So what is this? A big PR piece so we'll feel all sorry for 'that poor Google CEO that's got such a tough job'? (first paragraph, he talks about how he's "not good at multitasking", and some things are "difficult".)
At least, that's what I'm thinking after reading the article. it kinda makes sense, too, that Google is looking for a bit of a breather after this much coming against them. Still, I think the stuff they're dealing with is pretty much what they asked for.
- ads next to "unseemly" youtube videos: this is their core business, and in every other place you buy ads it matters where those ads are placed and who sees them and in what context. This problem is exactly what Google is expected to solve.
- gender inequality: this seems to come with the territory. every other CEO in the US, not to mention North America & Europe (etc.) is dealing with this too.
- staff protest about Trump immigration policy: the CEO was on their side. In his words, "the fight will continue." He doesn't get to say this is a headache he's got to deal with when he takes that kind of approach.
- a big regulatory fine. From what I've heard, it's almost impossible that Google wasn't rather careless in letting this happen. 'ask forgiveness, not permission' seems to be a mantra that Google follows, and this seems to be an instance where they're now asking forgiveness.
- and finally, Google is 'too big' and people are worried about its power. "boo hoo, we were too successful."
[sources for everything are in the main article or linked from it]
Deal with it, Sundar Pichai. You've got the same job every other CEO has got, and the same pressure. Buck up.
Indeed, the public and regulators are not pushing enough, the floor needs to be hotter for the CEO, whoever is in charge.
Google has lost its cute startup image long time ago and people have realized companies are never out there for the social / greater good, just for profits.
> Google has lost its cute startup image long time ago and people have realized companies are never out there for the social / greater good, just for profits.
It's more than that. Their behavior has changed.
Some years ago everyone was on their side because they were fighting for network neutrality and building Google Fiber and supporting Linux and providing Chilling Effects links to notify users of DMCA censorship and generally sticking it to the MPAA/Comcast/Microsoft.
These days they're not only not really doing that anymore, now they're misidentifying videos with YouTube Content ID and infecting web standards with EME and tracking everyone much more comprehensively than they used to.
People only think you're on their side as long as you continue to do things that show you're on their side.
> Those things are what gets HN riled up, but none of those things are noticed or cared about by mass consumer sentiment.
People are always forgetting that tech people are the ones involved in decisions about tech stuff.
When a huge corporation is deciding which cloud provider to use, the decision falls to the IT department, not the transportation department.
When Uncle Bob isn't sure which phone to buy, he asks his nephew the programmer instead of his other nephew the geologist.
When a reporter writing a tech story is looking through their contacts for someone to call for background, they choose the professor of Computer Operating Systems over the professor of Russian History.
When the government is involved in tech litigation, the EFF is there, not the ASPCA.
When some tech issue is in Congress, Wikimedia and Mozilla can put it in front of millions of people, not some blogger with a hundred readers.
It is usually unwise to disregard the interests of the people with the strongest influence.
When a huge corporation is deciding which cloud provider to use, the decision falls to the IT departmen
Cute. The decision is made by an executive based on a magazine article they read on a plane, or on what their buddies on the golf course said, then handed down by diktat to the workers. Same with all outsourcing deals.
> Cute. The decision is made by an executive based on a magazine article they read on a plane, or on what their buddies on the golf course said, then handed down by diktat to the workers.
I'm sure that has happened somewhere at least once. But in general what happens is that the executive reads a magazine article about The Cloud and the IT department gets orders to "do cloud" when the executive doesn't even know what that means. So the details fall to IT, like which provider to use.
And in the cases where the details are decided by people who don't understand the technology, they'll inevitably choose the wrong things and pay five times too much. Which makes it easy for IT to get a lower quote from the provider they actually want.
I mean your argument is essentially that executives are all incompetent and easily swayed by shiny objects and bright colors. But that was sort of the point -- they're as susceptible to being controlled by crafty subordinates as crafty vendors, if not more so.
Agreed, I can't recall a single instance I have seen where a major purchasing decision was influenced by anything out of the tech portion of the company unless the CEO was from the technical side.
Google has a natural monopoly. I am a big supporter of penalties for monopoly abuse but not all monopolies are bad. They do all need thorough oversight and regulation. But having a monopoly is not strictly bad. The illegal actions done to maintain them are strictly bad. They should be allowed to come and go as the markets demand.
A "natural monopoly" is something like the water or sewage or electricity provider where is isn't sensible to physically run more than one set of pipes into everyone's house. That dynamic doesn't apply at all to search engines.
