Apple Hires Google’s A.I. Chief

I can think of more examples.

I agree, and Microsoft is a good example, that a paradigm shift can totally change the playing field. A desktop software oriented company like Microsoft couldn't or wouldn't take their dominance into an internet oriented market.

However Google has managed to transition to mobile and demonstrated they can manage such changes.

From what I've seen of fuchsia they're thinking ahead again.

That must account for a huge portion of their advances, right?

For example, I took a picture of my driver's license a year or so ago, and needed the number on a form recently. I just went to Google Photos and searched for "driver's license." Sure enough, the old picture showed up, even though I never manually tagged it.

I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.

They should be and that is a great thing.

While it's easy to start mulling over why and how things are or could have done differently I'd argue that there is no animosity towards American companies per se. The data of its citizens however is a very sensitive issue for EU and in the light of Snowden leaks maybe they are rightfully fearful of US having too much technological hold over them. There is silly people over both sides of the ocean but let's not start willfully feeding rash preconceptions for no reason.

It'll be interesting to see how the first few non-compliance cases go. I would like to think if a requirement was vague, a company had made a reasonable interpretation of it and the company was responsive in making changes to become compliant that no fines would be issued.

This is to say: you don't have to be an American company to end up in the crosshairs of overzealous and downright populist regulators.

Source: used to work there, had to help respond to a rather ludicrous 40-page list of questions.

[0] Headquarters in Amsterdam, culturally strongly influenced by the Dutch, the biggest concentration of staff and virtually all product development in Amsterdam, albeit owned by an American company.

(Possibly thanks to GDPR) companies may object to that request if it costs local laws.

But yeah. Go on pretending that the EU lives to target American companies. From a European's point of view, American companies are not find enough as they view privacy, data, sovereignty etc. as some abstract concepts that don't apply to them.

This was in anti-trust, because privacy-related enforcement is actually left to the EU states and doesn't actually happen very often.

But in anti-trust, there is no evidence of any bias against US companies. The distribution of (the sum of) fines among EU, American, and Asian companies actually tracks closely with their respective market shares in the EU.

The only divergence I found was slightly fewer/lower fines being levied on US companies, and slightly higher numbers for Asian companies. I would attribute this divergence to the far more advanced oversight in the US vs. most Asian countries: the EU doesn't need to get involved if these companies are well-regulated in their home countries.

It'd be interesting to do a similar analysis for the US. As a German, I've heard similar grumbling regarding the fines against Volkswagen and Deutsche Bank. Personally, I doubt that those fines are motived by nationalistic motives. They might just show different approaches to corporate wrongdoing, with Germany either being too chummy with its industry, or possibly putting too much trust in the force of negative publicity alone to change behaviour.

Privacy will invariably generate more headline-worthy conflicts with US companies, simply because that's where all the large companies are located. But if you're in the US, I'll also point out a certain bias in what you'll see reported, considering EU fines against exclusively EU companies are unlikely to make the US news.

Trust me when I say that privacy happens to be a major concern of many voters in the EU. There is robust and constant debate regarding, for example, data collection by governments and law enforcements. In Germany, there is major opposition against the increased use of video surveillance, the use of phone location data in law enforcement, and EU legislation requiring the retention of communication data.

There is a low-hum undercurrent of anti-Americanism in some discussions of Facebook, Google et al, possibly more so in France than Germany or the UK. But Europeans are constantly exposed to US media and such familiarity breeds trust. If Facebook where Chinese, or Google were Russian, distrust and call for regulation would be far stronger than it is.

Homepod vs Google Home is a bit different though, since that's their only reason to exist.

It reminds me of how cars suddenly started to sprout an absurd number of cupholders at the beginning of the century, probably because they are an easy thing for reviewers to write about.

Extensively quoting The Verge[1] on the subject:

And yet, Intel actually had a written document describing a non-poach agreement with Pixar, where Intel's policy was to not hire any Pixar employee without the Pixar CEO's express approval.

"If a Pixar employee applies to Intel without being recruited by Intel, contact Pat Gelsinger and explain to him a Pixar employee (provide the candidates name) has applied to Intel without being recruited and he will contact the CEO of Pixar for approval to hire," read the Intel document.

...

"Mr. Jobs wrote: "I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this." Mr. Schmidt forwarded Mr. Jobs's email to undisclosed recipients, writing: "I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple and this is a direct inbound request. Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening? I will need to send a response back to Apple quickly so please let me know as soon as you can."

