice with exactly the level of seriousness with which I regarded it. HTH. HAND.
> Google's dominance in advertising couldn't occur without the product mix.
This is absolutely accurate.
Google is what it is because google.com is the best search engine in the world and because GMail is the best web-based mail client -- free or otherwise.
The interesting thing about Google though, is their seemingly humble roots and how quickly they rose to billions in ad revenue. I still remember when they didn't exist. I believe that kind of quick, meteoric rise is a relatively new phenomena. A company of Google's scale would've taken 100 years to build, 50 years ago.
So if they'd started in 1966 it wouldn't have been built until 2066? Good job they waited until the nineties so they could leapfrog their alternate destiny.
Actually, yes. That's exactly correct. You can probably directly correlate their growth with the rise of widely available broadband internet access for homes in the 90s.
The best business practices to emulate come from successful in boring and fiercely competitive industries, where you can see if those practices are really making a difference. When a company has a single massively profitable product that's mostly protected from competition, it's hard to know if anything they're doing makes sense at all. But boring companies don't make exciting Fast Company headlines.
That's because causation is really hard to reason about. Often times it's not that A causes B or B causes A, but C causes both, or A and B causes each other at the same time.
No. You're correct, causation is complicated, A-Z and all the greek letters too are part of a single cause. But the situation is worse than that.
The reason humans are superstitious is that we don't seek answers, we seek narratives. We seek to explain without disrupting what we already believe. We might see the real cause and effect and rewrite what we see to fit what we want.
> Google doesn't work the way it does to be successful. It works that way because it is successful.
Correct, and commonly the case. There is a corollary as well - often the company (not commenting on G specifically) does not know precisely why they are/were a success, i.e. what very specific details were important vs other specific details that look important, but aren't.
This lack of insight happens all the time and company culture can become fixed on things that they did as they became successful but were red herrings. A kind of cargo cult effect. One example I would give from Google is the early focus on "top school, top grades" "A" players as hiring filters - turns out that was useless, or worse. Kudos for figuring that out - but there are probaby at least a dozen other strong beliefs cooked in to the culture that are simply coincidental to success, not essential.
You're absolutely right. There may not even be causality but they have to evolve together. You can't start a company and try to be like google. The food staff would be a primary expense and that would sink your company and turn off investors. You care so you conduct the M&M Project - things like that. It evolves with your success and keeps people around and interested.
Most tech companies by far succeeded because they were in the right place at the right time - But post-rationalization can make anyone look like a genius; and the illusion can last forever.
This is true. Google founders were extremely thrifty in the early days, before they started making money. They didn't compromise, but they didn't spend lavishly either.
Big companies seem to step in the same puddle, every time they try to set up one of these "breakthrough incubator" projects. They pick fascinating projects. They hire lots of smart people and give them great autonomy. But they inadvertently set up incentives that lead to the repeated creation of LINS (lavishly impractical non-solutions). And then the plug gets pulled.
I think the key problem is that the research team starts optimizing for periodic demo days with the boss. That's a sheltered environment in which clever (and easy to demonstrate) technical features are rewarded, and real-world annoyances involving customers, social norms, regulators, pricing, etc. are put off for "later." Not only are ecosystem problems not addressed, they aren't even vigorously considered.
The technology behind Google Glass was quite clever and some variant of that idea may eventually work. But what arrived on the market was LINS to an extreme. You can find similar failures in Detroit's concept cars, Paul Allen's first go at Vulcan, Xerox Parc's grossly overpriced STAR, etc.
I'm not sure how to fix this. Within the big-company budgeting system, it takes a daring CEO to allow super-innovative projects to break the usual rules about desired five-year ROIs. Once such a CEO takes a stand, it's really hard for him/her to get out of the way.
Suppose these CEOs do miraculously set up a system that approximates the scrappy, minimum-viable experiments of a true startup, with the marketplace being the true boss. That still is problematic. When a big company is pushing MVPs into the marketplace, the public scrutiny and scorn makes it really hard to recover from an awkward start -- and keep iterating in peace.
I'd say it's an unsolvable problem, and that's good!
What breakthrough projects are good at is pushing the envelope and inventing whole new technologies. These technologies are then experimented with by smaller firms a few years later, and the winners of this scramble bring the technology to market.
This is a spaghetti against the wall kind of market research; I think it's impossible to solve the problem of how to identify a new market and win it over. You can definitely have an informed approach that reduces risk, but it's not a technical problem that can be systematically solved.
There will always be risk where there is reward. If it was possible to systematically identify new business opportunities, there would be many more players in the entrepreneurship business, and commensurately lower profits. In fact, an "informed approach" can sometimes lead you to discount real opportunities as too pie-in-the-sky.
We need different risk propositions to make an economy with more niches for different kinds of people. I don't think the difficulty of identifying new breakthrough businesses (presumably with breakthrough profits) is a problem at all.
I don't think it's a particularly wise idea for big companies to try to emulate startups or startup incubators.
A key thing about startups is that they don't have much riding on them. If they fail, you can just dissolve the company, and the worst thing that happens is that people lose money and people lose jobs.
If a big corporation tries to do the same thing, there are a lot more encumbrances that elevate the risk levels quite a bit. There's a mothership that wants to protect its reputation, there are internal social pressures to start throwing money at problems, there is risk of tort situations that originated in the "startup" having wide-ranging repercussions throughout the company. No sane company is going to look at that minefield and conclude that it really is safe to sit back and let people do the "move fast and break things" thing without having to worry about meddling suits. The risk/reward for shareholders just isn't there.
This is exactly what Alphabetization is meant to solve. A federation of companies can more effectively allow individual divisions to operate like startups. Additionally, it's a lot easier to push experiments when they're not attached to the Google brand.
Personally, I think Google should just funnel all the profits into GV.
Ah, but my point was that they don't operate like startups. They may adopt a lot of startups' superficial trappings, but in their first three years, they aren't sharpening their objective by being cash-constrained and exposed to the evolving tastes and distastes of the outside ecosystem. They're semi-generously funded while building whatever will amuse Sergey and Larry. That's creates LINS problems, again and again.
I agree that they don't operate like startups enough, but it is in fact the goal of Alphabetization.
You're right that it's not working well enough. That's why I think they'd be better off simply making GV the largest private equity/venture capital firm in the world.
Google could allow a small group to work on something with use of Google's full software stack, and HR etc, but host it in google cloud (or proxy through google cloud so it looks like it's in google cloud) and don't mention it's from google (and segregate the user data away from google) If it gets traction, you can reveal it's a google project or fold the learnings into appropriate google projects or spin it off (although spin off is more complex if you did build it on top of the usual google stack)
Allow something like ten people years and a reasonable amount of hardware, and when you run out of that, come back for more budget or make revenue.
I haven't worked at google, but from experience at large companies, having the basics set for huge scale helps a lot (and avoids choice paralysis) so you can concentrate on doing the thing you wanted to do.
I was going to suggest something similar. Provide a way for employees to work part time or on a sabbatical, while on their own company. The incubator could take a small %age like YC, and Google would get to keep employees that would leave otherwise, closer to home.
Developing great systems or internals, then trying to find a use for them is one thing. Google Glass was a crap product without a purpose (from the beginning).
That aside, Google doesn't know what to do with clever, ingenious, or well-Engineered systems/tools/libraries/components/etc. They'll wrap them in sh-t, then use them to try to promote it.
Even the way they try to promote their products is laughable. It sounds like poorly done attempts to spin absolute crap to make it seem as though it's something else. Why don't you just have what you're pushing not be absolute crap? Can't do that? Don't know how?
I fail to see what was innovative or groundbreaking about Google Glass and the other crap they pitch as being such. Driverless cars? Is the driving of a car the real problem, or even a problem?
Driverless cars sound cool in a way (would grab my attention), but the technology has long been created. What's on display now is a lack of ability to think about or come up with ways to take such technology and put it to use.
What they're also making clear is that they're investing not because they see the many potential future applications, but because they don't know and are just picking something to try to say "me too," or to have its failure clearly demonstrate the pointlessness of trying to innovate, or because this or that name is associated with it, etc.
They have no real idea what they are doing. They just do stuff.
Also, the moonshots are strange, because while they like making themselves seem progressive or innovative, they don't do anything without a "business reason."
> Driverless cars? Is the driving of a car the real problem, or even a problem?
