Larry Page, Google Founder, Is Still Innovator in Chief | Hacker News Reader

Larry Page, Google Founder, Is Still Innovator in Chief

nytimes.com

113 pointssamsgro59 comments

I've got a tech friend who enrolled his young son in the local Montessori school. He told me once about how the lobby was full of successful people who had graduated like judges, congressmen, federal government officials and heads of non-profits. I told him that Larry Page was a graduate of that school and he was astounded.

A while later he met with the headmaster and asked him why Page's picture wasn't featured in the lobby? He never got a direct answer but apparently they didn't feel that merely making a lot of money was enough of an accomplishment ;<).

Doesnt sound like a very knowledgeable headmaster. Larry invented PageRank and did a respectable implementation of it before he had other engineers take it over. And only googlers know what he has done inside the company.

Bill Gates gets a bad tech rap too, even though he was coding successful compilers himself for several years.

Gates also made a significant mathematical discovery that wasn’t bested for 30 years[1], and he published a paper on it while he was a sophomore at Harvard.

[1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9223678...

I am constantly thinking of ways to apply pancake sorting in a real-life environment that doesn't involve working at IHOP

Larry and Sergey are smart visionary people, no doubt, but PageRank was known (not that that name) since the '50s, and even applied during the 80's to academic references (offline hyperlinks, if you think about it ...).

I'm not sure who deserves the credit for figuring out the meaning of the stationary distribution of a markov chain (that it exists follows from the Perron Frobenious theorem and may have been known before that), and I don't know who first applied it to references/hyperlinks - but it wasn't Larry and Sergey

Doesnt sound like a very knowledgeable headmaster. Larry invented PageRank and did a respectable implementation of it before he had other engineers take it over.

Here is a video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ, of everyday people trying to explain what a browser is, a browser, the most important piece of (general use) software developed since the word processor or spreadsheet.

Try asking the general public what PageRank is, much less who invented it, and be prepared for a montage of silent deer-in-headlights responses with the occasional stammering about librarians for good measure :)

Thats is fair, and probably true. Ask somebody who larry page is, and almost everyone will know.

If not, they have heard of google. I am not sure if this guys was just ultra hipster, bitter about not getting a donation, or he literally doesn't realize that google was an inportant contribution.

Either way, society seems to disagree.

I think it's more likely that Page asked them not to hang a photo of him in the lobby and the headmaster would rather make a vague, dismissive comment than risk the perception that Page didn't want to be associated with the school.

most likely page just did not wire any donations

Bollocks....by that argument, would have never though congressmen and government officials wasting a lot of money was an accomplishment.

How about building a company withs tens of thousands of people, many of whom are working on hard problems that will benefit billions of people?

I have no problem with the guy, but has anyone noticed that there's a fluff piece about Larry nearly every year around this time?

More than that I've noticed about 30 years of consistent and regular fluff pieces to glamorize people such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. One of the notable exceptions is Steve Jobs who stopped giving interviews to these kinds of reporters in the 1980s, and also stopped getting covers around that time (after that, if he's on a cover he's holding a new product.)

One observable consequence of this is that Steve Jobs who gave us so much is widely reviled, while Bill Gates who destroyed the packaged software industry, almost killed the internet and went so far as to have schools raided by SWAT to make them buy windows licenses for their computers (computers that were Macs, by the way, back when Macs ran PowerPC and couldn't run windows anyway)... is widely regarded as a humanitarian[1]. Jeff Bezos (whom I've known personally) is widely regarded as a Tech guy (despite being really just a pointy haired boss.)

There's a reason these guys spend money on PR-- the PR becomes the public perception.

[1] I've been in the room when both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos lost their cool (three separate occasions, fortunately I was not the target.) Steve was quietly upset "how are we going to fix this?" and "we're never going to let this happen again, are we?" with all the weight those comments imply. Bezos and Gates both lit into the person with a clear intention to make their victims feel like nothing (both in different ways brought up the victims family as well.) I worked at Amazon and Microsoft, but not Apple.

> One observable consequence of this is that Steve Jobs who gave us so much is widely reviled, while Bill Gates who destroyed the packaged software industry

Hahaha, what? iOS set a huge negative precedence and pretty much killed off any hope for a mainstream phone that wasn't focused on consuming pre-approved content.

> iOS set a huge negative precedence

That's unfair. Before iOS you typically had to go to your carrier's app store to download anything. Verizon's policies about who gets listed and how much it costs were much worse than iOS.

Windows Mobile was completely open too. There were several independent stores out there you could buy from.

