Hacker News Reader

Comment by drawkbox | Hacker News Reader

The modern MBA is so efficient that is has optimized out research and development and many times the building part, which leads back to r&d. This is great for short-term and the upper end, bad long-term and for the core product. A big part of the equation missing today is longer term consumer strength i.e. wages, community impact, continue self-disruption/research etc.

Startups usually do most of the r&d now, and once it gets to small/mid level and "the process" comes in, the bizdevs take over after it is usually already an established product and r&d mostly completed. Depending on the balance of that takeover it either kills the product, slowly bleeds it, or if the focus is still on product then sometimes a super growth engine.

Companies that can keep a focus on r&d, building and changing markets while being very efficient are key. Usually these are engineer led (Amazon, Tesla, Google etc)

View on HN

Google is an example of the failure of being engineer led in my opinion. I think it's led to Google having institutional ADD and has left them with countless failed products and others that have been neglected for years (has anyone worked on Google Finance in the past 5 years? Probably not).

A lot of successful Google products were acquired (Android, YouTube) and others were able to leverage their dominance in search. But we also saw that approach fail when the entire company was directed at trying to beat Facebook. It infiltrated all their existing properties and employees were directly incentivized with compensation linked to the success of Google+. And yet all of that wasn't able to overcome Facebook's network effect. The go-to Google strategy for creating a hit product failed (and it also explains why they seem to fail at anything that has network effects or requires consumer affinity and brand: 8 messengers and countless failed hardware products).

Google stands a good chance of being the next Xerox PARC: good at science projects and technology, but destined to see others capitalize on it.

And it makes sense if you think about it. Google's origin story was 2 PhDs coming up with better technology in a market that was already defined and a business model that was already understood. They applied that technology well, but it was only possible because of the openness of the web. It feels very much right place, right time.

If Google is an example of "failure", I'm pretty sure a lot of other companies would love to fail.

> Android, YouTube

First off, Android didn't even exist as a product yet when Google acquired it, and YouTube was popular but nowhere near the behemoth it is now. Taking those things and turning them into world beating juggernauts is a very non-trivial task; as you've probably noticed, most corporate acquisitions of startups have a very different outcome.

Google had search and used that to prop the rest. Simple.

And Google is making money by removing more and more "free" listings and replacing them ads and their content. Morality aside, eventually they'll lose their effectiveness.

> Google had search and used that to prop the rest. Simple.

If it's so simple why aren't there other companies doing the same?

> Morality aside, eventually they'll lose their effectiveness.

People have said this for the last ten years. Sure, if you cry wolf long enough you will probably be correct at some point, but does this offer any insight?

He didn't say what they did was simple. He said it's a simple explanation for what they did. Google created a great search engine at the right place and time. Since then Google's products have been a hit but mostly a miss by a company with endless money.

Having many misses is just a result of trying many times. Hell, we're in the forum of the epitome of the idea that having many misses and a few hits can be a tremendously successful strategy.

The line should always be moving. Either up or down, hopefully mostly up, but moving nonetheless. It is perfectly fine for the line to go down, failing is learning. But if the line continues to go down, you're not learning, you're just failing. Fix that. Same as when the line continues to go up. If it goes up with no dips down, you're not learning either. Fix that.

The line should never be level. This is the worst position to be in. It means you're not doing anything at all.

I can't imagine anyone who's used the YouTube Android app would think it is skill rather than a massive existing userbase & network effect that's led to YouTube's success.

Google is absolutely horrible at UI and application design, I can't think of any product that doesn't mostly suck from a UI perspective. Scale & speed is obviously a different story.

What do you think about the UI of their flagship search website, goggle.com?

It's rubbish!

When I load Google.com, I should see the Google logo and at the bottom of a page a "click to continue reading" button that I should, well, click. Then as I continue to scroll down the search entry field should scroll up the page as the Google logo slowly fades out behind it. Searching should feel like an event.

But seriously, I love that Google keeps their search website so minimal. I think that takes courage.

It's fast, but it has many shortcomings.

>> Google had search and used that to prop the rest. Simple. > If it's so simple why aren't there other companies doing the same?

Because the "simple" strategy is predicated on a market-dominant search product. It was simple for them, but extremely hard for anyone else—because Step 1 is "supplant Google with 75% market share".

As it turns out the engineers are good at business.

Using your established brand to propel a new product is business 101 and building a whole web of closely related products is business 302.

The synergy between their many major products is quite astonishing (though it is not public knowledge).

Nevermind...

> Google had search and used that to prop the rest. Simple.