Monopolies that are allowed to exist (e.g. last mile telecom, utilities) are usually very tightly regulated. Probably to the extent that Google would prefer to be broken up instead.
I'm not sure you could break Google up in a meaningful way without destroying it. Considering the majority of their revenue is search how could you divide up search?
I'm not sure that's the case; Apple isn't as dominant in share of any intuitively-described market as, say, Google and search ads, but a more relevant test for monopoly is pricing power, and I wouldn't be surprised if they in fact have that for some of their products/services.
Pricing power isn't defined by descriptive categories, it is defined by behavior (whether they can increase prices without sales moving to competitors.)
It's a test that exists because there are an infinite number of ways to construct named categories of products, which can create any appearance you want, but none of them tell you if things in that category are genuinely competing with each other.
The person I was responding to wasn't talking about pricing power, they were talking about monopolies. Apple isn't anywhere near a monopoly in any commodity or service. In fact, they compete with the near monopolies of Microsoft and Google.
Also, being a monopoly isn't in and of itself illegal, it's abusing your monopoly position to harm competition. You have to be a monopoly first.
Pricing power is a test for whether a monopoly exists; it tests for actual practical competition rather than the presence of other participants in a decriptive category which may not actually compete in practice.
It may be a test but having pricing power doesn't mean they're a monopoly. They have pricing power because they deliver more consumer surplus in their products than what they capture. Even in the case of the iPhone business having rising ASPs most of that has come from segmentation of the customer base into higher end models rather than simple price increases.
You don't need to have a monopoly to have pricing power, your product just needs to be differentiated enough.
One thing regulators could do is force Apple to support the installation of other operating systems on their hardware and allow OS X to be installed on other systems that are reasonably similar to their hardware (i.e. "hackintosh"). Perhaps even demand that Apple support ways to develop iOS that aren't tied to their platform.
How exactly would this benefit consumers? Arguably it would suck — either it’s not well tested or they spend so much time and money testing they don’t ship as much anymore.
Btw, you can already put Windows on their hardware, or Linux for that matter.
That is a really naive view of market share. The market for phones is tiered, and Apple dominates the tiers it wants: The profitable ones. It doesn't take 51% market saturation to have monopoly control.
Anybody who wants to get out of Apple's system can easily pick up a different high-end phone[0], with different tradeoffs, with few repercussions beyond how their Apple Watch (if they have one) works and the color of their messages when texting iPhone users.
That's not monopoly power.
[0] as a consumer I care about the phone's features, not its profit margin for the manufacturer. There's still a healthy ecosystem of non-Apple companies making phones.
It was more of a if you own an iPhone you are required to get all your apps through Apple and are charged accordingly so, reducing competition and ultimately being fleeced with pricing.
But no one is forced to use their eco-system. You can buy an Android and use their ecosystem. You can buy a Blackberry or Microsoft phone (I think) and use theirs.
I'm surprised no comments talk about reducing regulation to help this problem too. If it were easier for small ISPs to thrive, then there would be more competition. The question is: how many areas is Google thriving in which are prohibitively expensive to enter due to regulations?
Another competing factor is that Google makes most of its money in advertising - so every feature of every product has the opportunity to be compromised for the benefit of advertising. Internet advertising needs another revolution!
A "communist country" has rather more monopoly power than Google has today, but why would you wait until the Google States of America are indistinguishable from a communist country (and unassailable) before you break up Google?
They very might have in theory. Other thing is practicing it. Governments understand that too. Who pushes the narrative has the power there is no need for the violent revolution of 1789 style.
I disagree with first part though, "don't write (like) this." Bloomberg's writing style is a little of old fashioned corporate sounding, but that's just style. It's also OK to write from a certain pov, including a ceo's.
I agree with the rest. All comes with the territory. Good reminder how nuts that territory is.
Glad you enjoyed it. :) I sometimes to use parentheses to indicate rabbit-trails of thought, if that's what your comment was referring to. And yes, I guess it is pretty nuts to be running a big company. Not that many of us would know anything about that. :P
Trump probably has Google’s number because it was a big Clinton supporter. Thiel even referred to Google as a utility. I would say Facebook would join them but Thiel is on its board.
Microsoft has been behind all sorts of anti-Google lobbying to have them regulated as a utility, enforce anti-trust regulations against them in EU, etc.
Anyone court watcher or MS watcher around since the late 90s knows they are entirely deserving of suspicion.
