This year’s Founders' Letter | Hacker News Reader

This year’s Founders' Letter

googleblog.blogspot.com

119 pointsgordon_freeman50 comments

This makes me nervous about Google's long-term prospects. There just aren't any new ideas here. Pichai has been very focused on mobile, and that's not a bad idea exactly, but it's just riding a wave created by Apple almost ten years ago. He's now starting to talk about virtual assistants, but that was kicked off by Siri's launch, almost five years ago. To have long-term success, Google will need to develop genuinely new ideas, ones that not everybody has already heard about. You can't be the biggest player in technology if you never take any risks.

(disclaimer: former Google employee here)

What is pichai's claim to fame? It's very hard to figure out what exactly he has done to suddenly rise up to the top. Just a very likable person? I am yet to see anything visionary from him.

I think Google Toolbar was his idea.

Per Wikipedia, Toolbar was launched in 2000 but Pichai joined in 2004.

Being a competent manager. Sort of like Tim Cook. He managed Chrome well, and then Chrome and Android, and now Google as a whole.

Visionaries are quite rare and unfortunately sometimes their visions aren't actually that great. See: VicG and Google+. Vic was a visionary who had unconditional support from the top, but in the end it wasn't enough to have a big impact.

I'm actually worried about short term issues in Google search. After the introduction of "AI" in to search, the keywords are far more frequently being ignored and results are astonishingly less relevant than about a year ago in my experience. There also isn't any easy way to force the keyword in queries because "+" operator has been reassigned to Google+.

Quote the word by itself.

This continues the impression I have that Larry and Sergey have lost interest in Google.

What are they interested in nowadays, then?

Larry seems to be of the megalomaniacal persuasion, his interviews focus on wanting to run cities, airports, etc. Somewhere on the side of "it would be making the world better if it wasn't a dystopian vision". There's the whole curing death thing too somewhere in there.

Sergey seems more interested in the Google X toys, as he always has.

There's this weird pattern that happens to geeky types when they become rich and powerful. They suddenly buy into the whole command-economy top-down philosophy when their success and wealth only exists because of the largely decentralized nature of technological markets and tech's low regulatory environment. All of sudden they think they can mastermind everything to perfection. The 20th century had a horrific experiment with centrally planned masterminding that cost humanity 94m lives. This should give every central planner some pause.

Pie in the sky rich guy stuff like immortality (Page, Kurzweil) and central-planning stuff like robot run cities, AI controlled airports, etc are just mindless futurism that either will never happen or will be too impractical or unethical to ever properly attempt. Heck, Page can't even deliver a thermostat that doesn't regularly fuck up in spectacular ways. He wants this cowboy engineering to run cities and fly planes? Meanwhile, Google has competely missed the boat on some real futurist stuff that is actually panning out like VR or private spaceflight.

The only person I can think of who didn't fall into this bizarre pattern is Gates, who just funds a foundation that hands out grants to various organizations, mostly non-profit and NGO, who might get things done. I think this is by far the wiser approach and the one that has the potential for the most change.

Live long enough to see yourself become the villain seems to be in effect here. Most super successful people don't have a second act. They peak and either disappear or just become weirdos who have spent too much time around yes men and in echo chambers.

How does your theory account for Elon Musk? Is he not rich enough yet to be "bad" in this way?

Everything I've read about the man makes me think if you gave him $100b he would invest all $100b in doing some awesome project which would only be successful through the superhuman efforts of himself and his team, but wouldn't require a command economy otherwise. Vertical integration inside, yes.

Because he built practical companies with practical objectives with practical funding.

Tesla started as a supercar company and slowly migrated to what it is today. Electric tech was actually old by the time Elon started, with GM already having built the EV1 program. This was all proven technology waiting for the right group to monetize. It also helps that lithium ion pricing had fallen significantly. The EV1's biggest fault was its old school lead-acid batteries which couldn't deliver the range and power li-ion could. In hindsight, li-ion and electric cars are a no brainer. That combination with, lets not forget, Tesla's and its buyers vast government subsidies turned out to be workable.

SpaceX for all its wonders, exists only because of the COTS program generously funded by the US taxpayer. Its been a long slog to its current levels and still has a way to go, but it has customers and accomplishments to show for itself and builds off rocket technologies that are decades old. Both of Elon's businesses are more refinements of existing technology than pie-in-the-sky daydreaming.

That's very different than giving speeches and interviews about living forever, having a 2001 style AI in your home, and airports run by robots. Musk is still in his peak. I guess we'll see how he turns out, but he's not comparable to Page yet.

isn't it true that all of Musk's companies benefiting from the governments' help in terms of federal subsidies and space contracts? Do you think without it he would have been this successful?

How are space contracts governments' help and not SpaceX helping government from the evil ULA?

