Slightly more organized info in the intro bullets.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the CEO and President, respectively, of Alphabet, have decided to leave these roles. They will continue their involvement as co-founders, shareholders and members of Alphabet’s Board of Directors.
In a way this seems like an admission of the failure of the "Alphabet" thing. The idea behind that originally was that all of these other projects were going to become so significant that it wouldn't make sense to have them or their management coupled with Google.
But a half-decade later, it's still 99.9% Google, so just double-up the Google guy to lead both tiers. Same as it ever was.
> The idea behind that originally was that all of these other projects were going to become so significant that it wouldn't make sense to have them or their management coupled with Google.
No, the idea was that they were high risk speculative efforts and that it didn't make sense to have their branding mixed up with Google, which is a stable, established industry leader.
The original reason was that smart people like career progression. Money alone isn't enough to keep them - they want something good on their business cards. Otherwise some will leave to become CEO of another company.
By making a group of companies, you can have many CEO's, more directors, more VP's, etc. and therefore keep hold of more smart people who are after external recognition more than money.
I don't think it was mostly motivated by management separation, as much as it was desire to break out revenue and expenses by unit. And this is unchanged.
> The idea behind that originally was that all of these other projects were going to become so significant that it wouldn't make sense to have them or their management coupled with Google.
This isn't entirely true. A major consideration was fear of anti-trust litigation. If all of these are the same company/orgs/departments, then you could reasonably say that this "search company" is far too powerful. If there's a search company and a youtube company and a self-driving car company (etc.) then you can make a (specious) argument that you're not vertically and horizontally a monopoly.
It's not an admission of failure. Two businessmen created one of the most successful, influencial businesses ever and are passing the torch. They're rich AF and probably want to retire.
Even if your observation is correct, it's not a bad thing. A failed experiment is hardly a failure. I doubt the legal border between Alphabet and Google won't prove useful in the future.
I am both cautious enough of Google that I've started avoiding using some of their products, and still have an opinion on how they should organize themselves that has very little to do with those feelings.
I was sort of hoping Alphabet would be a spot they could stick all of the projects that aren't going to make a billion a year. I think it still makes sense to maintain projects that 'only' clear $20+ million a year in another division. That would cover a lot of projects that are getting cancelled and causing them serious PR problems (like accusations of being a group of spoiled man-children who can't be relied upon to stick with anything for longer than four years).
Basically there's a lot of space to make money and products that they won't touch, and I don't think it has anything to do with Wall Street. It's just an artificial limitation they've imposed upon themselves.
I don't think it was a failure at all. It was a hedge against slowing ad revenue growth. They didn't want the billions they spend on moonshots dirtying the books of the ad business. This was specifically to keep the stock price moving up and up. I think they should find someone new to be CEO of Alphabet so they can focus on the non ad business companies.
not that I know anything but it seems like the decision was complex both to create the Alphabet and now to kind of merge it under one CEO.
I think some of the reasons could be they no longer see a risk of anti Monopoly regulation targeting them so they don't need to keep everything so divided. they genuinely want to give Sundar a go. They need a process to gradually fade out The original founders, but also importantly ensure those founders isolate their risk from any future missteps the companies take, and vice versa.
maybe the two co-founders were simply getting in the way.
Anyone who thinks Google is a failure should reconsider. They have had their share of bad decisions, but nothing has yet challenged their dominance. They keep spreading to other areas of tech. They may not dominate the AlphaBets, but they sure attract attention and investment.
I'm curious what their continued involvement will look like.
For a while after Bill Gates stepped down as CEO, there was this awkward tension where Steve Balmer was CEO, but people still treated Bill like he was the one in control -- because he was.
> I'm curious what their continued involvement will look like.
Page and Brin, combined, are currently the majority shareholders of alphabet. Each controls 27% of the voting power ( 54% combined ). They are still in charge. They just won't be involved in the day-to-day operation of the company. Sundar will still report to Page/Brin and the board of directors.
“cofounder” isn't “what you're doing now”; it's “what you did 20 years ago” but it's important because people put weight on what the founders say and think. “[large] shareholder” is sort of a role, and often goes together with “member of the board”.
Bill Gates is probably a good example to look to. He also stayed on the board (as chair) and remained a large shareholder, and was looked up to as the cofounder. So I'd imagine “like Bill Gates but with less active interest and involvement”.