Simple? Tell that to anyone else doing search.

One of the most successful companies in history is an example of failure in leadership to you? Thanks for the lawls

My view is that Google is insanely good at products that demand performance at scale. Google search, YouTube, Google Docs, Google Maps, Gmail, and anything that supplements their usage Android, Chrome. Their failures like Google+, Google Glass indicate a product-market misfit than a result of being engineer led. An engineer (software related) is no less fit to lead a tech firm than a doctor is fit to lead a Medical service facility than a musician leading a record company than a sportsman managing a sport team than a chef leading a restaurant.

Sure it could be the next Xerox PARC, but the next Apple (following the bad metaphor) will very likely be a division of Google itself.

And finally, if anything, Google's ability to kill products that it does not think valuable, is what keeps it innovating, exploring and yet not be a dinosaur search company. (I do miss Google Reader though. Did they really have to kill it so bad ? )

Isn't Google amorphous by design? I thought Google was supposed to exist everywhere hidden in plain sight, and its many products are just the interfaces it uses to connect to us. At least that's the impression I got from listening to Schmidt all these years talk about how Google can go anywhere and be anything it wants to be.

The counterexample is Orkut, Google's homegrown, initially successful social network, years before the rise of Facebook. It died mostly from scaling issues, i.e. became slow when many users were on it.

> I think it's led to Google having institutional ADD and has left them with countless failed products and others that have been neglected for years

You're missing the point. I think this is part of what defines their existence and probably their success; experiment with many different products/services (and do it quickly too), doesn't matter if you have 1 killer product for every 10,000 experiments.

Talking about Google products one has to mention the two products which make around 90 percent of their revenue: adwords and adsense. These programs are the real products of Google, and at least one of them was acquired. It must be really difficult to do other products in an organisation that makes more than 50B on those two products alone. No matter what product or service you launch it's bound to make peanuts compared to these products for 5-10 years to come. Worldwide there is barely a handful of products that come close to adwords and adsense in revenue. How do you get the attention and ressources from management when you are up against that?

How are failed and neglected projects a result of being engineering led? If anything, I would think that killing and deprioritizing products, as well as making revenue fueled decisions (i.e. google shopping express for google home) are examples of management making potentially harmful decisions.

I will agree that Google seems lackluster at network effect related things and I find that they are generally very poor at marketing.

> Google is an example of the failure of being engineer led in my opinion.

For me, Google is a failure under the very same rule that makes MBA-driven businesses a failure for society. I.e. I'd actually prefer more business to be Google-like "failures".

For example, talk what you like about how Android is crap, but who'd you trust more with mobile OS - Google, or Samsung? Siemens? Oracle?

> has left them with countless failed products and others that have been neglected for years

Building things that you consider failed is going to be a natural consequence of finding things that work because you gotta try things to know. As for Google finance if it isn't broke why change it? Don't confuse change with improvement.

No MBA was EVER designed for the R&D part of building a company. I'm constantly surprised at the myth that an MBA has anything to do with teaching you to start or even run a company. MBA's are designed to train middle managers because the modern "firm" realized great middle managers were really valuable (aka they'd pay them a lot) but hard and risky to train. That's where the MBA program comes from.

MBA's are ANTITHETICAL to entrepreneurship. That doesn't mean an MBA doesn't have value towards starting a company, just like a degree in economics or history aren't irrelevant to starting a company. But it's not what it's for, in fact, it's for the opposite thing.

This is a gross generalisation (by which I mean, I think you are wrong). My MBA set me up perfectly to quit my job and launch a startup. Maybe yours was designed to turn out middle managers. Mine wasn't. I had ten elective subjects and they were all towards starting and growing a service business. And the core subjects have proved an invaluable primer in many matters of strategy and day-to-day operations, ones in which I would otherwise be winging it.

Launching a startup does not equal R&D. They have things in common but they aren't the same. And the only convenient thing, I believe, a full time MBA provides is a starting point to build your network.

On average MBA's are less likely to start a business than someone from the general population, you are the exception.

Than an average engineer? Maybe. An average someone from general population? Citation needed.

From FT: Overall, 19 per cent of MBA graduates from the class of 2012 started their own company.

This is the average over all schools in their global ranking, and the US has most positions in the top 25 [1].

Meanwhile, only ~300 persons for every 100k start companies per month in the US [2]. Even assuming none start more than one per four years (which is doubtful), that's only 14.4% of the overall population over four years.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/cbd9b418-314c-11e6-bda0-04585c31b...

[2] http://www.kauffman.org/~/media/kauffman_org/research%20repo...