Pfft...corporations and biz schools can't produce people who can solve these kind of problems, therefore we will see exactly what happened to HP, IBM, Sun, Nokia etc happen to Google.
There is a long line of pointless CEOs that all these companies produced that nobody remembers today. Why? Cause they are programmed like robots to believe in infinite growth.
Google does not pay for articles, AFAIK. However, having a high profile individual like Sundar Pichai interview with you has huge benefits for cash flow anyways: Your ad revenue will skyrocket, because other major sites will also cite you and link to you as they also post the story. Google does not have to pay a site for the site to profit from promoting Google.
The big thing is, Google will not grant it's exclusive interview treatment to news sources which are heavily critical of them, which means that any news site or blog which gets interviews with Googlers isn't going to risk that revenue source by getting on the Google press folks' bad side. This is why sites like The Verge which regularly get insider treatment, and interviews with Sundar Pichai, Matias Duarte, and Astro Teller will never really write a truly critical article about Google.
> Google has historically stumbled in the difficult business of hardware, despite several multibillion-dollar attempts, including the $12 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility (since sold off for $2.9 billion)
Are we really still repeating this nonsense? The $2.9B number quoted above was merely what Google sold Motorola Mobility's handset division for. It also sold the company's set-top box division for another $2.35B, plus it kept the $2.9B cash hoard that came with the acquisition, and additionally $2.4B in tax credits and a patent portfolio valued at around $4B.
I get the sense that this "fact" was used BECAUSE it's "well-known". It serves the narrative purpose of showing that Google is fallible, rather than sinister (truth be damned).
The article begins by describing the CEO of one of the 10 largest companies in the world's office furniture. It was clear from the outset that this was not going to be an article terribly troubled by a sense of duty to present a completely neutral reading of the relevant facts.
Revenue from selling the set-top box division, cash, and tax credits are all cash-like and easily countable. Do they have revenue from the patents? In the standard model of tech patent ownership, wherein you accumulate a big hoard of patents so that you can threaten to countersue anyone who sues you for patent infringement, a patent portfolio valued at $4B would be worth nothing to Google -- they already have patents.
The article title is "Everyone’s Mad at Google and Sundar Pichai Has to Fix It"
The very short TL:DR is that Pichai is beset on all sides by people who expect Google to move mountains, reinvent itself. It goes on to discuss Pichai is a leader/person and ends on the quote "As Pichai has learned, Big Tech companies can no longer skate by on faith in their fundamental benevolence"
i personally think "Big Tech companies can no longer skate by on faith in their fundamental benevolence" is a very good thing that deserves to be embraced. its kind of insane its taken this long, really. while being able to trust companies is ideal, i think there have been enough real examples now that its worth being much more skeptical of tech companies. i wonder if the crazy faith we used to have was a byproduct of some combination of big tech's interests being mostly aligned with the public, and the public being unaware of the activities big tech was up to that weren't.
Everybody loves an underdog, and for decades the personal computer and internet industries were not dominant at a national scale. Now they are, so they don't get the built-in support of underdog status anymore.
You have a ready made fool proof automated solution to detecting an ISIS video or fake news ready to go? Because at the scale of youtube you can't do it with manual checking. If you do then Google would probably pay for it.
If not then, yes, these two things qualify as moving mountains.
Yeah, the fundamental question here is if we really want, given the current state of technology, to have these massive-scale automated operations.
I'm fairly ambivalent about many aspects there. Fake news is nothing new, it's at least as old as pubs and people in them spreading false rumors, but what's new is the expectation that there'd be a channel that would somehow protect people from it. But I do find the desire to disclaim responsibility for helping propagate malware, fraud, and certain types of content to be very distasteful.
They aren't disclaiming responsibility though. That's the thing. They are building the best tools to manage it that they can. They might be disclaiming the ability to do it perfectly but they are most certainly trying.
While you're considering zaphar's post and mentally designing your "get rid of ISIS videos" system, remember that YouTube gets 400 hours of video uploaded every minute
So, you’d only need an average of 18,000 people on duty around the clock to do review of everything uploaded to YouTube.
At $15/hour pay, that's only about $2.4 billion/year for reviewers; all told, with supervision and other overhead, maybe on the order of $7.5 billion/yr.
It's probably not impossible for Google, and it wouldn't even make Google unprofitable. But it would make YouTube unprofitable.
