As someone who's been on the sales and marketing side (and is now on the Angel side), I agree. When I look at potential investments, if it's an internet company run by MBAs or sales and marketing folks, I immediately pass.
Invest in and keep the people who build stuff. They're the talent. The rest (with exceptions, of course) can always be brought back in, outsourced, etc.
So much negativity in these threads. They are just stereotypes.
There are (some) bad MBAs, sales and marketing folks out there saying "I'll pass on the techies - it's just grunt work, I can get it done for nothing in (insert country here)". Stereotypes again.
Google has simply decided that their marketing department is too big. It happens. Particularly when you acquire a lot of companies as Google does (other shared functions such as HR, Finance are in a similar boat).
From the vibe of this thread you'd think they're getting rid of their marketing function entirely.
He's saying that sales and marketing is less valuable than engineering, not that it's not valuable, which is (usually) true. If you had to lay off a bunch of your staff, wouldn't you lay off the least valuable ones? It's not a personal decision, it's a business decision.
They're saying engineers are the "talent" and the others are something you outsource. Or that engineers do the "real work". Or that "At least they are firing sales and marketing people and not engineers.".
In an internet company, the people responsible for the product (engineers) are the talent.
In my experience, marketing people at big companies only know how to spend money. Many sales people just have expensive dinners and long-winded biz dev meetings.
Give me the sales guy who sold insurance door to door and is passionate about the product. Or someone who can excite Eskimos about snow to be marketing. The rest don't belong in startups (or any company trying to maintain a startup ethic)
To be honest, when I read something like that, what I hear is "techies are rude, antisocial, lazy and obstructive". Then you get images of guys with bad beards and no girlfriend. Because that's the inverse stereotype.
Brand is really important for an Internet startup. Perhaps more important than many traditional business -- because you're handing money over to someone you can't see, for product that you can't touch.
I'd say their brand is one of the Google's most pivotal assets. A bit hit to Google's brand would absolutely impede their ability to do business, and to subsequently make cool technology (coincidentally, there are threads about this on HN right now).
Either way, the thread's about 200 people getting fired from Google marketing. I hardly think I should get emotive on the issue, but certainly not something I'd ever feel like crowing about -- and not something I think is an "us and them", which is what this thread is really implying.
People initially flocked to Google because their search returned the best results, now here come the marketers calling it a "brand".
You know what a brand is?
A brand is just the business counterpart of a person's name. My name is a proxy in other people's minds for my professional reputation, but this doesn't give me loony ideas about "investing" in my name, making it more "catchy" or somesuch crap.
Sorry for being confrontational: I'd like to hear a marketer's honest response to unfiltered thoughts of this kind.
googles sales are pretty low touch - I guess that is out of need to massively scale (just ask anyone who has tried to contact a human there !), so having a large sales force doesn't really make sense for them.
I guess this is using the "cover" of a great recession to do this, although the fact that they talked about it on a blog kind of means its not really a case of timing. It does sound like the don't just want to turf these people out but are going to try to find them something else to do, where possible.
googles sales are pretty low touch
For the most part-
Except for enterprise sales that includes their search appliances, apps and gMaps API's. The sales folks were pretty top notch and always got me the info I requested in a timely manner. Plus you get a phone number that will get you to a real, live, breathing human. Really! :)
Though, IMO, laying off 200 folks globally is not that huge considering their total head count. (I say this loosely as those affected certainly are not happy about losing their jobs)
Invest in and keep the people who build stuff. They're the talent. The rest (with exceptions, of course) can always be brought back in, outsourced, etc.