Really?! You don't see the advantages of a self-driving car? What about taking a nap, reading, or watching a movie while you drive to work? What about having a couple of drinks and getting home safely? What about being dropped off in the middle of the city right at the front door, and your car looks for a parking spot, maybe 10 blocks away? What about the potential for vastly reduced risk of accidents? What about cars that communicate with each other to improve merging, thereby avoiding congestion? You really don't see the value in this?
A self-driving car that handles traffic situations at least as well as a human is the holy grail of personal transport. You couldn't have picked a worse example.
> Driverless cars [...] the technology has long been created.
No, that is completely wrong. If it weren't, driverless cars would already fill the streets.
> Really?! You don't see the advantages of a self-driving car?
I see advantages. My point is that they aren't enough to make the technology groundbreaking. The only thing left is the cool factor.
It would be cool to not have to worry about driving as much (it can be an annoyance), but only those who have to deal with major amounts of traffic or long commutes would really notice (and what they really want is something to shorten the commute, not make it more bearable). Even a long bus/train ride, though you're not driving, is still annoying, as it's potentially cutting hours out of the day.
> A self-driving car that handles traffic situations at least as well as a human is the holy grail of personal transport. You couldn't have picked a worse example.
No need for cars is the holy grail of personal transport. If you want to do something major in this regard, then invent teleportation or something. But wait-- that idea is too far out, eh, not practical enough?
> No, that is completely wrong. If it weren't, driverless cars would already fill the streets.
The technology has been in existence for at least 5-10 years. Many fine details (recognizing addresses, versus driving to a set location) maybe haven't been worked out, but the core of it has long been done.
There's an interesting fiscal corollary of having unbridled ambition matched by enormous firepower which brings the world's smartest engineers and hackers together: a Xoogler who was early in the business once told me about how engineers would hack/exploit the travel allowance policy.
Google allowed folks to book their own flight and accommodation, and had an algorithm which determined rewards for folks travelling with financial efficiency.
The measure of 'financial efficiency' was an invisible coefficient tied to average hotel and flight prices in an area. So if the average cost of a trip from Mountain View to Boston for three days was $1,500, and you managed to do it for less, then you got back a cut of the difference either as a cash bonus or in points to spend on upgrades for hotels and flights.
After a while someone realised that a group of engineers were consistently booking shitty travel around the same time, and then travelling first class the rest of the year.
They had worked out what the algorithm was doing, and started scraping hotel prices themselves. They booked (spurious) cheap earlybird flights and hotels during conference season in various cities, sometimes years in advance, and took huge numbers of internal points from doing so.
The person describing the situation to me said there was a lot of discussion as to whether they should be fired or rewarded.
> After a while someone realised that a group of engineers
were consistently booking shitty travel around the same time,
and then travelling first class the rest of the year.
How's that different than having an annual travel budget? Sounds like they sacrificed to feast later instead of holding accommodations constant at "above average."
I think you did a good job telling the story, but maybe I'm missing how gaming travel expenses is unique to Google.
They still had to justify that travel expense in the corporate card, which is charged when the booking is made. So their managers must not have though of those trips as unnecessary.
The difference is that if you know your budget is X, you'll probably try to spend X - epsilon, because that maximizes your personal outcome within the rules.
But if you get a credit based on the difference, then you'll have a shared incentive with the budget-maker to spend much less than X.
However, then you have the problem that if X is per trip, then there's a perverse incentive to maximize the number of trips (even if they're each well under budget) because you pocket the cumulative credit. Then you can go way over X on the trips you actually care about.
Giving credits for cost-saving isn't the problem. Companies do that with travel expenses. What you're describing is really the same as giving employees an annual discretionary travel budget.
Here's the problem: It sounds like Google didn't implement financial controls. The employees committed fraudulent transactions by booking travel from outlying years and get credits for use in the current year. That shouldn't have been allowed.
This was unclear in the original post and the commenter graciously clarified.
Firing someone cost money, affect teammates' motivation, and make people unhappy.
"Hi Mr X, I saw you managed to extract a significant benefit from the travel allowance policy. Congratulations! Please don't do that again, or you'll have to go through Mr Y for validation next time. Have a good day!". Here you go.
I don't think this is a fireable offence but it's not hard to see the logic that leads one to believe that:
- Company sets up a rewards program to incentive financial discipline.
- Employee notices something that could allow them to, as you put it, "extract a significant benefit"
- Employee chooses not to bring this to someone's attention
- Employee proceeds to willfully navigate the benefit system in an unintended manner which causes the company to expend quite a bit more X than expected (where X can be money, or processing time, or paperwork, or benefit credits, or whatever).
Spurious is the key word here in the original post. Reservations they wouldn't have otherwise booked in order to maximize there own personal financial gain. If 0 is intended activity and 10 is outright fraud, that isn't a 10 but it's a hell of lot bigger than 0.
It reminds me of some place I heard about that had very generous patent bonuses, to the point where people would make more money filing for patents all day than their salary--so they would do the bare minimum to get their "official" job done and not get fired, and spend the rest of their time writing patents all day. Not sure if it was Google, but it's another example of incentive systems being gamed.
Contrast Google's old way of managing bets with Tesla.
When Google started working on self-driving cars, they went about it academically. They did not plan a sequence of stepping stones that they could sell. They meant to have a product in an indeterminate future which should be immediately perfect and better than a human, essentially not needing a wheel.
Tesla went about it with an engineering perspective. First, cars that can send accumulated data over the Internet. Then, equipped with cameras. Then, with limited assistance, warning the user to take the wheel back in difficult situations. And sporadic updates adding support for more complex cases.
The end goal is identical; but they make money along the way.
> They meant to have a product in an indeterminate future which should be immediately perfect and better than a human, essentially not needing a wheel.
This isn't what happened. The first iteration of Google self-driving cars, the modified Lexus', had wheels alright. What Google found and told the industry was "almost autonomous seems to be more dangerous than not autonomous at all", explained by the driver getting bored and complacent. This isn't surprising to people doing Human Factors, and while Tesla certainly made money off ignoring it, the result has already been tragic.
Ugh. The sooner Tesla pass by the "we're safer than human drivers" mark the better because hearing stories about how a single guy who died, while absolutely tragic, is getting tedious when put in context of the the vast number of regular deaths on the road. My heart only bleeds so much for a guy I never met, who took a chance that he knew the risks of, when considering the grander goal at play here.
The problem is, a human driver wouldn't have had any trouble avoiding that accident -- the truck was visible for some distance.
It's not just about the overall fatality rate per mile. Self-driving cars also need to not have any accidents that humans would have easily avoided. Until they demonstrate that, they're not going to be widely accepted.
Teslas don't come equipped with a LIDAR, that cruise, uber, udacity and google have been adding as a very important sensor.
Lidar sees a 3D cloud around the car with almost a cm accuracy. Better sensors could have most definitely prevented the accident.
However, to add to tesla's point. I have a car with adaptive cruise control. Not having to constantly check distance with car head has probably saved me once or twice from a crash.
Good auto-pilot's are definitely going to reduce human deaths on roads. Not only just deaths, but the amount of traffic all of us have to endure because someone just didn't keep the right distance from the car infront and bumped into them.
I could be wrong, but I just don't think people are going to accept that. It's related to the illusion of control that driving provides: everyone thinks they're a safer-than-average driver. So even if self-driving cars are safe enough for everyone else, they're not safe enough for me.
There will, of course, be exceptions, as we've already seen (poor guy).
And my point wasn't "boohoo look at Tesla". It was that, contrary to what OP claimed, Google made the explicit decision to shoot for fully autonomous after having tried what Tesla did (and with LIDAR-equipped cars!).
Never understood this argument "s getting tedious when put in context of the the vast number of regular deaths on the road."
What are you comparing? a 70,000$ car with better safety standards to a 10 year old car! A car that's aimed to be completely autonomous (with driver assistance features) compared with a car completely human driven?
Can you not think beyond extremes? Here's a simple example. An always-on "Autopilot" (or any other driver assistance system) that only intervenes if the driver does a tragic mistake. We still have the important general intelligence of a human and the faster and reliable response of a machine.
"explained by the driver getting bored and complacent. "
I think it's more than that. I think driving requires a general level intelligence, and not a rule based AI.
For example, driving in the suburbs, you see a ball bounce in front of you. Expecting a chasing kid or a dog, you come to a stop. This isn't something a completely self driving car will do.
On the other hand, from the demos I've seen of "what the car is seeing", it looks like the car would probably know the child is running in his direction even before the ball passes in front of it.
We use general intelligence to deduce what we don't see. But the car sees much much more than we do.
It will be interesting to see what end-game is for Google. Is it to provide the hardware specs to car manufacturers for cameras/components and use a Google operating/control system?