Was the WM store really that different from the iOS store? I seem to recall there was a verification and certification process (and it cost a lot more than $99/year)

There was no WM store back then. The store was added in WP7.

PalmOS had a wide open app model and it was awesome.

Yes. The iPhone was a huge step backwards in my opinion, but at the time the only people who seemed to understand this were PalmOS users.

And Blackberry users. Blackberry was pretty damn good.

Even S60 had a pretty decent open market.

Yes, when I had a Palm, IIRC I scouted around for apps and there were many, probably not just on a Palm company store, but third-party sites too. I remember one called Pippy, which was a port of Python to the Palm. Used it a bit. But it used to crash somewhat often, so gave up trying to do any real apps with it on the device. A pity. Would have been cool to have custom apps on it, that too done in a productive language like Python, and maybe accessing / controlling the hardware.

Yes, the dozen applications available were great.

parent is clearly too young to remember PalmOS.

Nope. I lived it. I joined QuickOffice (now part of Google) in 2002. We built apps exlcusively for PalmOS back in the pilot days. The idea that only a handful of apps existed is nonsense. Handango had a thriving Palm community surrounding it for several years.

Palm ultimately failed because the leadership at Palm failed to recognize what they had and simply refused to innovate into the smartphone world until it was far too late. Still they showed that an app marketplace was something peple really wanted. Well before the iOS walled garden.

I had a palm III and the handspring palm V, both were gifts and they were ok. Losing everything multiple times when the AAA batteries died was very not fun.

I remember a few little games and calculators. Never felt compelled to pay for anything.

When I had a palm windows mobile thing circa 2004, that was when I saw the light. As horrible as the platform was, having a browser and google maps on the road was like having superpowers. My wife and I took a 5 week Road trip honeymoon, and basically pricelined our way across the country. Amazing.

Android allows almost all content, including sideloading apps.

Re. Gates/humanitarian: he is not regarded as one for his work at Microsoft but due to his work at the Gates Foundation. Are you able to say that the world would be better off if the Gates Foundation did not exist?

The more relevant question is: would the world be better off if Microsoft (and thus also the Gates Foundation) never existed?

To be fair, Larry Page apparently declined several times to be interviewed for this article.

Jobs gave these interviews for Apple products not himself. He arranged massive puff pieces (magazine covers) on Apple and their products to coincide with launches of new products.

Just like there is a piece on Musk every now and then. I dont mind either way but these articles are really shallow in substance.

I'd like to know what innovation Larry brings to the company these days. Especially technical innovation, rather than managerial one, as the primary meaning of the word.

Musk is the chief technical specialist in SpaceX, as he put himself. It's unclear what he does on this role, but his explanations are touching some rather deep details, so at least he looks like having a good understanding of technical aspects of SpaceX systems.

Wow some people think Musk is the chief technical specialist on SpaceX? That guy is an awesome self-promoter.

Aerospace vehicles are designed in a hierarchy with a whole lot of individuals specializing in one piece of one subsystem, but by the nature of aircraft everything is very codependent. You can't just design thermo, avionics, structures, aero, payload, etc. in a vacuum; the tiniest details of one subsystem have reverberating effects in all of the others.

At the top you usually have a set of old guys (you might have read Skunk Works, those old guys are Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich in that book) but in this case Musk and likely a few others... a set of people who have to know a little bit about everything and enough to drive the important piece of engineering of the moment towards a successful project.

Larry Page and Elon Musk probably have hired the same PR firm? Not a far fetched possibility given that they're friends with each other themselves.

An alternative (complementary) explanation might be that news organizations like NYT keep tabs on popular CEOs and write about them at regular intervals?

Alphabet earnings report coming up: http://www.nasdaq.com/earnings/report/goog

Probably because of Davos?

Was gonna say. But why? Just pure PR?

I seem to read one around their earnings reports.

IMO, it is the attitude to take a leap at difficult and off-the-beaten-path projects ("MoonShots") that sets Google apart from many other large companies.

Are they looking to profit? Sure. Does that mean that profit is the only motive? I don't think so. It takes guts to jump into a totally different area from what a company primarily does.

It is probably an attitude that needs to be powered by the founders themselves. That way, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are appreciable too.

Apple has its strengths, but they don't score well when you look at it from this perspective.

I love Google's "Moon Shots" program, and the ambition. But Google isn't the only company that's going in that direction.

Amazon is one other company that has been pushing beyond its comfort zone since forever. They pursue these different business and go on about without a fuss, without an elaborate PR stunt (apart from PrimeAir).

What Amazon does is take baby-steps but with grander visions. I may be biased since I work for Amazon, but I can clearly the push, the multiple directions and business the company is involved in.