Don't forget: Google etc already gets a ton of criticism for their use of manual screening as it is - it burns people out, gives them 'PTSD', is exploitative, etc. So to account for turnover, psychiatric healthcare benefits, extra salary (remember overhead is as much as salary), and figure you would have to double that cost to eliminate criticism (not that it would but let's say it did). That actually would be larger than Google's total profits.
Don't forget that your 15/hr employee is going to have to detect fake news despite their own personal biases. These are the same people that reshare fake news when on Facebook. You probably need some specialized training and more than one person to vet that news.
You probably wouldn’t need to review every video – videos from YouTube partners such as Disney or VEVO partners could probably be exempt in the first place.
Then you probably could let an AI pre-sort most of the videos, and have humans only skip through those videos to verify the AIs decision, instead of having to analyze them all at 1x speed.
You’d probably only need a tenth of the manpower in that situation. And YouTube might even still be profitable with that.
The post you are responding to does not indicate anything about my belief in what Google currently does (well, except that it makes the amount of money it's financial reports say it makes.)
Weird, the porn seems to be PERFECTLY censored and the ads are laser-targeted. Google is a world leader in ML and AI. You really think this is so difficult for them?
You clearly don't work in ads, we don't manage to have ads that render 100% of the time. Everyone thinks we have super awesome targeting that tracks your every move but most of that is marketing bullshit from people are trying to work for advertisers. Here's a huge amount are targeted do are you in this area, are you in the 18-24 male demo, and did you visit website XYZ in the past 30 days.
We have different YouTube probably. I can easily search and find fetish porn videos. The fact that we don't see it recommended videos doesn't mean it not exists.
I am actually happy that life becomes more difficult the bigger companies get. It was a good thing that Microsoft got some heat in the 90s and stopped dominating the market. I hope that Facebook and Apple also will also get more scrutiny.
Life becomes more difficult the bigger companies get regardless of outside pressures. Price's law states that the square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work. This means the number of "useful" people increases linearly with size but the number of not-so-useful people increases exponentially. If you have 10 people, 3 do half the work. If you have 100 people, 10 do half the work. Google has 60k employees, so about 250 people are getting half the work done. This is basically impossible to maintain and is part of the reason megacorps die.
> Price's law states that the square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work. This means the number of "useful" people increases linearly with size but the number of not-so-useful people increases exponentially.
Assuming you mean that the smaller group accomplishing half the work is "useful" and the larger group also accomplishing half the work is "not useful", it certainly doesn't mean that.
It means, very clearly, that the number of "not useful" people increases linearly with size, and the number of "useful" people increases sublinearly. But even if your definition of "size" included only useful people, x^2 is a polynomial function of x, not an exponential function of it.
One of the things I love about HN is that people get really pedantic about things like math terms used in casual conversation. That's not sarcasm, I actually do love it. Thanks for increasing the specificity of the language.
All those firms you've mentioned are already too big. Anything they do will generate scrutiny so they've stopped innovating. That's why Google is trying to take up role as an 'angel investor.' https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/13/google-and-amazon-are-ready-...
What is your evidence that Google has "stopped innovating"? In my opinion Google is very focused on making sure that innovation doesn't stop, because if it stops they will lose.
Google acquires innovators, it doesn't innovate much itself. Everything new Google has launched since like... Chrome, has been an acquisition, or an integration of a couple of acquisitions together. (Sure, that work is not small, but at the point Google got involved, the innovative part was mostly over.)
Self-driving car team was picked up wholesale from a university, DeepMind was an acquisition, most of what Google Lens is was from an acquisition. Projects like Ara, Jacquard, and Tango were all from Motorola's ATAP division, which they acquired. Almost anything you see coming out of Google can be traced back to an existing thing that Google purchased, rebranded, and relaunched.
You miss some key products (>1B Users) Google has created completely within: Search, GMail, Maps, Calendar, etc.
Many of Google's products did start from acquisitions. Though those startups can't claim all the credit. Most wouldn't have become as big as they are now without the capital and talent that Google brought to them.
They did? I recall their penalty being entirely ineffective, and a subsequent decade of more Windows ecosystem hegemony. Every workplace I've been in remains ruled by Windows ecosystem, even where they have bought Google Apps for the whole enterprise.
I wonder if Apple is getting less scrutiny because they are staying out of sharing any private information with third parties and even trying to prevent themselves from being able to see it.