In the most recent quarter, Tesla posted a $22 million profit, which was their first profit since first quarter 2013. There have been many times in Tesla's history where things were tight and risky. Things are looking good now, so it is exciting and Tesla seems to be going in a great direction.
It all comes back to Google having tons of money and thus being able to do things Googley.
I'm an electrical engineer and know people who were on the first iPhone team. I think it was about as close to 0 to 1 as you get in a big company like that.
I worked for a major RF test and measurement company when the first iPhone came out and everyone was blown away that a company could design and tool up production for a cell phone without tipping anyone off in the industry.
I mean, google is not quite going from 0 to 1 there. it's a machine learning problem and google has some of the brightest machine learning people out there already working on search.
The iPhone was released in June 2007. At that point, the iPod models were Classic (click-wheel), Mini (click-wheel), Nano (click-wheel), and Shuffle (screenless).
The first iPod Touch wasn't until September 2007, 3 months after the first iPhone.
When the iPhone 1 was released, the iPod range didn't have much on any other MP3 player. All the things that make an iPhone an iPhone - the touch-screen, multi-touch, iOS, didn't come from the iPod.
Perhaps iPod to iPhone wasn't quite 0 to 1, but it wouldn't have been much more than 0.001 to 1.
But those are different classes of bets, no? I mean, Tesla makes cars, and a self-driving car is still a car. Google's primary business has nothing to do with cars. Their "X" bets are in completely orthogonal fields from their primary business. They are (in theory, anyway) hedges against a complete collapse of that primary business, while Tesla's is more evolving their primary business to position it for the future.
Which is not to say that Tesla is Doing It Wrong -- I personally am a much bigger fan of focused, iterative improvement than of wasteful throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall "moon shots." It just feels unfair to compare the two.
> The end goal is identical; but they make money along the way.
Not really, there's a fundamental difference in the approach and desired result. Tesla is going for Level 3 autonomy (some human help needed on trip), Google attitude is more of Level 4 or bust.
Tesla's business strategy is a moving target. I don't think anyone put the words autonomous driving and Tesla in the same sentence until 2014. And now they turned into a solar power company all of a sudden.
Having a car drive itself was more tough/challenging than big or worth doing. Why didn't they try for something like teleportation? That's tough/challenging, big, and worth doing, though I bet some idiot would say, "no, because it would wreck the economy" or "no, because it would put people out of work."
Please don't toss off inflammatory, unsubstantive comments on HN. If you're going to comment here, make it substantive, and if the topic is divisive, please make it less inflammatory, not more.
Edit: you also became uncivil downthread. We ban accounts that do that. Please (re-)read the site guidelines and follow them:
Are you implying that Tesla killed the (1 person, not people) who decided to let his car slam into a tractor-trailer on cruise control?
It's not a problem to you that, say, Apple has "financed the suicides of dozens of Foxconn workers," or that GM killed 140 people by suppressing information on a defective ignition switch, or that Lockheed Martin and Halliburton buoy their stock by selling weapons to kill hundreds of thousands of people?
Evidently, you must find totally acceptable the gun-running, terrorist-sponsoring activities of HSBC in the last few years. I bet Google's permabanning of people from their own Google Apps accounts (because they were reselling a couple Pixel phones) is ethically fine with you, as well.
Never mind the tens of thousands of preventable automobile deaths yearly because car manufacturers refuse to implement even the most rudimentary of Autopilot functions.
Yeah, totally reasonable to pick on the electric car / solar battery company with $3b in revenue since one dope decided to drive into a truck and behead himself. There's nobody else deserving of criticism whatsoever.
Let's not even get started with how cocky their CEO has been with his fancy sustainable business plans!
p.s. I won't even attempt an ad hominem at the guy selling homeopathics and 'nutritional supplements' in this thread.
This is uncivil and stoops to personal attack. It's just the ante-upping, signal-noise-lowering sort of comment we ask people to abstain from here. Please don't post like this to HN.
Also, Elon musk has done amazing work with electric cars, sustainable energy and space travel. No doubt about that.
But this is about Autopilot, a collection of driver assistance program. Not sure about OP, but my spite with Tesla is that they are pushing the above-mentioned driver assistance programs as self-driving features. This over-selling is going to kill people.
And for your information, lane keeping assist, lane driving assist, automated cruise control (which is pretty much AP1.0) have been present in several cars. Even self parking has been demoed by several cars. Add in automatic lane changing (which doesn't sound difficult to me), it wraps up Enhanced AP1.0.
Does that sound like a completely autonomous self driving car? Because that's what the public perception is like.
I was the one personally attacked in this thread, not the other way around. Just because my comment doesn't fit the Musk Worship narrative doesn't make me wrong.
Was someone not killed by a malfunctioning / underprepared Tesla? What am I missing here????
What you're missing is that even though someone was uncivil to you on HN, you needed to remain civil in return. That's the social contract here, and we need it to prevent discourse from degenerating even further.
Given that there is no report button or ability to downvote someone that replies to you (at least not on mobile for me), it is only reasonable to defend myself in that situation.
The ensuing attacker went to my profile, researched me and my business, and personally attacked me because they disagreed with my sentiment.
What is my recourse for action in such a case? Take it on the chin like a wimp? I don't think so.
If you don't provide appropriate tools to stop a tit attack, then you are fostering an unfair and "unsafe" environment by banning tit-for-tat response.
You are turning this community into a one-way echo chamber.
Your recourse is to email hn@ycombinator.com, as the site guidelines ask. Note that I chided that person for what they did, which of course was wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right, though, and you're continuing to break the rules while they at least stopped.
For civil discussion we all need to hold ourselves to a higher standard than the one we perceive other people to be keeping, because the only alternative is a downward spiral, and an accelerating one. If you want to keep commenting here, we need you to internalize that.
About a week after joining, and having partaken of the food, massages, meditation rooms, fitness centers, shuttle bus, sports facility, arcade, juice bar, tech stops, shwag etc. - I remember thinking to myself "whatever we do here must be ridiculously lucrative".
There weren't signs of obvious waste (at least in my org.), and coming from other corporate gigs where you had to pay for coffee it really opened my eyes to what a difference it makes for employee morale / productivity.
A lot of that stuff although is cheaper for the corporation to provide than for the employee to pay for themselves in money and time. The corp has a tax advantage and a bulk purchase advantage. Not having a payment infra probably adds a little bit of efficiency too.
Which does seem like sort of a loophole. Don't companies have to add perks over a certain amount to the employees pay so that it gets taxed? Wouldn't feeding an employee every day qualify?
It would be sort of weird if we turn back into having sort of 'company towns' where your employer provides a lot of what you need except they pay for it. It's not just Google this would be beneficial for, even if you run a factory you could pay employees a tiny bit less, but provide food/services for them that would make up for it. And because of the taxes/bulk situation it could be economically beneficial for both sides.
Meals are a sideshow, though; healthcare is where the real action is. If work buys you a Playstation you get taxed on ~$300 in imputed income; if work pays $12k~$25k a year for your health insurance, that isn't taxed.
The company cafeteria was once a staple of American business. They usually were not free, but were below cost. It was just easier and cheaper for everybody than getting everybody out of the building and back.
I used to work for a subsidiary of an auto company, and I got a new company car every year. But those cars were used partly as test vehicles; they were maintained at the company garage by company employees, so they had a benchmark on maintenance problems. The company could make a tax case for that not being income. This only works if your employees are using your own product.
The fact that employer-paid health insurance premiums are not taxed as income is a direct result of the wage-and-price controls established in the US in WWII.
"Employer-sponsored health insurance plans dramatically expanded as a direct result of wage controls imposed by the federal government during World War II. The labor market was tight because of the increased demand for goods and decreased supply of workers during the war. Federally imposed wage and price controls prohibited manufacturers and other employers from raising wages enough to attract workers. When the War Labor Board declared that fringe benefits, such as sick leave and health insurance, did not count as wages for the purpose of wage controls, employers responded with significantly increased offers of fringe benefits, especially health care coverage, to attract workers."
The benefits must be provided for a business reason to not be taxed (to the employee as income).
I expect that it's a mix of two things:
1. You can make a case that keeping them in the office (rather than making trips out) is a business need, and it might hold up to scrutiny. This probably covers things like coffee, juice, snacks, etc. The company legitimately does benefit from (some key) employees not constantly leaving the office for small necessities.
2. There's a lot of low-level tax fraud the IRS is too understaffed to deal with (and is directed away from corporate fraud like that, anyway). So you probably are supposed to report the value of the meals you get, but no one tracks it, and each employee is only committing a small error, so the IRS can't justify dealing with every case.