The difference here is that Page and Brin have always been willing to give up the CEO seat i.e. day to day operations.
They're 100% still in control of direction and people will always treat them as the boss (esp voting power), but the dynamic will not have nearly as much friction.
I would assume nobody. Unless it's explicitly stated in the Alphabet corporate charter, there's nothing that requires them to have an employee with the title President, or any employee with any particular title at all.
Weirdly this feels like a non-issue. Google has not felt like it has a "personality" for some time - maybe it's a function of hitting mega-corporate size, but it also feels a bit like when Microsoft (a Computer on every Desktop) essentially achieved its goal, it then spent a decade in "goalless and soulless exploitation" mode - something that one suspects is the next step for the worlds largest personality-free platform.
If the two of them leave (have fun sipping pina coladas on the beach!) I am not sure (from the outside) what difference will be made. This may sound like great corporate succession planning - but I feel without a goal there will be little to stop business plans that boil down to "squeeze every dollar from everyone everywhere"
(Was there a glimmer of light in "unbiased free information to all" - is that a mission for the new decade?)
Edit: Just to emphasise - I hope they have fun spending their billions.
That page is awful with a hood that keeps flapping around up and down and text that is trying to be true to italics for quotes instead of lots of diacritics and ends up looking badly diseased. Then the letter sidesteps into a memo, which is equally odd and awkward. It's all a bit odd.
S and B (in my very opinionated ... opinion) did create a great thing in Google. I can't fault people trying to make a living and running with the ball to the point where the playing field is not just paved with gold but it nearly redefines what the concept of gold is.
I think they should have retired before "do no evil" was ditched. That would have cemented their status as internet demi-gods. Instead I think their legacy will be
LOL. I agree with a lot of your points but this one really hit home. On this one, the spying, I always wondered how odd or awkward it had to be internally to push new methods, techniques, or initiatives for "improving user experience" (I.e., spying). I interviewed for some Technical Solutions Engineer role at Google a long time ago. I really wanted the job but when asked a couple questions about how I'd technically achieve some goal related to spying on users and I always found myself hesitating, looking at the interviewer, and thinking, "is it ethically okay if I say this?" I can't imagine how the work environment transitioned at Google over the years from "do no evil" to actively fostering spying on users. I have to imagine it happened because there were few if any laws around user privacy while Google was up and coming. But I know Google has good internal controls for privacy, but I have to imagine there were many unethical or borderline conversations in the name of better spying on users data. I'm still trying to get away from Gmail because I know everything I send/receive is parses but the struggle is real. This is in addition to Chrome and an Android phone, not to mention Google search results. What's the risk of all this spying? In sum, what is at risk is the loss of free will. People who don't care because "they have nothing to hide" cannot see the forest for the trees. Then again, I need to make some changes myself. As an ancient Chinese proverb says, "To know, and not to do, is in fact not to know."
> And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
The problem was that it was moved from near the top to being near the bottom (though it's own paragraph). Sadly there were lots of very inaccurate headlines like this:
> Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct
It would be nice to see a focused mission from El Goog. From the outside it feels like they incubate a bunch of random semi-competing products which are arbitrarily terminated or boosted. There's a lot of talent that could be marshaled.
People find the thought of a company with a clear mission appealing but there's no clear advantage of having a mission other than maximizing financial value.
The company mission is just one of the Sillicon Valley tropes, another one is the idea of "changing the world".
Having a mission might be useful for focus and clarity in thinking but if it's taken as something more than that, it's just an artificial constraint. If you can use the company capital more effectively in a completely different market, you should do that, regardless the mission.
I feel that the mission is often constructed backwards from the products. I.e. at Google they looked at their products and came up with a broad description of the user need (organizing the world's information).
I share the sentiment that Sundar to me feels a bit like an invisible placeholder for leadership that I would argue is obviously lacking in Google lately.
There's nothing wrong with its stock price and revenue and I'm sure from that angle a lot of financial people are pretty happy with the status quo of just milking that cow perpetually. However, looking at it from the technical angle, I see a company that is asleep at the wheel and showing a distinct lack of vision, leadership, and direction across the board of its product portfolio. Perhaps a bit like MS under Balmer ramming out increasingly less popular iterations of windows and office. MS turned things around under Nadella. Google perhaps hasn't sunken far enough that it needs that kind of leadership change yet but it seems in my eyes to be going down that same path slowly.