The intent of the COTS contracts was to procure launches for much less than the usual price by providing up-front payments in exchange for a block buy of future launches. Seems to have worked great. Commercial companies sign contracts like that on occasion, when they don't like the prices from their current suppliers.

because I have said that assuming that Musk's main goal with SpaceX is not to send the supply (or astronauts in near future) to Space Station. His main mission with SpaceX is to help create a self-sustaining city on Mars. It seems to me he is using government's space contract money to pay the bills till he achieves his main mission. In that sense, I'd say that Govt is helping him and not the other way around.

I think you're forgetting about PayPal.

Ok. All but one then.

Yes, but that was the one that made him successful.

And Zip2?

Not sure why you are getting downvoted, seems like a honest question.

He certainly has benefitted from government programs (and of course from the general commercial situation in the US, lots of smart people here, centuries of science and engineering, etc.)

That doesn't really speak to him being a closet authoritarian or anything, though.

The other takeaway would be that Musk, unlike all those other billionaires, is working on things that are in the public interest. He generally wasn't the instigator for the govt subsidies, but his interests of "make money while making the world a better place" are pretty well aligned with the governments interests of "spend money in the USA while making the world a better place".

"In the public interest" is a very debateable term. I consider the way Google handles privacy and their cloud push very against the human interest. Of course, Google would argue offering free services that connect and inform people is in the public interest.

Your vision may align with the governments then, given that the government isn't offering subsidies for companies to invest in cloud

Easy.

Elon Musk doesn't want to rule the Earth.

He wants to rule Mars.

I mean, if he gets there first, I just feel that's fair.

I'm not sure why you think ai controlled airports or robot cities need to involve central planning. Airports are to some extent already run by robots and that's pure private sector:

https://youtu.be/n2Wy_tduq5k?t=53s

Private companies and venues can be centrally planned too.

I assume that by the "horrific experiment with centrally planned masterminding that cost humanity 94m lives" you mean communism. If so, that's a drastic oversimplification and (imo) incorrect assessment of what actually led to those deaths.

Of course, communism wasn't the problem there. We can do it right this time, we're smarter than they were.

A horrific experiment in central planning has killed lots of people, so has a horrific experiment in letting rich people run things (you know, capitalism). Now we can get the best of both killing capacities at once!

Lots of people have been killed at all stages of history. We're currently living in probably the least violent times ever.

> The only person I can think of who didn't fall into this bizarre pattern is Gates, who just funds a foundation that hands out grants to various organizations, mostly non-profit and NGO, who might get things done.

I think you make some insightful points about the "weird pattern", but I don't think Gates is a good counter example. He, his wife, and his foundations seem as top-down/central-planning as anyone else, he just isn't as outspoken about it.

Presumably the other parts of Alphabet: longevity, health, AI, etc.

A pretty generic letter with nothing new that the HN crowd would not know.

Even after the birth of Alphabet, Google still has a lot of seeming unrelated parts. Should it have been broken up further? Does it make sense to have YouTube, Google Cloud Platform, and android (but not Fiber or Google Capital) all in the same company? Is there anything other than "profitable" that determines who is in the google-core?

AFAICT, it really is "profitable". The Google/Alphabet split is really for investors' benefit; the only folks who care about corporate structure are Wall Street and the government, so the corporate structure is such that it pleases Wall Street, which lets the people actually working at Alphabet focus on their respective businesses.

As a small business owner of private businesses, I care about corporate structure! it affects financials and banking and employee organization, as well as private capital infusions. Just saying... I do agree re Alphabet/Google though.

When they first announced it, I thought it was some kind of strange attempt to put products into companies and for Alphabet (ABC) to be a holding company on that. This would have brought more visibility into the truly profitable bits of Google and the parts that are huge money holes.

Instead, it looks like Google already knew this all along and what seems to be happening is that Alphabet seems to have been formed to divest Google of financial drag, breaking out money pits to see if they can more easily be killed or sold off for parts.

I've noticed that in financial news, ABC is still basically just talked about as "Google".

The stock is still GOOG and GOOGL. I think that and popular perception (Google is a household name) is the reason.

The majority of your profits come from search. If you break it down investor will be clamoring to get rid of most of the other stuff since it doesn't make much money especially when compared to search. Was Sundar a founder?

More accurately, the majority of their profits come from advertising. Search is just what draws a lot of the eyeballs.

While not directly stated, to me, the letter is a reminder that at some point in the near future AI will not be the next big thing.

Any (reasonable) thoughts on what's next for Google after AI - and how you believe Google will get there?

My guess is health and psychology, they get there by creating exceptionally good personal "life coach" bots. Basically like the movie Her minus the FOOM. I guess that is AI, but really it is more a UX problem, a truly engaging positive thinking bot doesn't have to be too complex to change people's lives. It simply needs to be so well designed that it becomes apart of people's lives. Design may be far from googles strength now but results are and if googles bot can improve my life that is all that maters.

So, not much from the founders then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com