The IRS actually has a great PDF on when giving an employee a free meal is a taxable benefit or not. (I found it a couple years back when starting a small corp, but can't seem to find it now.)
Ed:
According to this document [1], Google providing meals probably falls under a nontaxable status because they provide them on campus and there isn't a lot of food near the campus. (Section starts on page 43.)
Interesting, even if you give them the lunches it would be a huge stretch to say a fitness center and massages benefit the company.
Sounds like a rule that is hard to impossible for the IRS to enforce. I hate rules like that, we ought to create a better rule or get rid of it altogether. Because I'm guessing if a factory lowered their wages while providing the same perks as google the IRS would probably say something.
Yea I get that, but you can extend that logic to just about every domain of life. Should they be allowed to buy all their employees the best mattresses available because a good night's sleep helps productivity? Should they pay for a nanny because help with child care makes you more productive?
With that logic you could fund your employees entire lifestyle if you made the case that it helps them be more productive.
> Should they be allowed to buy all their employees the best mattresses available because a good night's sleep helps productivity?
Yes, potentially though it'd probably help to have data supporting that. But things like company housing or sleep pods can materially benefit the company (for one thing, if you can take a nap at work you'll work longer hours).
> Should they pay for a nanny because help with child care makes you more productive?
Sure, potentially. In fact, employer-provided childcare is a tax-free benefit.
Is it "customary" for a company to pay for mattresses? Maybe if the company runs an oil rig, but a tech company?
This even goes for things like salaries. If a company pays salaries that are way above the market rate, this could be seen as [corporate] tax fraud. But there often isn't a bright line in law, which is frustrating to us engineers who think deterministically.
> It would be sort of weird if we turn back into having sort of 'company towns' where your employer provides a lot of what you need except they pay for it.
It would be weird but it would make sense, in the same way that theoretically the 'best' government in a benevolent dictator. When it's good, it's great, when it's bad, it's BAAAD.
I one spoke with a woman from the Netherlands who was surprised that these perks are not taxable. According to her, in the Netherlands perks like shuttles to work or company-provide food are taxable.
Taxable throughout the EU [probably the entire EU]. In most cases it amounts to full income + social tax - just like salary (except it doesn't count for retirement). There could be some exceptions like drinking water but overall it's considered hidden salary.
Shuttles are a weird area even in the U.S. - When I worked as a contractor at Google I was required to pay for shuttle use since Google couldn't write off benefits provided to non-employees.
And as long as they're below a certain amount, the benefits will be taxed at a fixed tax rate, not the employees individual rate. It's much easier for accounting purposes.
If it involves clients, then you need the paperwork and may save on part of the VAT + part of the money could be considered expense.
Usually it can be quite complex and it's not harmonized in the EU.
Yeah. Which is why I'm always amazed how many companies will nickel-and-dime on that stuff. Those benefits more than pay for themselves, a smart company would commit to them especially when times are bad.
As well as a diversity / community aspect. For every chef, barista, waitress, cleaner etc they hire, there is a chance to alter the hiring clique from (hyperbole) rich, snotty nosed, Ivy leaguers to include people with different backgrounds.
I know that may seem like a small thing, but providing jobs for the less educated off sets at least some of the problems these companies face with gentrification, gender and racial diversity etc.
Unfortunately, I think this has backfired. Instead, it has created a caste society. The service jobs are dominated by minorities (especially latinos), while the engineering jobs are dominated by whites, chinese, and indians. The difference between rich and poor has never been more stark.
Until you factor in employee turnover costs... Amazon spends an enormous number of man-hours and resources recruiting to backfill and has thousands of open job listings un-filled. It would be difficult to argue that they are saving money at the end of the day by crimping benefits and salary at the expense of employee loyalty.
Is there a non-high-horse way to word this? I understand the meaning, but the same phrase can be used to be completely dismissive as well. It's a potential moral high ground, where if you don't agree you must be uninformed.
I'm not saying OP meant it that way, it just brought up the honest question from me.
I'm not sure "express permission" indicates that you are aware of the full extent of that permission, merely that you were explicitly asked for it and you agreed to it.
To answer the parent, I wasn't trying to say everyone who knows what Google does with their data would not actually consent. There are people who argue that "privacy is over" and that it's entirely okay for Google to know everything about them. Most Googlers fall into that category, along with a large number of extremely liberal tech people. I'd say most people on HN understand at least in large part how Google operates.
But I'd argue the majority of society does not understand the extent to which Google collects and uses their information, nor grasps how that may affect their lives in the future.
Hmm, not sure - Trekkie made some good points regarding express permission. Perhaps it's just a bit of a loaded word, and if i care to use it without being dismissive, i must be careful.. well, not to be dismissive haha.
I use DDG, as well, but I think you're missing the point. It's virtually impossible to avoid Google. You visit some sites, and they use scripts or fonts hosted by them, or use their services such as captcha, maps, etc.
If you use Android, virtually all apps rely on Google Play Services, and interestingly you it will autoupdate even when you explicitly tell it not to.
Using google maps to navigate (now even Waze is theirs), people sending links to google docs, google pictures etc.
While some data is stored, no cookies are sent, plus there's heavy caching involved: "The result is that website visitors send very few requests to Google: We only see 1 CSS request per font family, per day, per browser."
All in all, those services (IIRC the JS library CDN is similar) don't seem to be designed to be a tracking data source except for some popularity stats about the data hosted there.
How is any of the data private when you willingly use their tools, sites, servers, etc? You open up google.com and type things in, what privacy do you expect? Or am I missing something you are referring to?
What's always frustrated me is that there are perfectly legitimate complaints about how google has gained their market share; but people seem to like weakening the broader argument with more emotional arguments.
I'll gladly cite examples: Search ad dark patterns. I remember a time when G was _proud_ of that their ads were entirely distinct from native search results, and never caused native results to fall beneath the fold. Now when I search on even a moderately sized monitor, literally half of the first page results are sponsored or ads (native content being entirely beneath the fold), to boot in a manner increasingly less distinct from the native results. (there used to be a separate ad box, and then a line between ads and native, and now just a tiny little 'ad' or grey 'sponsored' blip)
I've seen these encroachments across the board; youtube/G+ integrated logins was another, dark patterns for data-gathering approval on droid ("do you want to share data; yes/cancel"), which I'd best summarize as a slow collapse of any legitimacy to their "don't be evil" mantra from early on.
The one concrete point I can think of for "scraping data without approval" is that when various new data policies were established and yes/no controls added to your G profile settings, I believe some of them defaulted on? I've heard mumblings both ways in the HN discussions on this topic so it's a less strong point than my previous, but may be a basis for a more established argument of that aspect of dark patterns in private data acquisition that the parent was trying to pose.
The problem is that Google's target market is largely people who are unaware of what the risks are, unaware of the extent of what Google does with their data. It's up to us in the tech community to protect people from companies that use dark pattern behavior like Google.
yuhong: Responding to your question as an edit to my own comment since two -4 comments is probably enough for one day. Silently implementing opt-out features, and automatically opting everyone into new ways to violate their privacy, granting themselves the right to change their terms of service or privacy policy without notification. Using confusing terminology to make it difficult to discern what is the "more private" option. (Opting out of Google+'s "Featured Photos" feature, for example, requires you to switch ON the option to shut OFF Google stealing your intellectual property.) As existencebox noted, making ads on search look as close to search results as possible to mislead people into clicking on scam and malware laden Google Ads rather than real results...
Even if you know that, you don't really have an option to stop it. You can buy a smartphone with either Android or iOS - and both are spying on the user heavily.
They make money from products and are the only remaining big tech company not mining customer data. Google and Facebook are built on the idea of spying on users. Microsoft is moving in that direction.
They've also taken a public stand for privacy, whether out of self-interest or not, that's something Google will probably never do.
>It's up to us in the tech community to protect people from companies that use dark pattern behavior like Google.
Are you a self appointed privacy vigilante or were you elected by the people to protect them? Do you also protect people from Credit Card companies, ISP's, Cable Companies, e-Commerce sites and Cell Phone companies or are you just infatuated with Google?
I definitely also try to protect people from other types of predatory technology companies. When people ask me for recommendations, I generally steer people away from ISPs with poor/slow service, hardware manufacturers which produce low quality equipment, and cell carriers which use deceptive marketing.