- To many inside, the company feels like it lacks direction. It feels like the leadership doesn't know where to take Google and this pervades pretty much everything;
- There is a lot of discontent at the the amount of money Google throws at executives. I mean Sundar got paid ~$200m LAST YEAR. Levandowski got $120m+. Back in the day, Patrick Pachette was parising the benefits of scrappiness, which saved $40m in travel costs that year. Incidentally, his was paid ~$40m extra that year;
- It feels like there are constant reorgs going on. This plays into the directionless point above but is also symptomatic of politics run amok and middle managers creating work for themselves and covering their asses. I mean a decision can never be judged good or bad if it lasts at most 6 months before another reorg.
- Some units were deliberately keep apart from Google. Most notably Youtube, Android and X. This exacerbates a cultural drift such that Google is really becoming autonomous and separate business units;
- Internal mobility is harder than it used to be and also less advisable for your career, as a general rule.
- It takes too long to do pretty much anything, particularly anything UI related. This is in part because UI work is looked down upon by the engineering leadership and the tech stacks are like 10 years behind the rest of the world.
- Sundar came up through Chrome and still seemed to me see everything through a Chrome colored lens. Chrome in particular had (has?) a bad rep for hazing and their retention numbers for women engineers in particularly aren't great.
- Google promotion culture seems to value individual technical ability above all else. I can see how this breeds the views of the likes of Damore. Worse, it seems like a lot of PAs tolerate someone being an ass if they're a high performer, which is an unfortunate reward loop.
- This all said, there are a lot of talented and great people and projects at Google. At the same time you could probably get rid of half the company because they don't really seem to have anything to do.
- Left to their own devices teams will create work for themselves. This is most apparent in Maps, which definitely went through a period of new work and features making the experience decidedly worse by, say, unifying data pipelines because consistency to some is an absolute good.
- The effects of Vic's disastrous reign can still be felt and Larry needs to take the ultimate blame for that.
- There seems to be little or no regard for the harm in burning user trust. This comes in many forms but includes announcing projects and then cancelling or abandoning them.
At least in my corner of Google the direction seems pretty clear. We are trying make our storage stack cheaper and more efficient so we can pass the savings to internal (other PA's) and external (Google Cloud Platform) customers.
The big thing I see happening at Google is that as Google has grown, it has become more and more like a "big company". So that means different PA's (product areas) will have different experiences, and different cultures. I wouldn't call them autonomous and separate business units, but there is a trend in that direction. And honestly, I think that is a Good thing. It means the company is scaling.
It does mean that the company is not going to have "one" direction. The last time we had something like that was one Vic pushed everything into Social, and it's clear that was a disaster. So Android is going to have its core direction, and You Tube is going to have its core direction, and Technical Infrastructure/Cloud is going to have its core direction..... and I'm OK with that.
Finally, as far as "half the company don't really have anything to do" --- that certainly isn't my experience at TI. We have way too many things we would like to do, and we're hiring. :-)
P.S. Google is not a dysfunctional big company. Eight years ago I left IBM, and so I know what dysfunctional big companies are like. I've also worked at VA Linux systems, so I also have a very good idea what dysfunctional small companies/startups are like. As far as I'm concerned, Google's is a place where I'm quite happy. Is it perfect? Of course not; but it's better than all of my other previous employment experiences.
Google has always had a single product area: grow and defend advertising revenue. Every major initiative can be cast in that light. Consider the "non profit" multi-billion dollar efforts.
Chrome? Prevents Microsoft or Mozilla from strangling them at the browser.
Android? Stops Apple from strangling them at the phone.
Fiber? Was intended to stop ISPs strangling them at the premises. A rare misfire which they probably wish they'd pushed harder.
The first consequential alternative revenue stream to appear in Google's lifetime is GCP. In Google's position I'd spend just about anything to get a double-digit marketshare. I suspect they have the best technology out of the three, but don't enjoy first-mover (Amazon) or sales channels & bundling power (Microsoft).
Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we work closely with Google. But also with Microsoft and a lot of other partners too.
I don’t know if you were here long enough to experience the range of promotion processes, but only the lowest levels of tech promotions are based on individual contributions and ability. To reach “senior” grade, the lowest career grade at Google, requires significant demonstration of leadership. To get above “senior” based on individual contribution alone is virtually impossible. But to rise higher based on leadership alone is quite doable.
I would say technical ability is the least important of the three dimensions of Google’s promotion process for SWEs.
>Google promotion culture seems to value individual technical ability above all else.
If I was at a company that promoted people on anything else but their merit and skills, I'd leave immediately because of misalignment of values. If hard work and skills are not valued, the company itself is doomed.