IMHO all the money making units worth mentioning in Google have their origin in a brief period of the early 2000s perhaps up to the 2006-2008 time frame (i.e. the Android launch) when it was smaller, more creative, nimble, and definitely more capable of translating vision into execution. That includes things like google docs, hangouts, maps, photos, youtube, gmail, android, chrome, google cloud and of course the big money maker ads.
A lot of other stuff launched in the years since has simply failed to get traction or got killed early. This has actually become a meme on HN and elsewhere where people openly wonder when they will kill X at the moment of the announcement where X is a long list of stuff Google tried and failed to deliver or just walked away from despite internal and external enthusiasm (e.g Google Inbox). The list of stuff that they announced in the last decade or so that actually didn't get killed is worryingly short.
There actually is very little of significance that I can name that emerged out of Google in the recent decade that is worthy of being added to that list and only some stuff under the Alphabet umbrella that comes close (i.e. Waymo would be the main success story there that has yet to prove itself as a long term money maker).
In other words, I think of Sundar as a caretaker, not a leader. He's greasing the wheels of the money printing machine that is ads but maybe not really the best for coming up with the next big thing. Maybe now is a good moment to start looking for a real leader to replace the founders that clearly just announced their permanent retirement from the industry and any other meaningful involvement with tech (tu un-sugar coat this announcement).
"maybe not really the best for coming up with the next big thing"
But does any huge successful company that ends up having a second act really do that, go and find a visionary* to rejuvenate the company? With Nadella, wasn't it more like, Microsoft did a lot of random things, and when one of them was particularly successful, then the leader of it (cloud, Azure) rose to the top? Not that they picked him and then he decided the direction of the company.
*Jobs isn't really what I mean, because he was the original visionary, not a replacement.
Ironically, they could find some focus by no longer being a one size fits all search engine, and instead offer different search products for different types of users, or focused on different types of information. They do to an extent with travel data, financial data, scholar, but their product just isnt great at crawling the web anymore.
They, like Apple and Microsoft, also need some consumer experience advocates, who take a step back and ask how the consumers entire experience is across the whole suite. All of them have products that are often less than the sum of their parts.
They recently acquired Fitbit so I expect we should see some brand new product developments within that category soon enough in the future. I do feel they have not participated as much within the IoT market which still has so much potential unrealized. Perhaps the market is not ripe yet without 5G availability? It's incredible that we have all these new AI and ML tools and still they don't really have a lot of meaningful impacts yet in improving our daily lives if we really think about it. The main opportunities still remain mostly unexplored.
They got sued, prevailed in court, but by then the 10 year battle sapped energy out of the project. With antitrust and other scrutiny, I doubt Google will attempt other massive forms of digitization that need it like academic journals. My personal opinion.
> Edit: Just to emphasise - I hope they have fun spending their billions.
Meh (time for my socialist side to come out) they could try and do the Bill Gates Foundation thing. Don’t be cynical — it is making some much needed positive change!
Money = Power = Responsibility (with wisdom).
Exponentially true if you are a super billionaire.
Seems like “interesting“ timing given that the Alphabet board just recently stated they’re investigating the handling of sexual misconduct by executives:
> Charlie Ayers: Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around.
Heather Cairns: And we didn’t have locks, so you can’t help it if you walk in on people if there’s no lock. Remember, we’re a bunch of twentysomethings except for me—ancient at 35, so there’s some hormones and they’re raging.
Charlie Ayers: H.R. told me that Sergey’s response to it was, “Why not? They’re my employees.” But you don’t have employees for fucking! That’s not what the job is.
I was thinking “interesting timing” given we are coming up on 2020 elections and Twitter CEO Jack announced he would be living in Africa for a portion of the year... they are washing their hands of whatever shenanigans that Google and Twitter will be up to during this election cycle.
One thing I really like about Larry Page is that it's obvious he never really wanted to be a manager. He's a real nerd at heart who likes technology. But he also realized the value of what he created and acted as a good steward for 20 years. He took the reigns when he needed to, and let others take over when the time was right. He's still one of the people I look up to most.
I strongly disagree. Alphabet is an unfocused company which seems to treat product releases as experiments that can be killed at any time without warning. There's a culture that incentivizes more experiments rather than better products.
