Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Arguably, Google's best CEO was Eric Schmidt. He's the one that turned Google from a startup into an awesome tech company. But nobody ever accused him of having no vision. That's because vision was not his role. That role was for both founders who acted in a duo CTO role.

Looking at Google today, they have a CEO but no CTO and the founders seem to be not involved in day to day strategy of Google. So, the real problem is that their current CEO is not filling the CTO boots very well and that's a problem because there is no CTO. It's showing. Google's strategy is fine from a financial point of view but less so from a technical point of view.

A bit like MS under Balmer. In fact, Google is starting to act a lot like MS a decade ago; including being arrogant, increasingly isolated, and somewhat tone deaf. I like them a lot less than 10 years ago. Of course Balmer added a whole other level of surreal to the mix that is thankfully missing here. Looking at MS today, they turned things around quite a bit and their current CEO is in an entirely different league than Google's CEO. That's the problem they need to fix. He's alright but not great. They need great. Pichar isn't. That's what those numbers are saying.

In order to understand Google actions it's important to understand a bit of culture at the top as well as who Pichai is.

Pichai spent all his management career at Google. He is undoubtedly a very bright individual but his personal life experience is limited to a single company which was on the rise during his entire career. He came to prominence by inventing the MSIE Toolbar. The thing was quite insidious: when installed, it showed some proxy for the PageRank of the current page (not the real PR). That gave it a reason to call home for every visited page -- this data was used to improve search quality. In addition it distributed Google Search to IE users. Toolbar generated some billions of dollars for Google. Pichai was also instrumental for starting the Chrome project.

Pichai is an extremely shrewd politician. An excellent diplomat. He manages the company by finding the balance between internal power groups. When the company is growing that's all that is needed. That's absolutely not enough when things go sour.

Here is an example. Google Cloud is failing. The fundamental reason for the failure is quite obvious: the margins in the cloud business are much smaller than in the ads/search. Consequently it's starved of good people. After all, if you are in sales why would you work on something which has 5 or 10% margin when you can work on something with 30 or 50% margin? The solution to the problem is also simple -- spin cloud off into a separate business. But that requires splitting up Google's infrastructure. That means a conflict with Urs Hoelzle. Which is impossible for Pichai. He would rather see Google Cloud die than pick a fight with a powerful old-timer like Urs.

That brings me to the Google culture at the top. If you want to have a career at Google you need to do something visible. At the lower levels it means working on a new project. At a VP level you need to start a new audacious project (this is why Google has 6 instant messengers). If it launches you get recognition and money. If not your career slows for a year then you do it again. Once launched, the project is no longer relevant for the career and can be passed to someone else for maintenance where it's starved of resources and slowly killed. This culture was formed long time ago, under Schmidt and Page. Pichai just perpetuated it. As long as ads and search generate healthy amounts of cash this may continue indefinitely. At the same time the new challenges and the new markets are likely to be missed by Google, just like it happened under Balmer at MSFT.

Pichai is status quo.

Your comment gives so much more sense to how Google behaves and I thank you for it. May be obvious for some in the field but for me it really is eye opening. Your comment about the 6 different instant messengers was perfect and explains so much.

> At the same time the new challenges and the new markets are likely to be missed by Google, just like it happened under Balmer at MSFT.

This line contradicts with others. My issue is that Google tries too much to enter new markets. Google is fine with starting 10 projects if one of them will be successful and kill others. It is the same thing you wrote.

I suspected that someone might bring it up :). I agree I was not clear.

The distinction is in having a sustained effort behind the project. One may have 6 messengers while none of them gets the resources to succeed. The projects are used for a short-term career advancement, not for a long-term effort to open a new market.

The logic is indeed to have "... 10 projects if one of them will be successful and kill others". It just does not work that way. Google's leadership (the top ~10 people) position themselves above the fight. They don't throw their weight behind one of the (for example) messengers because if it fails it's their failure too (remember Google +?). As a result the users are confused, the resources are spread thin, and none of the 10 wins the market.

> After all, if you are in sales why would you work on something which has 5 or 10% margin when you can work on something with 30 or 50% margin?

It isn't that simple I think. You need to know the volume of each "something". Selling a lot of product A at 5-10% margin is great!

Why would not having a CTO symbolize Google's strategy shift from tech? Google has more than enough talented tech visionaries at high levels in each of its sub organizations, probably overpopulated with such.

I don't think Google lacks tech direction, quite on the contrary, they still excel and way ahead of the crowds. But they don't have a strategy to make money off from those technologies, other than limited venues like advertising/play store. But that is nothing CTO can solve.

I'd say Google is showing signs of too many captains on the ship when it comes to tech. I'm not going to bore you with all the examples that are being cited elsewhere in this thread but there are plenty of things where people are raising eyebrows lately.

A CTO's role is to provide clarity internally and externally on what a company is doing technically. In absence of a CTO, that role is for the CEO. Pichar is not enough of a credible leader on this front.

E.g. Steve Jobs was a clear visionary leader. Bill Gates was a clear technical founder CEO. They did not need CTOs. Amazon has an effective business oriented CEO that defers to a very strong CTO (Werner Vogels) for technical things.