Mr. Geshuri told Mr. Schmidt that the employee "who contacted this Apple employee should not have and will be terminated within the hour." Mr. Geshuri further wrote: "Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs. This was an isolated incident and we will be very careful to make sure this does not happen again."

Three days later, Shona Brown, Google's Senior Vice President for Business Operations, replied to Mr. Geshuri, writing: "Appropriate response, thank you. Please make a public example of this termination with the group."

1. https://www.theverge.com/2012/1/27/2753701/no-poach-scandal-...

However I would argue hiring a 'suit' who was CTO for a reputable knowledge based AI company 8 years ago, and since been in a strategic position during Googles recent progress is more valuable to Apple at this time than a well published researcher.

This is a feature of a well run business, you want to be able to change your executive teams without negatively impacting on the rest of the business in the short term.

> These people are very different from Jobs, Musk, Zuke, Jenson Huang etc who are absolutely down and dirty at every level, knew more details then any individual employee and had real technical contributions in their product that made significant difference.

Sure in the early days of the product this is the case, but these are exceptional individuals who have transitioned into executive roles over time. They have spent the time since building up a management culture and organization capable of running a billion dollar company, which is not easy to do, and is more than a full time job.

I think you grossly misunderstand what executives do, both long term and day-to-day. At the end of the day a company is mostly just a group of people, with a set of assets. To grow and evolve beyond the current products you need to cultivate this group into a team that can consistently bring success.

For a short to medium time, sure (and I think the better the exec is the longer his team will be able to work successfully without him). In my experience most successful execs build teams that build good products.

Remove the exec and the good team still builds good products, but it usually starts rotting (e.g., good technical people are frequently not good at handling people issues), then snaps as good people leave and what is left cannot build anything anymore.

Most good exec contributions are not visible at the technical level (there are some exceptions as you cite), but they still create an environment where smart engineers find it fun to work productively. It feels like some magic is involved in this -- I do not have this skill, but I have seen it in action a few times. Just my 2c.

Jobs isn't a great example to make because he wasn't an engineer either and he very much "took the credit for the work of others" (as you put it earlier).

However Jobs is a great example of the value of "suits" when you have an exec who is actually bloody good at what they do. I've worked with project managers and CEOs who have been excellent at their job. I've also worked with some who haven't. And some of those who didn't work out was more down wider company politics than their own ability to perform.

You see, you cannot make accusations that all execs are the same pedigree of worthless cannon fodder. In fact many of them are developers and engineers, like ourselves, who have risen through the ranks (either via successful startups like Musk or through the more traditional "hard grafting"). Some are project managers et al who have proven themselves. And yes, some are just useless - but you get good eggs and bad eggs in all industries.

To try another avenue to convince you: Presumably, Jobs(?), Musk, Page, and Brin were, once upon a time, technologists just like you. It's somewhat certain that at least some of them shared the mindset you're showing.

Considering they ended up hiring lots of managers, it stands to reason they changed their opinion at some point.

I tend to value the opinion of people who have shown the ability to change their mind over those that never have. Add the credentials these people bring, and I'm tempted to accept the idea that managers have something to add to the success of software companies.

You judge the utility (or lack thereof) of these positions while never having had one yourself. Luckily, it's the top management of a company that choses who these are and not engineers.

It's clear from claims like "if 80% of those people disappeared you would see absolutely no change" that you have no idea what their role is.

When you say "most suits had no clue where source code existed" you just fail to realize that that's good. It's not their job to know this, it's an engineer's job.

You talk about their "known contribution" as if it's a general sentiment, but show no proof of it being other than your personal opinion.

In fact, it's clear from statements like " Another of their contribution was to do meetings with other suits at customers/partners" that you have no idea about how valuable talking to customers is for a company.

And tell me, in case you had to "make hard decisions" like "throwing 10% of team under the bus in form of layoffs" what would you do instead? That's exactly one of the cases where the skills of an engineer are the last a company needs.

Even religions have (human) leaders.

You said "He isn’t in the field and no one I know who is in the field seem to know even his name" but the article I linked to seems to clearly indicate he is in the field - can you reconcile the two?

You also said "I have zero clue on what is his contribution to the field" but the linked article does seem to cover this. Is it wrong?