The aimlessness is obvious in the frequent and baffling product renaming, reorganizations (like Nest joining Google), duplicated/overlapping products, and killing of acquired products.
A smart CEO knows how to focus, build on early success (rather than abandon), and tell a coherent brand story.
Yeah from my limited view when I was there as an L4, Google felt very much run by a weird network of politics and some bureaucracy. Mid-high level VPs seemed like they controlled things a lot more than real higher-ups.
I think this can be... interesting? Trying to give more power and autonomy to individual teams is nice (there were some efforts that tried explicitly to map things to some kind of free market model). Sometimes higher-ups would be like "hey we're all gonna migrate to technology X" but individual teams were like "lol nah the new thing sucks" and keep using it and nothing really ever happened. But I think that attitude also kinda opened the door for a large political/influence market. And there's not _real_ market pressures on individual teams that I think tend to keep the actual free market a little closer to ground truth.
This all reminds me of a critique I'd heard of flat organizations, which is that all groups of people are going to have power structures, and by not formalizing them, all you're doing is allowing them to opaquely evolve in strange ways on their own.
I really wish that someone could study internal Google politics and actually understand it and map it all out.
One of the first initiatives Larry undertook when he became a CEO is to "put more wood behind fewer arrows" by canceling a ton of bullshit projects that _haven't_ yet been released to the public, and some that have, as well. So if you're going to blame Larry for anything, this is not it.
I don't. He's allowed Google to become many of the things he's long stated he was opposed to. Either he never had his stated values in the first place, or he's turned his back on them in later years.
There are some ongoing theory-crafting in this thread, but the real reason seems pretty simple; Larry and Sergey obviously don't want to deal with all the management and operational stuffs, but only "moonshots" like autonomous vehicles or quantum computing. Yeah, this was the whole purpose of establishing a holding company, but Alphabet has grown by 2 times (both in employee count and revenue) and probably they're now facing the similar amount of bureaucratic workload again.
Personally, I think Sundar has been a pretty good CEO and probably a better businessman for this size of organization but I'm still not sure whether this leadership change will work better for Google though. Due to Alphabet's structure, Larry and Sergey will keep majority voting stocks but they will be away from most of the details in the company. Can they still make good business decisions without such details?
> I think Sundar has been a pretty good CEO and probably a better businessman
Has he though? I get the sense that he’s really Balmering it up in that he inherited a super successful company, and didn’t do much with it except not screw up.
The two big growth areas- social and cloud- are dead or a distant and growing third.
Google hasn’t done much new or exciting through his whole term. So no new products, the 2016 election and congressional testimony debacle, randomly firing different people with no sound reasoning.
It would be neat if someone could establish a vision beyond “10% growth forever through lots of rent seeking.” Maybe a company has to go through their Ballmer to get to their Nadella.
Maybe they can somehow convince Jeff Dean to be CEO and just write an AI that generally maximizes profit.
I'm not sure that Sundar has been a good CEO. The constant shutdown of google services that people rely on has been troubling. The management troubles over employees lately has been troubling as well. They still own the search market, but would you worry about the lifespan of the google products you're thinking of buying?
I still have a Sony Google TV, it works great as a TV but the android OS is no longer supported, so there are no more OTA updates. It's a shame because it seems like if they had thought about it they might have wondered what happens when they no longer support the product.
There was a time when Google questioned the value of managers and managers had to prove their value to the engineers. Maybe it's time to question their value again.
My personal prediction is that Sundar will be to Google what Ballmer was to Microsoft: He will make tons of money but will drive Google into a corner where it will be disrespected by, well, hackers (That is, people who are interested in technically open solutions, configurability, fitness of unplanned purposes, etc). But is it refreshing that Microsoft now is going back into an opposite direction.
Yeah you could say they are close to jumping the shark... it remains to be seen what former Google employees do next. If Google continues to dump money into salaries and stock then they might not have much to worry about. Personal assistants, knowledge graph, Alexa/Siri/"Ok Google" are definitely the future. Apple seems to be winning in the car but Alexa is winning at home.
Google has never lived up to the "do no evil" motto but under Sundar things have only gotten much worse with no signs of getting better at any point in the future.
Sundar made a mistake in wading into politics after the 2016 elections. A good business leader knows to stay out of the forbidden topics of politics and religion; unite the troops, don't divide them. I don't think he realized how much impact his words would have on conservatives once the TGIF video got out. Anyway let's hope they learned something about remaining neutral in public, as the company "grows up".