I do speak about Google more than average, largely because the volume of fanboyism around the company is so massive, and their PR department generates so much fiction. I don't have to tell you AT&T is a terrible company, you already know, so I don't waste a lot of time doting on it. Combatting the sort of psychological warfare Google employs requires drastically more effort.
Making their ads on a search result page look more and more like their organic search results, for example.
Or making Android Location History on by default and then using it for things like http://searchengineland.com/hood-google-adwords-measures-sto... -- yes, they're reporting anonymized data to the advertisers, but of course they're storing your actual location data, with a well-hidden knob to turn it off.
Doing things people probably wouldn't like done to them if they knew about them with a well-hidden knob to turn it off is fairly dark-patterny as far as I'm concerned.
ocdtrekkie is infamous for having endless anti-Google arguments on Google+ for the past 5 years. Trust me, you're not going to have a fruitful discussion.
I'm not saying the argument is bad (I probably agree with it more than not), but from memory, it almost seems compulsive rather than an actual attempt to discuss Google's role. Many posters on G+ resorted to blocking him because it became insufferable.
And the people who ended up with Chrome installed and set as their default browser because they installed some other application (like Flash) were using Chrome willingly, right?
Yes, Google was doing that sort of thing for Chrome distribution for a while. They've stopped since, which is better than nothing, I guess. [Edit: apparently they haven't stopped, according to ocdtrekkie's comment! Or maybe they have started again.]
Point is, a lot of people are NOT using Google's products willingly. They may be using them because someone else set them up with the product and they don't know how to change, they may be using it because they're required to for work (Google docs, e.g.).
They still do it: https://get.adobe.com/reader/ (Checked today, Windows 10, while using Edge. Default checked on this page is to also install Chrome.)
It's worth noting that Sundar Pichai's claim to fame at Google, prior to Chrome itself, was getting the Google Toolbar installed on everyone's PCs whether they wanted it or not. The CEO of Google isn't just a fan of software installation dark patterns like this, he's the guy responsible for it at Google.
Because Edge doesn't support the Adobe Reader plugin, and to avoid a support nightmare Adobe seems to recommend downloading a browser it does work with.
I visit that same link using Firefox on Linux and don't get a Chrome install checkbox on the page, but maybe someone else is?
Adobe Flash is directly built into Microsoft Edge, they collaborate on this. Chrome doesn't support ActiveX or NPAPI plugins either, and the Flash plugin also doesn't work with Chrome, because similarly to Edge, the Flash plugin is built directly into Chrome.
Also, Adobe Reader is a standalone program, you don't install it to embed in the browser. (Both Edge and Chrome can display PDF files natively.)
This has nothing to do with "recommended" apps. Chrome is pushed with Adobe Reader because Google pays them to do so. Similarly, McAfee pays to have their software installed with the Adobe Flash plugin installer.
Adobe Reader plugin doesn't work with Edge, because Edge doesn't support ActiveX. The Adobe Reader installer also installs the browser plugin.
You linked to the Adobe Reader download page, which asks you to install chrome if you don't have a supported browser. Which you didn't.
I get that you have an axe to grind here, but it seems like you're cherry picking an example of where Edge doesn't support something so Adobe is recommending a supported download.
Adobe doesn't recommend the Chrome download when visiting with Firefox, for example.
Note that IE does support ActiveX, but Reader still not only tries to bundle Google Chrome, but the Google Toolbar as well.
You're creating an incredible work of fiction to avoid a long-standing well-known truth: That Google pays Adobe to bundle Chrome in their installer when the user is coming from a Microsoft browser. (If I come from Firefox, it offers McAfee's Security Scan Plus, which also pays Adobe for the privilege.) This isn't a technical or compatibility issue, and it never has been. This is where Adobe makes money on Adobe Reader downloads.
We don't know the dollar amount of the deal, as Google keeps those sorts of things confidential. But it is very similar to the figure an Oracle lawyer dropped, that Google paid Apple a billion dollars to keep Google as the iPhone's default search: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-22/google-pa...
Some additional reading on this strategy, is that Chrome came about as a fear that Microsoft might disable or cripple the Google Toolbar, which was used to push people over to Google Search and collect their browsing data. (And was also heavily promoted as a bundle item in other installers like Java.) Sundar Pichai, now Google's CEO, spearheaded the toolbar and then Chrome: http://fortune.com/2014/10/27/google-rise-of-sundar-pichai/
If you believe Google got where it was by being "the best", it may be hard to realize this, or easy to overlook the facts. But Google's market share is largely a result of paying for other companies to push their products, with or without user permission.
The Chrome distribution deal with Adobe was always Windows-only, as far as I know. So I'm not surprised you're not seeing it on Linux. That said, Adobe is just showing whatever they were paid to show, for whoever the target audience is. With Firefox on Windows as of today it shows checkboxes for some antivirus programs instead of Chrome; I assume McAffee outbid Google here.
With IE11, which does support ActiveX, it shows ... a Chrome download checkbox. And the Google toolbar.
But in terms of the ethical question, we're now talking about how if I break into your house to steal all your unhealthy potato chips that's better than if I break into your house to steal your money. The fundamental problem is breaking into your house.
So you would have no problems with your cell service provider keeping records of all of your calls and locations and recording conversations in the room even when not on a call? Most people don't know what data google is keeping and monetizing.
“No one wants to face the reality that this is an advertising company with a bunch of hobbies.”
Remember Nokia. They produced mobile phones with excellent quality, extreme ruggedness, good battery life, and good voice quality. Their manufacturing was highly automated and their costs were low. They focused on their core business. Recently, their CEO said "We did everything right, and we lost anyway".
On the other hand, Google has repeatedly failed to develop a second big money-making product. They failed at social. They failed at fiber-to-the-home. Android is a loss leader to drive ad traffic. Automatic driving may pay off, but that is being a component supplier to an car company, not a high-profit business. Google's second venture into smartphones might be a success, but that remains to be seen.
If one gathers all of their businesses which sell ads under "ads" , well, sure they have one business, the same as microsoft has only one business: "software".
But i'm sure their different ad businesses might have different risk factors, so in totality, they're stable. And BTW, Android made $33B (probably mostly indirectly) according to the oracle trial. Also youtube is a $9B business growing at 20%(probably waiting for the shift of brand ads from tv).
>> Automatic driving may pay off, but that is being a component supplier to an car company, not a high-profit business.
Having control on Android, Google Maps, and Waze puts them in right place for people ordering transportation. Couple that with possible network and data effects, and brand of the self driving business and Google's possible big advantage on self driving cars could put them in a good place in the future self driving ecosystem, not just a component supplier.
> Remember Nokia. They produced mobile phones with excellent quality, extreme ruggedness, good battery life, and good voice quality. Their manufacturing was highly automated and their costs were low. They focused on their core business. Recently, their CEO said "We did everything right, and we lost anyway".
I don't agree that not developing a side-business is what cost Nokia their throne.
Very simply put, it was because they rested on their laurels. A Nokia executive told me the original iPhone is going to fail and used the Nokia N95 spec sheet as the only argument. It was the most impressive smartphone of the time but he completely failed to look ahead, as Nokia had a huge market share, large R&D budget, their own factories and no real competition.
Of course the new platforms crushed Nokia while they had several half-hearted attempts to follow them. They were completely setup to be crushed by any disrupter with money and a vision.
One more reason because of which Nokia failed, I think, is because they had a platform which was somewhat successful. Symbian. They stuck with it too long rather than jumping the Android ship. If they had embraced Android whole heartedly, I think they could have competed with Samsung for the Android supremacy. Their hardware was good and they had loyal customers, at least in India.
Nokia made a lot of money for its shareholders, and when its core business died, it shut down. I don't think that Nokia's story is a cautionary tale. On the other hand, if Nokia had spent all the money they earned from selling cellphones on failed moonshots, that would be a cautionary tale.
Plus in-app ads and the fact that ad-blocking basically doesn't exist on mobile. I'd guess that Android is what actually ensured the success of Google. Controlling the ecosystem is incredibly important, even if you don't directly make money from it.
I mean that it is not widely used. There are solutions for ad blocking on mobile. But while it is quite widespread on desktops, the rate of adaption on phones is still relatively small.
However, many of these "hobbies" actively support ad traffic. Chrome and Android ensured Google's high market share for search & maps while delivering additional ad revenue channels.
By the number of projects most are side projects that make a loss, but the really big ones have a big contribution to Google's success (via ads).
I would say that it's a search company that monetizes via advertising. The adwords product is so bad that you'd have a hard time arguing that they care that much about ads.