This is irrelevant to my point, just to be clear. Whether they're effective at creating founders is debatable, whether they're designed to create founders is not.

You made a false and sweeping statement, and now you're doubling down on it with ever more preposterous absolutes. Your understanding is evidently limited to a grossly distorted and narrow perspective on the MBA curriculum.

In reality, business schools around the world turn out people who are qualified to start and run a company, and this includes R&D processes. Some people may choose electives that lead to middle-management, but others can and do choose electives in starting up, product development, service process design, negotiations etc etc.

I think you're continuing to misunderstand my statement. You're suggesting some MBA programs are good at producing founders. I have no idea if that's true and no opinion. The MBA and all traditional MBA programs were started to produce managers at large companies, there are no exceptions and it is well documented and easily researched.

You said, and I quote: "No MBA was EVER designed for the R&D part of building a company".

This is garbage. Unmitigated, sweeping, unknowing drivel. I understand your claim perfectly well, and you are flat wrong, and apparently from a position of zero awareness. I can correct you authoritatively because a) I have actually completed an MBA, and b) it was one that included comparative studies of R&D processes in the case work and a team-based competitive simulation of managing R&D processes. Along with a toolkit of knowledge that made company formation and launch much easier. This has, as I say, all been super useful in actually building my business.

Moving the goalposts to some nineteenth-century context and claiming it's the same thing is, as I said, simply doubling down on the wrong. Also irrelevant.

Your MBA program (or some other MBA program you know of) was designed to specifically to give people the skills to found companies? I doubt strongly that it was.

The only exception to this I know is Babson, but I'm not certain whether they qualify their entrepreneurship degree as an MBA or not. I think they don't, but if they do I may have missed the mark by 1. Otherwise what I said is correct.

See, there you go again. Changing your statement once more - this time to something that is so specific and twisted from reality to be meaningless, and pretending it is the same thing.

I think I'm done here; having presented real-world counterexamples, your claim, which was a gross and simplistic misrepresentation, is dead.

You think I'm moving the ball because you're convinced I'm arguing something I'm not arguing. You're convinced I'm arguing about the value of an MBA rather than why they exist and what they're designed to do. It's possible other people upvoting my original post also misunderstood my point.

You think I'm moving the ball to something meaningless because you want to debate the value of an MBA and I don't.

Just out of curiosity, where did you receive your MBA & what electives did you take that you found the most value from in regards to starting and growing your service business?

Melbourne Business School, class of 2015 (part-time).

The electives that have been most useful to this startup: "Entrepreneurship & New Value Creation", "Managing Service Businesses", "Negotiations", "Mergers & Acquisitions", "Business Law".

Amongst other outcomes, these units a) quite radically changed my perspective on matters pertaining to value creation & capture - which was especially surprising for someone with two decades meandering experience across many different product & service development gigs - and b) gave me the analytical tools & confidence I needed to put my ideas into practice.

It's not a generalisation it's a fact. The fact that it set you up well to launch a startup is a fortunate coincidence, period. MBAs not being designed to help people start companies is a matter of historical record it's not up for debate to be honest.

It's said of the Harvard Business School that it trains people for two jobs: President and Chairman of the Board.

..which demonstrated that it's primarily about the network, and not about what you're learning

If that's all true then why did Harvard open a school to train middle managers?

Efficient? You’re too generous. I’d call them short-sighted, or even go as far as to call them looters: they are people who gut companies (again, the word “optimize” is too generous!) to boost short-term profits and line their pockets at the expensive of long-term viability in ways you mentioned (cutting out R&D, building of product, etc.)

I call them robots.

The robots are great at doing one thing well by hook or crook. Problem is with scale and speed that come with large orgs, the good little robots follow their programming and over optimize the heck out of one little variable. The environment has no time to adapt. Massive unrecoverable collateral damage happens. But the robots are all very pleased with themselves cause their one little self worth defining metric has been met. But as nature already demonstrates highly virulent viruses like these cannot sustain themselves long term. This robot class will die out sooner or later cause the cost for destabilizing the ecosystem every couple days is just too high.

Nope. That robot will find another place to go and optimize another variable.

Virulent viruses don't work like that. Once they destabilize one subsystem, the system as a whole takes hit. By the time they switch to which ever other subsystem they want the body is more or less shutting down. That's why highly optimized virus don't last long.

Maybe we are lucky that admission rates into MBA programs are not that high.

The MBA thinks in spreadsheets and talks in scalpels.

Happily, about 90% of business is spreadsheets and scalpels.

Heh. The fish does not notice the water.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com