None of the big tech companies have avoided "wading into politics" since 2016. Tech is far too big and inextricable a part of society for any competent CEO to think they could hide on the sidelines.
Yes, this is the announcement that Page and Brin are stepping down.
I wouldn't really call it "incredibly subtle" - most similar announcements are wrapped in a bunch of corporate language as well. This is a pretty standard way to announce this sort of thing.
I guess I just don't believe this. Google is one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. Having both people step down like this is incredibly strange.
I mean, neither of them even tried the ol' "I'm stepping down to spend time with my family" thing.
>Today, in 2019, if the company was a person, it would be a young adult of 21 and it would be time to leave the roost. While it has been a tremendous privilege to be deeply involved in the day-to-day management of the company for so long, we believe it’s time to assume the role of proud parents—offering advice and love, but not daily nagging!
From the outside, it feels much more like the company is hitting a midlife crisis (feeling unsettled, not as agile as they used to be) than a young adult.
The funny thing is: If you are used to coporate speech, then immediately after you read the headline "A letter from Larry and Sergey" you know that there is a resignation coming up.
It's not subtle at all. Anyone who knows the current state of affairs (i.e. Sundar being CEO of Google) will have deduced this based on the myriad of titles on this topic alone.
Nah, anyone used to reading Google press releases knows that a subject line of, "An Update on X" always means X is being shut down, and thus, "A letter from Larry and Sergey" could mean nothing else except they're stepping down.
Nobody could prove that without it the web would have been a better place. You couldn’t have known what’s to come when you were raising hundreds of thousands of dollars as two students in 1998. Maybe your leadership has been one of the least evil among the possibilities in the evil world we live in.
However, we know what is it like to lose control of your company, and how it could inspire dystopian novels under your leadership now. There’re many lessons for all the entrepreneurs to take from your story.
I sincerely hope that you would prioritize the greater benefit rather than the Google’s benefit as years pass.
That is something that I kind of admire about Bill Gates: As Microsoft's boss he was ruthless, and even anti-competitive, all to benefit his own company.
But somehow, he is one of the "best type of person" that could become the richest man in our world. There are so many rich people that just look to be buried with their millions or pass it to their family.
Hopefully Sergei and Larry will try to get the same type of legacy.
So Gates is not alone. Buffet and Ellison have both pledged the vast majority of their wealth to the Gates Foundation. Somewhat unique to the US, our billionaires tends to be fairly philanthropic.
They could help with their money, but if they could help with their visions, social capital and network that would set them apart.
I admire Brian Acton in this respect. He regretted the decision of selling WhatsApp and publicized it. Since then he has taken on the leadership of Signal while donating money into it.
Google! What a thing to have created in this world. Hats off to Page and Brin.
After the dotcom crash, and I don’t know if there’s any real analysis to be had around this or if it’s just sentimentality, but personally there was always a sense of hope attached to Google as they brought excitement back into bleak times in the industry.
Facebook was a sort of cheerleader in that way as well, during the 2008 credit crisis, way before the world turned sour towards the Facebook brand. Who will be the great business to drag us out of the next financial / tech-industry crisis?
Readit News
Slightly more organized info in the intro bullets.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the CEO and President, respectively, of Alphabet, have decided to leave these roles. They will continue their involvement as co-founders, shareholders and members of Alphabet’s Board of Directors.
But a half-decade later, it's still 99.9% Google, so just double-up the Google guy to lead both tiers. Same as it ever was.
No, the idea was that they were high risk speculative efforts and that it didn't make sense to have their branding mixed up with Google, which is a stable, established industry leader.
By making a group of companies, you can have many CEO's, more directors, more VP's, etc. and therefore keep hold of more smart people who are after external recognition more than money.
This isn't entirely true. A major consideration was fear of anti-trust litigation. If all of these are the same company/orgs/departments, then you could reasonably say that this "search company" is far too powerful. If there's a search company and a youtube company and a self-driving car company (etc.) then you can make a (specious) argument that you're not vertically and horizontally a monopoly.
The lack of direction, apart from the bigger projects is noticeable.
Maybe they should just rename the whole thing to "AdWords" then...
I am both cautious enough of Google that I've started avoiding using some of their products, and still have an opinion on how they should organize themselves that has very little to do with those feelings.