Google has a fundamental problem with solving challenging issues, especially those in the realm of physical "meat-space". Really hard problems, problems that might reveal that Google is not omnipotent, where Google might not succeed, Google pulls back from. In areas where Google is, Google dominates the landscape. In all others, Google does not deign to participate. If Google can't dominate a market, it is not interested.
> Former employees say Page became frustrated with Fiber’s lack of progress. “Larry just thought it wasn’t game-changing enough,” says a former Page adviser. “There’s no flying-saucer shit in laying fiber.”
The issue with the physical world is that fundamentally, compared to a lot of software or hardware technology, it _is_ fairly boring. Boring work is also some of the most important work; the synchronization of traffic lights, the scheduling of flight paths, the minutiae of power line access, these are all boring, important things. A common reaction to boring problems by technologists is to throw computers at them. Build an algorithm to synchronize traffic lights. Build an AI to schedule flight paths more efficiently. I understand these reactions, the impulse to replace existing, less-optimal processes with stronger, more efficient, automated ones. Google does a really great job at automating things, its their core competency. However, automation can't solve all problems. You can't automate away political processes. You can't automate away property rights and fair access to power lines, and contracting construction work. Page clearly feels uncomfortable with this, and so he abandoned Fiber.
Honestly I am not sure Page was wrong to abandon Fiber. Google's core competency is automation and if they can't automate a problem, maybe they shouldn't be involved in the space. Or maybe Google should get a new core competency and learn new things. Teaching an old company new tricks is hard though. Very hard. So hard that most companies fail before they can ever adapt. Without being able to solve problems in the physical space, Google is fundamentally "locked-in" to only being able to solve digital problems in the digital world. This is why Google has no physical stores, no physical products (which are not manufactured by someone else - Chromebooks, Pixel, etc do not count. Prototyping is easy. Selling to customers in a retail store is hard). Microsoft had the same problem as Google once. It was hard for Microsoft to learn how to run stores, build its own products; it took Microsoft over a decade. Let's hope Google can learn too.
I think a counter example would be Google Streeview.
I remember when Apple launched their own Map service I was thinking that there is no way they were going to tackle something in the real-world "meat-space" the same way Google did to produce Streetview and gather improved map data.
They literally put a fleet of cars on the street and drove down a majority of the roads, big and small, in the United States and then in many other countries.
> Really hard problems, problems that might reveal that Google is not omnipotent, where Google might not succeed, Google pulls back from.
I've heard this phrased as "Google has the good fortune to be operating in a field where being 90% right 90% of the time is more than good enough"
If the search result you want is number 3 instead of number 1, that's totally acceptable. If your ad-targeting is good but not perfect, you can still make enormous amounts of money.
There are other domains where 90%/90% is absolutely unacceptable: avionics, medical life support, rocket propulsion, etc.
> It really is not a dumb search/ad engine that anyone could replicate easy.
I'm not saying it's simple or could be replicated easily. I'm saying that the marginal improvements they've made don't really matter that much to users.
I mostly use DuckDuckGo these days, and its native search results are markedly inferior to Google's, but it basically doesn't matter because I still almost always get what I want on the first page of results.
But it does matter to a lot of people, which I think is the thing.
There will absolutely be people who are willing to sacrifice some ease-of-use in the name of additional privacy, but it seems that those people are in the minority, and that means that Google (or whomever) needs to provide 99/99 when everyone else is only 90/90, if they want to continue being market leaders.
Imagine some alternate reality where Bing were the dominant search engine (or look at real world cases like Russia, where Yandex dominates), do you think that Google's marginally superior results would be enough to make users switch?
I propose that Google reached a market-leading position early on by being pretty good when other search engines were pretty bad. Since then, they've become the "default" option, and people will keep using what they're accustomed to.
>> If Google can't dominate a market, it is not interested.
Google Fi and Fiber are counterarguments to this claim. It's pretty obvious their interest in these markets is to influence the oligopolistic prices and practices, not dominate them.
Fi's market competes with Verizon and ATT, and even if it's a play on Android as you say, vertical integration != market domination.
ATT is now rolling out it's own Fiber program and Comcast it's own gigabit service, in response to Google Fiber, so it was successful in moving the oligopoly.
You also see this behavior in FOSS, where all too often someone will decide to rewrite a piece of software from scratch essentially because they are bored of maintaining the existing implementation.
>>Google has a fundamental problem with solving challenging issues, especially those in the realm of physical "meat-space".
Actually, before you get to the other examples you gave, there is another aspect of that, which is the social aspect. Think about Google Glass. That project, and its failure, really opened my eyes to the reality of Google: that it is one giant bubble, and the people living in that bubble don't comprehend what it is like to not be in it.
When I first read about Google Glass, the very first thing I thought of was, "man, people are going to find this thing waaay too intrusive." I ended up being right. When stories started coming out about Google Glass wearers being asked to not wear them in public places, Google realized the project was a failure, so they canned it.
The speed increase from Fiber is cool. Brute forcing things by digging up streets and laying tons of Fiber seems like a lot of work for incremental gain.
Streetview seemed like an excellent idea to me and is a Maps feature I like using (which would be even better if the pictures were more detailed and VR-/life- like). Buying or renting a bunch of cars/planes to manually take those pictures, however, seemed like a stupid idea (dumb way to do it), like another brute force approach, and like them trying to grunt their way through the problem using large amounts of cash.
Some may like such approaches, but I'd see them as inelegant and a waste of money (how it's implemented, not the actual idea).
Yup. There was SOOOOOOOOO much bullshit work being done there that could ONLY be done because Google can afford so much top-notch talent to work on research, even if it reinvents the wheel. It was a big part of the reason why I left.
That being said, at least they didn't invest their dollars on loads of red tape, though to be fair it isn't like all of Google is incredibly regulated unlike many other multi-billion dollar companies
If you actually have a worthwhile idea or something you're working on starts going somewhere, the masses will descend trying to stall it out. They'll also magically try to slap their face/name on it, while trying to push you out.
Also, it's funny how many random things are being worked on, as it seemed impossible to get time or support to work on anything. I wonder what process/reasoning goes into deciding who gets to work on their own thing.
This company is so typical regarding many things that most of their PR/marketing sound like outright lies.
The robotics effort sounds like an absolute disaster. How shareholders haven't been demanding answers there is beyond me. Acquiring 11 companies to, apparently, satisfy Rubin's obsession with robots (it's named Android for a reason) and then trying to shut them all down or flog them off ... but nobody wants them? Yikes. How did they get so starry-eyed about Rubin that keeping him (also failed) was apparently worth such a huge effort? Yes, he ran a successful operating systems project and fully demands enormous praise for Android's wild success. But where are the limits to retention efforts?
Shareholders can demand answers, but it won't get them anywhere. For better or for worse, Larry, Sergey and Eric own Google and can do whatever they want.
Shareholders can sell and thus lower the stock price (and the owners' wealth). The fact they don't do it means that many people seem to believe in management's ability to earn future profits.
This bring to mind how Michael Dell decided to take the namesake company private so that it could focus on long term projects.
Similarly i can't shake the feel that the handset division of Nokia, never mind similar efforts at HP, got sunk because of board room having blinders for all but the quarterly earnings report.
I'm no businessman, but does anyone else feel this will kill a lot of potential innovation? Not every project pays dividends immediately, and some are worth pursuing even at a long-term loss. (imagine if we all had fiber today and bandwidth was ridiculously abundant. Just how different would the internet be, just as when electricity became abundant?) Also I understand that Google is a business, but the need for a business model for research might stymy forays into interesting tangents. (I can't currently list any, but history is full of examples of things that were invented while looking for a solution to a different problem) Sure a company shouldn't be hemorrhaging money or throwing it at anything that moves, but it also shouldn't be completely beholden to (my generalization of) investors who can be quite short-term-thinking and risk-averse.
Michael Dell effectively rescued his company from board room rampant shorttermism some years back because of just such a problem.
And we basically witnessed Nokia and HP effectively crash and burn because of boardroom demands for short term profits while the execs were trying to pull of long term "pivots".
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. Short(shorter than usualy for Google) term financial motives kill any far fetched ideas from ever having a chance. Wall Street demands up and to the right movement every 3 months. Companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple try to have their own internal cadence of some goals in 3-5 years. Google had 10+ year projects but from the sounds of this article and what has been happening in the past year or so that leash is being shortened drastically. Sad day but I guess every company has to eventually grow up. Maybe another contender will emerge for long range innovation.
I don't imagine that Google will become super conservative and short sighted overnight; it's probably more about managing moonshots a bit more closely rather than not betting in them at all. It wouldn't be Google if they stopped placing bets that don't pay off immediately.