When people say technical ability they are often drawing a distinction between overall ability to engineer (which includes many technical and non-technical things) and ability in some super specific area (C++ template metaprogramming wizard).
It's a forest for the trees sort of thing. In my limited experience with former googlers and microsoft people, they came from environments that were so far removed from real customers and product feedback that their only measure of success was if they could impress their peers by using the very latest features of C++ move semantics, as opposed to architecting/building a scalable system that actually solved a customer problem.
Literally I know of a startup that basically failed because the ex-microsoft guy spent most of this time building C++ $WHATEVER to get better performance on our i/o bound app and the ex-googler spent most of his time reorganizing the repo. They never got around to delivering software that they could iterate on.
[edit]
Both of those places are big companies, if you feel the need to respond with how you work at company X and your team is great at getting things done, you really don't need to bother. We get it, companies with tends of thousands of employees probably have many different subcultures.
Superficially what you say might be right but the truth is far more insidious than that.
For one your prospects are tied to how well your project does. Sounds reasonable right? But what this results in is many teams battling to "win" with politics often playing a large role in who is the victor, rewrites of existing code essentially to prove your technical prowess and make your promotion case and little to no valuation of team value rather than individual value, namely that teams are (or can be) greater than their sum of parts.
The last point is a key one and an area where the likes of Damore go wrong. The best team isn't one simply that's the sum of the people who individually had the highest "merit".
Put another way the cynical view is your shit never breaks no one notices but if it breaks in a big way and you fix it, well that's impact. Likewise adding a feature isn't nearly as much impact as rewriting the whole thing from scratch.
A better way to put this is, in general, refactoring code to make it healthier, or improving product excellence by fixing some long running bugs, does not get the same visibility as launching something.
However, to be fair, I haven't been at many companies where "cleaned up code base with large scale refactor and improved documentation" gets you noticed. It's just not as sexy as a customer facing launch.
As someone who has worked in a place with a similar attitude, I think I understand what he meant.
The stuff I saw:
1. People will not do easy yet impactful tasks. Everyone will try to solve a challenging problem, even if its effect on the bottom line is negligible. Folks who solve simple problems that bring in a lot of money are less likely to be promoted. At times, an easier solution was actively campaigned against by someone whose brilliant pet project would be impacted.
2. Highly valuing individual technical ability often ends up with devaluing team cohesion. In the place I worked, the people were very capable and smart. But the teams were not that effective. If something went wrong, people were less likely to see how existing policies and the organizational structure led to these problems, and instead focused more on which individuals were to blame. Everything - success or failure - was at the individual level.
So I do not think he meant that a company should not value individual technical ability. But if they value it more than effective team management, etc - I would not work there. Been there, done that.
This just means management sucked at recognizing real talent. Real talent includes knowing how to pick low-hanging fruit, knowing how to make the challenging problem look simple, knowing how to work with a team.
> Patrick Pachette was parising the benefits of scrappiness, which saved $40m in travel costs that year. Incidentally, his was paid ~$40m extra that year;
Where does that number come from? I see the NYT reporting that he got a "golden parachute" of that amount, but they give no source. The WSJ says he sold 55M in stock he owned, which is quite different from an exit payout.
Well you could be right. His stock comp for 2013 was $40m. That was the scrappy year.
The point is that instead of cutting the travel and entertainment budget for the whole company it would have been a lot more effective to simply show Pichette the door.
40m in fiscal 2014. This also contains the answer you previously wanted:
“Upon Patrick and Omid’s respective departures, all of their outstanding equity was cancelled and we made cash payments equal to the value of their unvested biennial equity grants, prorated for the time between the grant date and the cancellation date. The payments equaled $56.2 million to Patrick and $16.3 million to Omid.“
Vesting schedules are for peons. For executives, unvested shares are converted to cash when you quit! Amazing!
Great. The most concerning issue - the question of trusting all your data with a for-profit entity which doesn't get directly paid for the services it provides - gets a token mention as the very last point ("just in case, let me throw in a casual mention about this somewhere at the bottom"). I am fairly sure that announcing projects and then cancelling them, on a scale of 1-10 for burning user trust, will get a score of 0. In comparison, here are some higher scores for issues which are actually 'burning concerns':
8 - the kind of tracking data which was presented in the Waymo case
9 - the kind of data mining which happens when you combine the most popular email service + highly popular browser + most popular website analytics tool + most popular mobile OS
10 - the efforts to get into providing 'free' internet just in case a few bits and bytes escape into the ether, and attempts to acquire companies which may be collecting/assembling harder to reach datasets
And then the rest of the folks here wonder, "Do people inside Google actually spend any time thinking about whether they might be burning their user's trust?" Based on your response, I would say that it gets about the same level of token acknowledgment inside.
