Peter Norvig on Being Wrong
slate.com
slate.com
This has a huge implication for the value of Facebook - they know who I am, really. They know where I live, my age, my sex, and they can even tell what sort of activities I like. Google tries to guess this information from my page view habits, but they often get it wrong, big time. Here's an example - if I get a dating site ad on Facebook it correctly identifies me as a woman and throws up pictures of guys. If that ad is being served up by Google, I get identified as a man because of all the time I spend on tech sites, so the same ad has pictures of women in it. Facebook gives me ads about clothes, Google almost never does. I suspect that Google's core business is at significant risk here. People are spending more and more time in the Facebook universe, those 'Like' buttons have popped up all over the Web, and that spells trouble for Google. It'll be interesting to see how they respond, but I for one won't be buying any more stock in Google for a while.
I think what we've seen so far is that Facebook is about creating social spaces, not solving problems, so it really can't be used that effectively as a recommendation engine. Facebook doesn't have a great way to seek rent on these social spaces because they've built their user base on free service. So where is the money going to come from? Probably selling user data to corporations.
Full Disclosure: I'm not running an ad-blocker, but I am running a hosts file, so I still see Google and Facebook ads, but maybe not "all of them".
Anyway, eng doesn't really run Google any more. PM does. Eng can still push back to some extent and feels important when they control huge budgets for new datacenters. But who designs, specifies and ultimately controls the products for which those datacenters are being allocated? Most everything you see, good or bad, that happens on Google these days came from a PM.
A product manager's job is to understand why people are (or are not) buying your product. They need to understand the market, keep track of competing products, and be able to make decisions (or offer advice) about which of a list of potential new features are most likely to make the customer's mouth water. It's fundamentally a marketing role, but, especially with a complicated product, can require a fair amount of technical skill to do.
Disclaimer: This is all Big Company language, but not necessarily identical to Google's language.
Maybe a separate PM would see the forest better as he is not looking at specific trees, but there are a lot of people who can do both well.
See also "Maker's Schedule Manager's Schedule": http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
And, like you say, it does create a very different attitude toward error. If you're a politician, admitting you're wrong is a weakness, but if you're an engineer, you essentially want to be wrong half the time. If you do experiments and you're always right, then you aren't getting enough information out of those experiments. You want your experiment to be like the flip of a coin: You have no idea if it is going to come up heads or tails. You want to not know what the results are going to be.
Some of the stuff in this sounds nice but I feel it lacks some honesty. "What is the thing you have been the most wrong about?" And you say that the worst error in judgment you've made is an off-hand remark in a meeting? Let's be serious here.
His call on big mistakes from Google seems good but I doubt Google could have executed on it even if they had known how big Facebook would be beforehand. Big G is not a product company and is best at making products that minimize the time you have to spend using them.
Huh? That isn't how I read it at all. From the article:
"Question: What about you yourself—what have you personally been most wrong about?
Answer: One thing is how fast things change.[Stuff about meeting here]You think you have this experience—and we talked about how important experience is for having intuitions—but experience can go out of date very quickly."
To me he seems to be saying that one of his major mistakes is underestimating how fast things change, and underestimating the erosion of the value of his experience in guiding his intuition (He just finished talking about the importance of intuition for situations where statistics and data can't help/don't exist.)
Given that he was speaking about a professional context [1] and the position he occupies at Google (Director of Research), where anticipating change would be presumably part of his job description, that sounded to me like admission of a major lapse, somewhat different from "My biggest mistake was an off hand remark I made at a meeting", as you seemed to imply.
He was using the meeting incident as a concrete example of a rather large failing. How is it "dishonest"?
[1] The whole interview is about errors in a professional context , about Google and his work there, so I wouldn't expect to hear about whether he got stoned as a teenager and got thrown in jail! ;-)
An excellent observation - I use Google a lot the total amount of time I spend on their sites really is pretty small and the "brand loyalty" for me is almost non existent.
I do think it's worth differentiating between types of failure, however. You don't want 50% of your experiments failing in the sense of failing to give you an answer in either direction (i.e. being inconclusive).
And this leaves aside the topic (covered in the article) of the more serious kinds of failure - of live code etc. You probably don't want that happening 50% of the time.
I couldn't disagree more with what Fried has to say, which surprised me because it doesn't happen very often, this interview expresses why quite good.