I think this article is trying to unnecessarily create issue out of something very obvious. It's very clear that Google's main source of revenue is ads. But that is backed by very strong products which are an integral part of billions of people's daily lives. Search, You Tube, Android, Gmail, Maps and a few others. As long as they maintain their lead in these products, their ad revenue is not going to go anywhere.
What's even more encouraging is that most of these products are improving with great speed every year. They are fighting the Cloud Battle very hard. So I think it is OK that some of the big dreams they have tried like Google glass and autonomous cars have failed. One needs to take big risks to get big wins. I think if they stopped these moon shot projects then it will be a thing of big concern, then they would have stopped innovating. Innovation is what give the Google "brand" it's aura, which makes people believe that whatever Google produces must be good. It gives them the edge.
This thread being here today is rather ironically timed, given that Google announced internally today it isn't giving its employees any Christmas gift for the first time in its corporate history, presumably because of the financial impact.
To some degree, this is like anything else in life, isn't it? The more successful/skilled/good you are at anything, the less you have to worry about whether you're doing things the 'right' way.
See for example, sports. A gifted athlete could quite easily defeat a far less gifted one with more 'technical knowhow' because they're simply more skilled by default and can hence make up for their inefficiencies or mistakes.
Or maybe any RPG game ever made. Come across a super powerful character or grind your party 100 levels higher than everything else, and it doesn't matter what tactics you use; you're simply too powerful to lose.
And the same obviously with companies, individuals and money. Enough money means even a lot of stupid decisions will work out well, whereas a competitor with much less will simply falter in the same situation.
>See for example, sports. A gifted athlete could quite easily defeat a far less gifted one with more 'technical knowhow' because they're simply more skilled by default and can hence make up for their inefficiencies or mistakes.
This is a surprisingly good analogy. Look at Steph Curry in the NBA. He takes a ton of awful long range 3-point shots, but he also makes a ton of them (45.4% in 2015-2016 compared to league average 35.4%). But some people are arguing that he's actually a detriment to the future of basketball because kids are emulating him instead of learning fundamentals:
>"Even watching this weekend, everyone is trying to hit the three and there are a number of big guys that are pretty good that aren't seeing the ball at all," Johnson said at an EYBL stop in Indianapolis in April. "It's like guards feel like they have to shoot the three to reach their goals, but it comes at the sacrifice of actually playing a team game. There's a lot of guys chucking a lot of bad shots without actually knowing how to get their teammates involved and create for other people."
One of the problems with companies that have cash cow revenue streams is that it sometimes doesn't matter what kinds of decisions the executives make, poor or good, the money will keep rolling in...until one day it doesn't and nobody has a clue how to actually manage the rapidly sinking ship.
I've been studying Atari for quite a while, there's so many interesting pieces to the company and their success and failure, and it's all been so well documented and autopsied that it makes for a marvelous case study that still has amazing applicability today.
I think you can look back and see some things that Google has done successfully. Youtube turns out to have been a good buy. Google successfully managed the transition to mobile, which many questioned whether Google would be able to do ("Mobile first"). Most recently, Google has made a huge bet that their future is intrinsically tied in with machine intelligence ("AI first"). We'll get to watch over the next 5-10 years how that plays out.
(It's probably already clear that there's a lot of power in an AI-first approach, but it's worth noting that this change didn't just happen with Sundar's blog post last month. A better way to look at it is to realize that if Google has been running their custom machine learning ASICs for over a year now, they must have started designing them well before that, which, to me, was amazingly early. Google acquired DeepMind in 2014.)
Not all those bets will, or have to, work, as long as some of them work out really well. I'm curious to see what happens with VR, for example. But I think AI is the most obvious central bet, in the same that that mobile was beforehand.
I'd bet that "AI first" will play out well for them, because AI is beneficial to both search and ads - while self-driving cars, fiber and balloons are not.
"Racing the Beam" is a more technical analysis of some of the early Atari platform development for the VCS/2600. This platform was Atari's cash cow and they failed to really pivot away from it. https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Beam-Computer-Platform-Studies...
Plenty of companies make so much money. Google didn't have to worry about financial discipline, not because it had so much money, but because it has an unassailable competitive position that is not aligned with its cost structure. Put simply, if you had the mandate to bankrupt a company through competition and had an infinite amount of money, I believe it would cost more to bankrupt Google than any other business.
Best i recall, the Glass problem was more Brin over-hyping than the tech itself.
And i do not recall reading about the car getting into trouble while under computer control. Either someone ran into it or it ran into something while human operated.
The car actually did hit a bus while in autonomous mode. To me, it was an odd situation though. The lane the car was in was for parked cars as well as traffic and it was ending at a turn lane or something. http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-video-google-car...
I think Google has been trying to somewhat imitate how life under nature selection works. Bring basic-but-extensiable-happy-route-scoped projects to life to test markets and wait and see which one would have the DNA for the next boom. From this perspective, I think they actually allocate their resources very carefully and intelligently. But the next emerging DNA perhaps needs more than just luck. Maybe more persistent and focused effort. I guess W. Brian Arthur's work has not small influence on its strategy. In fact, if I recall correctly, he is/was some kind of advisor to Google. Just my personal speculation.
Google has some killer products that aren't just about adsense for the web:
Youtube - incredible future for revenue
Google Docs/Spreadsheet/Slides - the future of productivity suites - easily monetisable when needed
Android - dominating this space bodes very well
They are gently providing an entire computing stack that covers all a simple user might need: android/chrome OS/chrome browser/cloud
Yes they have a bunch of crazy hobbies. But they are dominating in a number of key spaces.
The problem with it's lack of financial discipline is that the money isn't going to anything worthwhile. Everything they've advertised they're investing in that seems to be worth something either fails to go anywhere, or was just outright BS.
They essentially have a bunch of people doing nothing much in particular, going nowhere in particular, while acting on their whim and whatever their hand position happens to be on that day. It's even worse as they constantly try to claim they are about-- something greater.
It's hilarious. It's not that they are wasting money (ie, doing something worth something but that may not provide any returns, or something big and unconventional but that doesn't seem relevant at the time), it's that they are wasting money (ie, wasting money).
They are either doing what they're doing to make more money or to protect their revenue stream, or to be once again doing the dumbest thing.
Nothing really gets funding unless it's going to make more money, or serve as good PR to distract from how full of it they are or to try to brush aside failure.
These days, when their products fail, all I see is failure. That is, it probably took 2 years to develop whatever crap was released, rather than it being "early days" and them "trying many different things." They picked one thing, spent an eternity on it, pushed out absolute garbage, then failed.
Everything else that went somewhere or that could go somewhere gets caught in political gridlock, as the idiots descend to try to claim credit, while really trying to be the cliche they've always been: stomp out anything that's going anywhere, because... <insert whiny bitching here>.
I always wondered if Google just fired all their engineers except a few top guys, and focused on their core money making products like search / ads / etc. and tried to stay as lean as possible (lean being a relative term), how much profit they could make.
Only the top 5% at Google are "that good" (and that number may be lower now). Everyone else is average-to-mediocre. As search and ads will essentially be in maintenance mode in your hypothetical world, what they should do is pull out the top 5% and set them to work on something "big" (if they'd prefer to be told what to do or have nothing worthwhile in mind). The next 5% can then be assigned to search or ads, mainly to maintain (which still requires incremental times-related improvement).
That's 3,000 people working on bigger things, and another 3,000 supporting what is.
If you want to do something even more aggressive (which doesn't like such a bad idea if the top 5% are actually working on more important things, rather than it just being claimed/heralded as the plan), then get rid of all products other than search + ads (therefore Android and Chrome), YouTube, and GMail (which would first have to freed from political gridlock and modernized).
I'll mention the obvious (the plan relies on properly identifying the top 10%), as it seems the idiots there fall for politicking, posturing, BS'ing, or whatever else leaves them drawn toward "meh"-quality people and toward screwing over everyone else.
They also like trusting their intuition, while twisting, mangling, and misinterpreting data in whatever way will push/support their biased self-serving point of view.
There's an old analogy that running a business is like taking a road trip, with money as the gasoline: you need to get gas along the way, but that's not the point of the trip. So effectively you're wondering how much fuel you'd have left over if you only had a few bicycles towing a fuel truck. What's the point?