You can install Linux distributions and run them in Windows from Microsoft's own store. The bulk of .NET is open source. VSCode is pretty good. No one seems worried Microsoft will suddenly shut Azure down or lock non-Windows operating systems out. They did a lot of work to make git work on huge, complicated projects (for Windows) and shared it. (https://github.com/Microsoft/git)
Meanwhile, Google is...well, where are they? They never did give us that Linux Google Drive client they promised. They announce products then shut them down, so no one can really trust their products. Even the ones we had before Google lost its way (I miss Reader's trends feature). Aside from whoever's on the Takeout team, Google seems to have stopped caring about sharing and working with others.
There's plenty to criticize in Google, but this idea that MS is suddenly so much better is absurd, in my opinion.
Microsoft open sourced .NET. Meanwhile, Google... open sourced Android, Chromium (including V8), Tensorflow, Go, Dart, Angular, Kubernetes, and literally hundreds of other projects. They also fund Let's Encrypt and contributions to third-party OSS projects on their annual Summer of Code.
> You can install Linux distributions and then run them in Windows
Ooook, sounds like you weren't around for the bad old days of Microsoft playing dirty tricks with their OS to sabotage application competitors. This friendly new open Microsoft is the result of decades of market pressure.
Yes, Novell, Netscape, WordPerfect, Lotus 123, Lotus Notes, Spyglass, Borland, CP/M, OS/2, ColdFusion: all dead or a shell of their former selves. There were many, many more I can't even recall. Most were superior products and didn't lose because they weren't good. Hell, they nearly killed Apple.
Spyglass was a particularly nasty stab in the back:
The deal stipulated that Spyglass would receive a base quarterly fee for the Mosaic license plus a royalty from Microsoft's Internet Explorer revenue.[6]
Microsoft subsequently bundled Internet Explorer with Windows, and thus (making no direct revenues on IE) paid only the minimum quarterly fee.
Neither is open source, sadly. Or you could say they technically are, but not enough is open source to actually ship either a phone or a browser without obvious deficiencies.
Are you talking about Chromium or Chromium OS? They are very different things. Both of them have working OSS forks, or just work out of the box.
Chromium (Browser) - Just chromium. Works without changes (except for Widewine EME). WebRTC is an open standard, and Google primarily uses open codecs like VP9 and Opus. Can you point to something you think says about restrictions?
Chromium OS - Neverware sells a fork ('support' technically) to schools. You can download it for free.
Android - Dial a phone number? Are you talking about the modem firmware? That's the phone manufacturer's fault, not AOSP's.
There are obviously differences between closed source versions and what you get by immediately compiling. This is true when you have a real permissive license (non-copyleft) like Apache or BSD. You can't expect a company to release little thing, especially when that involves divulging info about other products they don't want to.
Webrtc required codecs aren't supported for chromium/chromeos (won't work at all with apple stuff). Neither is Netflix and ... That's not a small issue. It also is not at all the only issue.
I don't care whose fault deficiencies in Aosp are. I was talking about restrictions. Any app using the "default" Apis mooie mooie and more moved into the play support libs (and that's a lot) won't work. These are not trivial things at all.
I don't get why Google cops so much flack. Other companies which are considerably less useful (facebook), more intrusive (facebook), actively manipulate user psychology (facebook), sell highly addictive harmful products (Snap inc, big tobacco) or are destroying the planet (the frackers, Schlumberger), seem to escape much criticism.
This just sounds like whining from someone who gets paid a metric shit-ton of money to run google. Frankly, he should just shut-up and get on with his job, If its too fking hard, resign.
> Discussing the issue, Pichai deploys the vocabulary of an apologetic CEO that’s become de rigueur in Silicon Valley since last November. He says the word “thoughtful” 13 times and “deeply” (feeling, listening, en
I'm reminded of the BP CEO on South Park. Not that he's actually anything like that guy, it's just what comes to mind.
> Pichai’s solution to the gnawing problems of fake news and illicit content that slip through Google artificial intelligence is, no surprise, more artificial intelligence
Of course it is. What do they say the definition of insanity is again?