I was sort of hoping Alphabet would be a spot they could stick all of the projects that aren't going to make a billion a year. I think it still makes sense to maintain projects that 'only' clear $20+ million a year in another division. That would cover a lot of projects that are getting cancelled and causing them serious PR problems (like accusations of being a group of spoiled man-children who can't be relied upon to stick with anything for longer than four years).
Basically there's a lot of space to make money and products that they won't touch, and I don't think it has anything to do with Wall Street. It's just an artificial limitation they've imposed upon themselves.
I think some of the reasons could be they no longer see a risk of anti Monopoly regulation targeting them so they don't need to keep everything so divided. they genuinely want to give Sundar a go. They need a process to gradually fade out The original founders, but also importantly ensure those founders isolate their risk from any future missteps the companies take, and vice versa.
maybe the two co-founders were simply getting in the way.
For a while after Bill Gates stepped down as CEO, there was this awkward tension where Steve Balmer was CEO, but people still treated Bill like he was the one in control -- because he was.
Page and Brin, combined, are currently the majority shareholders of alphabet. Each controls 27% of the voting power ( 54% combined ). They are still in charge. They just won't be involved in the day-to-day operation of the company. Sundar will still report to Page/Brin and the board of directors.
Bill Gates is probably a good example to look to. He also stayed on the board (as chair) and remained a large shareholder, and was looked up to as the cofounder. So I'd imagine “like Bill Gates but with less active interest and involvement”.
They're 100% still in control of direction and people will always treat them as the boss (esp voting power), but the dynamic will not have nearly as much friction.
Deleted Comment
Bill was simply playing politics.
Dead Comment
If the two of them leave (have fun sipping pina coladas on the beach!) I am not sure (from the outside) what difference will be made. This may sound like great corporate succession planning - but I feel without a goal there will be little to stop business plans that boil down to "squeeze every dollar from everyone everywhere"
(Was there a glimmer of light in "unbiased free information to all" - is that a mission for the new decade?)
Edit: Just to emphasise - I hope they have fun spending their billions.
It is.
That page is awful with a hood that keeps flapping around up and down and text that is trying to be true to italics for quotes instead of lots of diacritics and ends up looking badly diseased. Then the letter sidesteps into a memo, which is equally odd and awkward. It's all a bit odd.
S and B (in my very opinionated ... opinion) did create a great thing in Google. I can't fault people trying to make a living and running with the ball to the point where the playing field is not just paved with gold but it nearly redefines what the concept of gold is.
I think they should have retired before "do no evil" was ditched. That would have cemented their status as internet demi-gods. Instead I think their legacy will be
<i>wierdos whot spy on you</i>
LOL. I agree with a lot of your points but this one really hit home. On this one, the spying, I always wondered how odd or awkward it had to be internally to push new methods, techniques, or initiatives for "improving user experience" (I.e., spying). I interviewed for some Technical Solutions Engineer role at Google a long time ago. I really wanted the job but when asked a couple questions about how I'd technically achieve some goal related to spying on users and I always found myself hesitating, looking at the interviewer, and thinking, "is it ethically okay if I say this?" I can't imagine how the work environment transitioned at Google over the years from "do no evil" to actively fostering spying on users. I have to imagine it happened because there were few if any laws around user privacy while Google was up and coming. But I know Google has good internal controls for privacy, but I have to imagine there were many unethical or borderline conversations in the name of better spying on users data. I'm still trying to get away from Gmail because I know everything I send/receive is parses but the struggle is real. This is in addition to Chrome and an Android phone, not to mention Google search results. What's the risk of all this spying? In sum, what is at risk is the loss of free will. People who don't care because "they have nothing to hide" cannot see the forest for the trees. Then again, I need to make some changes myself. As an ancient Chinese proverb says, "To know, and not to do, is in fact not to know."
> And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
The problem was that it was moved from near the top to being near the bottom (though it's own paragraph). Sadly there were lots of very inaccurate headlines like this:
> Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct
https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
It would be nice to see a focused mission from El Goog. From the outside it feels like they incubate a bunch of random semi-competing products which are arbitrarily terminated or boosted. There's a lot of talent that could be marshaled.
The company mission is just one of the Sillicon Valley tropes, another one is the idea of "changing the world".