There is no point. It is a thought experiment. I'm wondering how much value the different parts of their company actually add to the bottom line. I'm thinking that despite "losing money" on a lot of their stuff, it does keep them in the news and their brand relevant. Like if Google had only done search and ads would Android have taken off like it did? Or was it because everyone knows Google does cool stuff and hopefully their cool stuff would make its way to Android?
I concur. But then I tried to classify Google projects in 3 categories and find for "obviously useless things that only exist so engineers can have fun", and I didn't find so many obvious things:
- Obviously productive ones: Gmail, Google Analytics, Android, Android TV, Maps, Youtube, OpenSocial, Chrome, because they all participate to "universally trackable users",
- Skeptical projects: Fiber, Flights, Google Scholar, TensorFlow, Chrome OS, GDrive, GApps for Business,
- Pet projects that may be fun but don't seem to serve as leverage: GCE (yes, their cloud solution), Google+, Go, Google Earth, Google Play/Music, Google Wallet, Google Glass, GGroups, GFinance, GTranslate, Google Fonts, Google Classroom, Inbox, Wave, Hangouts, Google News, Google Currents, Google Keep, Google Now, Wave...
Therefore... If they wanted to stay as lean as possible, would they have come up with the right list straight away? What makes products "obviously" part of the first list?
- Flights will likely make money, it operates on a comission basis. It's just not big compared to other projects
- TensorFlow is part of the machine learning programme that is used heavily to make more money in other areas. Sharing knowledge helps to get talent in that area
- Chrome OS is like Android for laptops. It ensures that you use Chrome and Google. The adaption rate is not huge, but I could imagine that it still pays off
I have to disagree. TF is Google's internal ML system, so the waste here is minimal, on top of that the luck they had in adoption means that lots of people they hire are already quite familiar with their internal systems and their internal system is now very common for deep learning research, and plenty of people are writing systems compatible with their internal tech.
Brilliant article. Larry Page isn't impressed with Fiber because "it wasn’t game-changing enough,” and that “There’s no flying-saucer shit in laying fiber.” Definitely gives you a peak into the thought process of this giant.
Funny, Microsoft used to talk this way in the 90s when IE and Windows ruled the roost. While they are still strong, they do now appear to worry more about financial discipline. Worrisome predictor for today's darlings?
That Porat person is a serious contender for buzzkill of the year. Google makes tons of money with ads and spends it on geeky experiments to try to push a futuristic envelope (and create an environments where they can sell more ads, like a self-driving car) we'll all benefit from eventually and she gets to be the person that locks the toys away because "financial discipline".
More control was pretty much a given as the company grew. When an operation is small and doesn't do anything particularly important, you can be casual about a lot of things. It just doesn't make sense to formalize everything. But once the operation is big and doing important things, control and visibility and process become increasingly important.
Something like this was going to happen. Hurray for Google for doing it before rather than after some major disaster or embarrassment.
To be fair, though, Google is a company that exists in a country where shareholders have the legal right to say how a company is run. Google (for better or worse) does not belong to the world, it belongs to its shareholders who _paid_ for the right to own a piece of the company. Even with Google's unique ownership structure mentioned in the article, Larry and Sergey are not immune from pressure from shareholders who might want to crack down a bit on corporate costs. There will always have to be a balance, and it doesn't look like Google is completely killing off its innovative culture, just trying to find a happy medium where it can do its thing and shareholders will still be happy.
But she also sounds like one of the few responsible adults in the place with a hand on the purse-strings, whose job is to ensure that there is an Alphabet and Google in 10 years, shiny toys be damned.
There will be an Alphabet or a Google in 10 years but it will look eerily similar to the aging behemoths of Silicon Valley today that take paltry swipes at different markets while their main revenue source slowly dwindles (up until the point they are bought by a holding company).
I don't think that is necessarily true. I am hard pressed to think of anything out side of search that Google has released that has really pushed a futuristic envelope.
I feel their current approach is sensible. Research at a for profit organization has to have a path to profitability. Long term this will enable them to more efficiently distribute their funds to projects that will see the light of day, generate revenue, and feedback into the cycle.
M(r)?s. Porat is merely efficiently carrying out financial accountability, which is what your CFO should be doing. Their job title should simply be "Boring Buzzkill", which if they live up to it they are doing a fantastic job!!
I'm not a fan of "cost discipline." It sounds more like stingy, conservative, short-sighted, and backward.
My problem isn't with Google spending tons of money on "far out" things, it's with those "far out" things not actually being far out.
If they were spending billions to develop teleportation, anti-aging (both internally and skin/beauty-wise), intelligence/fluidity increasing drugs, disease cures, etc, then I'd be all about it. Especially if they were making progress, as another problem is setting out to develop teleportation, making no progress after 5 years, then continuing anyway.
There are also nearer-term things to work on like wireless charging, batteries with increased capacity (and/or more efficient/passive energy usage), solar/wind/nuclear power to add variety to energy sources, lower cost Tesla Model S equivalents (rather than the brute force approach being used by Tesla with the Model 3), etc.
There also more relevant education in schools (actual knowledge and skills, rather than an indoctrination with "smile, show up on time, conform, and do what you're told"), streamlining/elimination of politics (government), elimination of middle-management and company politics, ending hunger, getting rid of prejudice and inequality, minimizing crime (especially violent crime), etc.
In the grand scheme of things, they are really doing nothing, going nowhere, and spending endless amounts of money doing it.
Also, there are the crap products they keep releasing. Something needs to be done to put an end to that crappiness.
When I worked at Yahoo (2003-2005) the talk was the same: Engineering, which dominated the company, largely thought Yahoo was a tech company.
But Yahoo was an advertising and media company.
Yahoo never quite managed to resolve that conflict, which rose straight to the top, and it kept causing stupid things like the massive amount of money that was poured into their own search engine instead of focusing on the content and services that actually had users continue to come back and stay within the network (e.g. Mail never made much money, but a large portion of users went to the Yahoo homepages to log into their e-mail, and a good portion would end up clicking on various news articles etc.)
Lots and loss of engineering effort went into project that'd never have been greenlit if Yahoo had accepted earlier what it was.
But Yahoo had a great deal of Google-envy at the point I was there, and it coloured a lot of decisions. At the same time, Yahoo didn't have the cash to operate like Google. E.g. where Google engineers could order servers by the dozens without justifying it, I had to present my arguments to a harware review group in Sunnyvale (I ran a team in Europe) to get a single new server to run the European billing system that processed millions of dollars worths of payments. So on one hand they wanted to be more like Google, on the other hand they didn't want to pay or it, and meanwhile what made Yahoo money was first and foremost the content side.
I feel like Google is still stuck in 2005. Not much has changed from top of my head.
All of their products are still based on their end-user being the product since everything is free and people expect it to be that way.
I don't see anything changing because they are literally printing money from their monopoly on online advertising. They have no serious competition and no, Facebook is not really great for targeted advertising unless you are a big brand.
Without any real external pressure as a result of their own success, it's beginning to look a lot like Microsoft of 2005.
Even from a developer's point of view, Amazon has usurped the cloud space with Azure now playing catchup and winning.
Much as Satella realized that Microsoft needs to stop being like Google and more B2B like Oracle, Google needs to find it's new place.
Vast majority of the public is unlikely to give a shit about their privacy in return for free productivity and entertainment but demographics change.
"All of their products are still based on their end-user being the product since everything is free"
Counterexamples:
GSuite (fka Google Apps)
Google Pixel
Google Home
Google Wifi
Google Cloud Platform
What's funny about Google's Cloud initiative is that even as recently as a few years ago, they didn't have enough servers to scale their own products and "were lacking the capacity to expand to meet the needs of X-product-being-pitched." Or maybe this is just another example of them being full of it.
If I remember correctly, they had to take a significant amount of server resources from other teams in order to launch Google Instant.
Ideals like that are the sort of thing you expect companies to abandon after a few years. And the idealism has been draining from google for years. It barely exists anymore beyond internal-facing perks and their cult-ish belief that their shit doesn't stink.
That letter also included the famous "don't be evil." Does anyone really think that in a few hundred years time, people aren't going to look back and laugh at the feeble rationalizations that have currently taken hold to convince otherwise clued-in people that the most pervasive surveillance apparatus in the world isn't at least a little bit evil?
Except in 2008, during a developing worldwide financial crisis, when the new CFO Patrick Pichette started figuring how much was actually getting spent on things such as cafeterias and childcare subsidies (for the onsite service).
However, when other companies try to imitate Google they always fail because they're missing a crucial piece:
Billions of dollars in ad revenue
Google doesn't work the way it does to be successful. It works that way because it is successful.
I found this no more evident than when I worked on Google Search itself.