Not long ago, Paul Graham published "Kill Hollywood" [0] which has been taken down in favour of a composite ycombinator.com/rfs.html. You could see that Amazon is already at work on that idea and makes acquisitions to that affect as well (Amazon Games, Amazon Studio, Twitch.tv).

A lot of ideas listed in the "ambitious"[1] category, are semi-implemented by Amazon-- cue 'confirmation bias' ;)

1. A New Search Engine: Amazon Echo / X-Ray for Kindle and Fire

2. Replace Email: I'd say, WhatsApp's done it. Amazon isn't in this business yet.

3. Replace Universities: Kindle/Twitch is a step in the right direction.

4. Internet Drama: Amazon Studio

5. The Next Steve Jobs: Jack Dorsey? Elon Musk? Drew Houston? Jeff Bezos?

6. Bring Back Moore's Law: AWS Lambda, and the other more Modern AWS Services in general.

7. Ongoing Diagnosis: Not in the business yet, but Google is.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120122043507/http://ycombinato... [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

>Are they looking to profit? Sure. Does that mean that profit is the only motive? I don't think so. It takes guts to jump into a totally different area from what a company primarily does.

Not that much guts needed, when you have billions at your command. It would be more gutsy if it was a much less rich company doing it. That's not to say that it is a bad thing, though.

Google doesn't leap, which implies commitment. Instead they dally. And it's not yet clear that this sort of dallying can actually produce results. It may even have the opposite effect, e.g. the way Glass ruined the wearables market.

Five years from now the average consumer won't remember anything about the Glass fiasco and wearables will be everywhere. Glass didn't do anything to the wearables market of any consequence, at all. It couldn't have been more irrelevant. The only place it was relevant, for 15 minutes, was in a tiny little echo chamber in California.

In what way has Google not been committed to eg autonomous vehicles or Google Fiber? They've produced amazing results already in both examples. The Google Fiber result alone is astounding and almost single-handedly responsible for the broadband speed boom going on in the US right now.

Is Google committed to either of these? These are basically hobbies: there's no evidence that Google is pushing hard on them. Six years after starting, and they're still pilot programs at best.

These are certainly cool technologies and producing amazing preliminary results. What I am questioning is whether this strategy of dipping their toes in a bunch of different ideas actually works. Google's hope seems to be to throw a bunch of stuff and see what sticks, whereas Apple's approach is to pick a few ideas, and then devote tremendous resources at it until they get it right.

Google thinks that their autonomous vehicles will be ready for broad scale use by 2020, the same year that Elon Musk thinks Tesla will have their autonomous car ready, and the rumored date of the Apple car. So it doesn't seem that their head start allowed them to bring things to market any faster. Maybe Google's offering (in whatever form) will work way way better than its competition, but my guess is they'll be roughly comparable.

And six years on, Google Fiber is only available in a tiny number of municipalities, and has a small fraction of the subscriber base of, say, Verizon Fios. Six years!

I'm an outsider, but I speculate that these types of projects are low pressure. There's no revenues at stake, no expectation of profit, no hard deadlines, and probably no serious threat of cancellation. So it is not surprising that progress is slow. Recall that the literal moon shot - the Apollo program - was a national goal, set by the President, with an explicit deadline.

IBM?

Sounds like he is getting sidelined. He gets a pie in the sky job where he can do less harm to profits ... And the running of the core advertisement business is left to harder men.

Sidelined by whom, exactly? Page & Sergey still own controlling shares in Alphabet

Yeah, you are right. It doesn't make sense.

Is this supposed to be a good thing? Something to be admired?

With over 60000 employees, only one decides what technology will receive billions of dollars. See the problem?

Yes. A much better approach would be for all the shareholders of the company to elect a group of experts to periodically review Larry's ideas and sign off on his major capital outlays. We could refer to these people as the "Board of Directors".

Elected by Larry and Sergei.

That's not substantially different. How about some of those 60000 geniuses make some choices about what to pursue?

They do, in fact, have quite a bit of leeway. Eventually, though, when they need significant funding, or headcount, they ask their managers. As the project grows, it continues escalating, and if it's a major strategic commitment, it goes all the way up to the CEO and Board of Directors.

It's worked really, really well for Google thus far; have you seen the long-term trend of their stock price? Nonetheless, if you'd like to change it, you're welcome to acquire a controlling share of the company, and then you can run it however you please.

Aditorial

This why I love Google. They are leaps and bounds by orders of magnitude above other companies like twitter, facebook, snapchat, linkedin etc. in terms of revenue, value and real innovation.

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