Having a mission might be useful for focus and clarity in thinking but if it's taken as something more than that, it's just an artificial constraint. If you can use the company capital more effectively in a completely different market, you should do that, regardless the mission.
I feel that the mission is often constructed backwards from the products. I.e. at Google they looked at their products and came up with a broad description of the user need (organizing the world's information).
All their 'random' stuff makes sense in that context.
There's nothing wrong with its stock price and revenue and I'm sure from that angle a lot of financial people are pretty happy with the status quo of just milking that cow perpetually. However, looking at it from the technical angle, I see a company that is asleep at the wheel and showing a distinct lack of vision, leadership, and direction across the board of its product portfolio. Perhaps a bit like MS under Balmer ramming out increasingly less popular iterations of windows and office. MS turned things around under Nadella. Google perhaps hasn't sunken far enough that it needs that kind of leadership change yet but it seems in my eyes to be going down that same path slowly.
IMHO all the money making units worth mentioning in Google have their origin in a brief period of the early 2000s perhaps up to the 2006-2008 time frame (i.e. the Android launch) when it was smaller, more creative, nimble, and definitely more capable of translating vision into execution. That includes things like google docs, hangouts, maps, photos, youtube, gmail, android, chrome, google cloud and of course the big money maker ads.
A lot of other stuff launched in the years since has simply failed to get traction or got killed early. This has actually become a meme on HN and elsewhere where people openly wonder when they will kill X at the moment of the announcement where X is a long list of stuff Google tried and failed to deliver or just walked away from despite internal and external enthusiasm (e.g Google Inbox). The list of stuff that they announced in the last decade or so that actually didn't get killed is worryingly short.
There actually is very little of significance that I can name that emerged out of Google in the recent decade that is worthy of being added to that list and only some stuff under the Alphabet umbrella that comes close (i.e. Waymo would be the main success story there that has yet to prove itself as a long term money maker).
In other words, I think of Sundar as a caretaker, not a leader. He's greasing the wheels of the money printing machine that is ads but maybe not really the best for coming up with the next big thing. Maybe now is a good moment to start looking for a real leader to replace the founders that clearly just announced their permanent retirement from the industry and any other meaningful involvement with tech (tu un-sugar coat this announcement).
But does any huge successful company that ends up having a second act really do that, go and find a visionary* to rejuvenate the company? With Nadella, wasn't it more like, Microsoft did a lot of random things, and when one of them was particularly successful, then the leader of it (cloud, Azure) rose to the top? Not that they picked him and then he decided the direction of the company.
*Jobs isn't really what I mean, because he was the original visionary, not a replacement.
They, like Apple and Microsoft, also need some consumer experience advocates, who take a step back and ask how the consumers entire experience is across the whole suite. All of them have products that are often less than the sum of their parts.
Or just fixing the search engine that they do have. It really has become shockingly poor.
(yes of course they and I would get bored of a life of endless luxury - but I would like to at least try it and see how long I can hold out ;-)
Why spend their own money on a risky capital intensive venture when their cash engine let them do it unopposed?
He feels ... reserved and safe.
Maybe that is what Google needs at this moment
That still feels like at least a 100yr mission.
They got sued, prevailed in court, but by then the 10 year battle sapped energy out of the project. With antitrust and other scrutiny, I doubt Google will attempt other massive forms of digitization that need it like academic journals. My personal opinion.
Meh (time for my socialist side to come out) they could try and do the Bill Gates Foundation thing. Don’t be cynical — it is making some much needed positive change!
Money = Power = Responsibility (with wisdom).
Exponentially true if you are a super billionaire.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/technology/google-sexual-...
And relatedly:
> Charlie Ayers: Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around.
Heather Cairns: And we didn’t have locks, so you can’t help it if you walk in on people if there’s no lock. Remember, we’re a bunch of twentysomethings except for me—ancient at 35, so there’s some hormones and they’re raging.
Charlie Ayers: H.R. told me that Sergey’s response to it was, “Why not? They’re my employees.” But you don’t have employees for fucking! That’s not what the job is.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/valley-of-genius-exc...
If your theory is correct, we should see Drummond retire soon as well. I expect it...
Deleted Comment
I strongly disagree. Alphabet is an unfocused company which seems to treat product releases as experiments that can be killed at any time without warning. There's a culture that incentivizes more experiments rather than better products.
The aimlessness is obvious in the frequent and baffling product renaming, reorganizations (like Nest joining Google), duplicated/overlapping products, and killing of acquired products.