> has stirred general alarm about AI; he thinks computers that make their own decisions and are smarter than people could enslave humanity.
if we as a society idolized our leaders less, leaders would not have it this hard. But we idolize them in big part because they are encouraging it. So that's where perhaps leaders should start: don't idolize me, I am a person, with similar deficiencies that you all have.
Agreed. Mostly because the amount of cash companies like Google and Apple have mean they can afford to not be magical for a long time. They have plenty of cash they can burn while trying to regain that magic.
After Microsoft lost it's pedestal, it didn't go anywhere remarkable until Nadella's big cloud services push, where they have changed up quite a bit and reentered the marketplace in a big way.
There may just be a point a company becomes too large to ever completely die, since they have enough cash to spend decades looking for a way to revitalize themselves. Though I say that as we've seen former giants like Sears be brought to the brink of death.
I don't know why this was voted down, but there is merit to it.
Successful, world changing product launches are mostly serendipity, luck, and timing. You could have the right product at the wrong time, or the wrong product at the right time, or both. Most of the home runs (Google Search, iPod, iPhone, Windows 95, etc) happened because of simultaneous fit of product and time. I'd argue the original Mac was too early, and Win95 was timed right.
In 1984, the vast majority of people weren't ready for a home computer, especially at $5000+ in 2017 dollars. Computing was still highly technical and reserved for specialists -- even though the Mac wanted to change that. It wasn't until the mid 90s and into 2000s, where hundreds of millions of people were ready to integrate computers as "must haves" as part of their life. Microsoft rode that wave, the way Google rode the wave of the internet explosion, and Apple rode the wave of the mobile that had been building.
Everyone's looking for the "next big thing", they're spending money like crazy in a thousand different directions: AI, AR, VR, Health, Cars, etc. But no one knows.
There's the assumption that it's AI, because of the scale, but does AI need a big company? Part of the assumption is you need lots of data, an inherent advantage for big companies, but what if you don't?
AlphaGoZero just proved, that unlike AlphaGo, you can start with nothing, and still succeed.
Silicon Valley executives fear the big AI breakthrough will happen at a small startup, come out of nowhere, and disrupt them. AI firms are being bought almost as soon as they form with no product.
All the while, what if the next big breakthrough isn't even AI? What if it's battery chemistry? If someone discovers a battery with just 10x the density, it would change everything. For example, drones could fly for 5 hours instead of 30 minutes. What would that enable?
It's hard to compute what the downstream effects of small disruptive changes in tech will bring, and if history is any guide, new companies will come out of no where with shocking results.
One of the things small scrappy startups can do is, ignore the bad rep and government oversight. A large company that missteps will grab the world's attention, so they have to be risk averse, which means slow. Google can't ship a self driving car that kills people, but startups can ship self driving aftermarket add-ons that do, because in the worst case, they lose the investors money, and they start another company, they don't end up exploding $200 billion in market cap.
>AlphaGoZero just proved, that unlike AlphaGo, you can start with nothing, and still succeed.
There are various types of AI. The type of AI AlphaGo is something that needs computing power and smart people. The kind of AI you see in Google Photos and Translate is what needs large amounts of data.
I guess when you want to control everything and position yourself as the controller of all things, then people expect you to do that.
Google's problem is that it's too big and some of their core values are starting to become mutually exclusive of each other; you can't be a "you"tube where anyone can upload anything but also pull in TV-level advertising dollars.
At least, that's what I'm thinking after reading the article. it kinda makes sense, too, that Google is looking for a bit of a breather after this much coming against them. Still, I think the stuff they're dealing with is pretty much what they asked for.
- ads next to "unseemly" youtube videos: this is their core business, and in every other place you buy ads it matters where those ads are placed and who sees them and in what context. This problem is exactly what Google is expected to solve.
- gender inequality: this seems to come with the territory. every other CEO in the US, not to mention North America & Europe (etc.) is dealing with this too.
- staff protest about Trump immigration policy: the CEO was on their side. In his words, "the fight will continue." He doesn't get to say this is a headache he's got to deal with when he takes that kind of approach.
- a big regulatory fine. From what I've heard, it's almost impossible that Google wasn't rather careless in letting this happen. 'ask forgiveness, not permission' seems to be a mantra that Google follows, and this seems to be an instance where they're now asking forgiveness.
- and finally, Google is 'too big' and people are worried about its power. "boo hoo, we were too successful."
[sources for everything are in the main article or linked from it]
Deal with it, Sundar Pichai. You've got the same job every other CEO has got, and the same pressure. Buck up.