A smart CEO knows how to focus, build on early success (rather than abandon), and tell a coherent brand story.
I think this can be... interesting? Trying to give more power and autonomy to individual teams is nice (there were some efforts that tried explicitly to map things to some kind of free market model). Sometimes higher-ups would be like "hey we're all gonna migrate to technology X" but individual teams were like "lol nah the new thing sucks" and keep using it and nothing really ever happened. But I think that attitude also kinda opened the door for a large political/influence market. And there's not _real_ market pressures on individual teams that I think tend to keep the actual free market a little closer to ground truth.
This all reminds me of a critique I'd heard of flat organizations, which is that all groups of people are going to have power structures, and by not formalizing them, all you're doing is allowing them to opaquely evolve in strange ways on their own.
I really wish that someone could study internal Google politics and actually understand it and map it all out.
I don't. He's allowed Google to become many of the things he's long stated he was opposed to. Either he never had his stated values in the first place, or he's turned his back on them in later years.
Friendly amendment: reins
Dead Comment
Personally, I think Sundar has been a pretty good CEO and probably a better businessman for this size of organization but I'm still not sure whether this leadership change will work better for Google though. Due to Alphabet's structure, Larry and Sergey will keep majority voting stocks but they will be away from most of the details in the company. Can they still make good business decisions without such details?
Has he though? I get the sense that he’s really Balmering it up in that he inherited a super successful company, and didn’t do much with it except not screw up.
The two big growth areas- social and cloud- are dead or a distant and growing third.
Google hasn’t done much new or exciting through his whole term. So no new products, the 2016 election and congressional testimony debacle, randomly firing different people with no sound reasoning.
It would be neat if someone could establish a vision beyond “10% growth forever through lots of rent seeking.” Maybe a company has to go through their Ballmer to get to their Nadella.
Maybe they can somehow convince Jeff Dean to be CEO and just write an AI that generally maximizes profit.
Deleted Comment
I still have a Sony Google TV, it works great as a TV but the android OS is no longer supported, so there are no more OTA updates. It's a shame because it seems like if they had thought about it they might have wondered what happens when they no longer support the product.
There was a time when Google questioned the value of managers and managers had to prove their value to the engineers. Maybe it's time to question their value again.
> ... Going forward, Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet. ...
Not knowing the internals of Google, it seems as if this is the announcement that Page and Brin are stepping down. Is this correct?
If so, what an incredibly subtle way to announce a high-profile pair of resignations.
I wouldn't really call it "incredibly subtle" - most similar announcements are wrapped in a bunch of corporate language as well. This is a pretty standard way to announce this sort of thing.
I mean, neither of them even tried the ol' "I'm stepping down to spend time with my family" thing.
Deleted Comment
>Today, in 2019, if the company was a person, it would be a young adult of 21 and it would be time to leave the roost. While it has been a tremendous privilege to be deeply involved in the day-to-day management of the company for so long, we believe it’s time to assume the role of proud parents—offering advice and love, but not daily nagging!
Thank you for creating Google.
Nobody could prove that without it the web would have been a better place. You couldn’t have known what’s to come when you were raising hundreds of thousands of dollars as two students in 1998. Maybe your leadership has been one of the least evil among the possibilities in the evil world we live in.
However, we know what is it like to lose control of your company, and how it could inspire dystopian novels under your leadership now. There’re many lessons for all the entrepreneurs to take from your story.
I sincerely hope that you would prioritize the greater benefit rather than the Google’s benefit as years pass.
Sincerely, A Non-Googler, one of the 7.7 billion
But somehow, he is one of the "best type of person" that could become the richest man in our world. There are so many rich people that just look to be buried with their millions or pass it to their family.
Hopefully Sergei and Larry will try to get the same type of legacy.
I admire Brian Acton in this respect. He regretted the decision of selling WhatsApp and publicized it. Since then he has taken on the leadership of Signal while donating money into it.
After the dotcom crash, and I don’t know if there’s any real analysis to be had around this or if it’s just sentimentality, but personally there was always a sense of hope attached to Google as they brought excitement back into bleak times in the industry.
Facebook was a sort of cheerleader in that way as well, during the 2008 credit crisis, way before the world turned sour towards the Facebook brand. Who will be the great business to drag us out of the next financial / tech-industry crisis?