AWS is no accident; that requires technical leadership (Vogels) and long term strategic thinking (Bezos). Google just got leapfrogged by MS in the same space. I'd argue lack of leadership is a big reason.

Thank you for your clear critique, would you mind clarifying the Google leapfrogged by MS statement? I don’t keep close tabs on Azure.

There have been a bunch of reports citing MS as being second in terms of market share and growing nicely (hence the MS valuations going up), for cloud based deployments rather than third after Google. That's a failure of Google to beat Amazon and not to get beaten by someone else. That happened on Pichar's watch. That's just a small part of Google's business and a huge part of Amazon's business. Puts the whole ads are all there is point of view a bit in in perspective. They are all ballpark in the trillion dollar valuation range so I think the comparison is fair.

Google has been doing not so well in cloud for a very long time, long before Pichai became CEO.

And Microsoft has got some very unique strengths when it comes to Enterprise IT and developer tools.

You are right in your views of them having enough technical leadership.

The main difference I can assume is when you look to 1 or 2 (founders)equal leaders to set vision it’s easier to get behind than however many VPs they have(today).

For example a CTO could say unilaterally "no, we won't help build the great search firewall for China".

Or could say the opposite and fire anybody who refused to do their job ...

For example a CTO could say unilaterally "no, we won't help build the great search firewall for China".

That would be absurd, as such decision has no technical merit.

>That would be absurd, as such decision has no technical merit.

You think a CTO's job is only to decide which technologies to use?

Yeah, this is my point. CEOs are often too detached from the technology to understand the moral/privacy implications of practically anything.

How is technology at all related to moral implication? That is like too simplistic view of Google CEO that he does not understand privacy implication.

No but that's not a CTO decision.

I don't think you have any interest in discussion. CTO's role is of course not just technology related but he can't just veto the management without reason. There are pros and cons to both side for google, and I will be damned if moral reason was not considered when the decision was made, even when there is no CTO.

That’s not a CTO decision.

I do think that Google has a technical vision.

They want more people writing amazing content, and not SEO garbage.

They want to offer people focused answers to their questions.

They want to serve as your personal assistant.

They want people to really trust the first answer they get from Google.

And they want to be deeply integrated with your life.

The thing is: building AWS is more of an engineering project. Achieving Google's list is more of a research project - it's just far harder and less predictable.

Some will even say those goals require artificial general intelligence.

Assuming that's the case, the fact that Google leads the world in AI/ML , hints that they are doing a good job, right ?

"They want more people writing amazing content, and not SEO garbage"

I'm not convinced on this one. It feels like they've ceded the SEO spam war to me. As mentioned in the article, they just crudely exclude large swaths of content now instead of trying to filter out actually bad content.

And they have just generally devalued the organic results in favor of ads, widgets, curated stuff...anything that keeps you walled in to Google owned properties or ads. It's fairly common now to have zero organic results above the fold.

As of anything with SEO, it's all guesses.

But in general, the job of SEO's is increasingly being about writing better content and satisfying the user, and less about "tricks". That's true , at least generally.

But when i say better content, better is defined as more engaging, shareable, linkable, clickable. that sort of stuff. This isn't our cup of tea here at HN, but maybe that's what most people go for. Maybe.

BTW, my fun pet conspiracy theory(everybody should have one!) , is that somewhere deep in the belly of alphabet, they have a secret search engine built for engineers, that nobody knows it exists, even the engineers(it uses a google theme), and it's the key behind their moonshot empire. :)

> But when i say better content, better is defined as more engaging, shareable, linkable, clickable. that sort of stuff. This isn't our cup of tea here at HN, but maybe that's what most people go for. Maybe.

Are you kidding? Look at the articles posted on HN. MANY are pure marketing or self-promotion pieces designed to be shared on social media like HN, get clicks, and start discussion.

It’s funny how HN commenters only call it seo, clickbait, and marketing if they don’t like it lol.

The articles here aren't that great. that's true.

But would you say the same about the comments ?

But also, we come here mostly for entertainment. And even in our entertainment we prefer a high-quality discussion.

But Google isn't a tool for entertainment. And people here do complain about shitty Google results.

And to be fair, they also complain about the declining quality of HN. But still, it's better than the alternative communities, probably.

No, for the most part I don’t think the comments here are particularly good.

Plenty of people who think because they’re paid a lot of money to be computer programmers that they can instantly have genius insights into completely unrelated fields. A good amount of “well actually” when any social issue is discussed. Surprising volume of apologizing for discrimination/racism/sexism/etc. under the guise of “free speech”.

Maybe you're right about discussions about social issues.

But for me, that's not the reason i come here. I'm more interested in discussion about entrepreneurship and businesses, and some of the commentors are quite good.

Google wants extractable facts that they can insert directly in the search results. I speculate the users want it too, at least as long as those “facts” are actually true. The more voice makes up the percentage of searches, the fewer searches will be directly to a non-paid organic website.

Anyone trying to build a scalable business and expecting SEO to play a meaningful role probably doesn’t have a firm grasp on what Google has done over the past 10 years and will continue to do. Most businesses, and their investors, should be calculating what their numbers look like if they were to receive 0 free users from Google.

>> Anyone trying to build a scalable business and expecting SEO to play a meaningful role

Maybe true. but it can still, sometimes be an effective tool for small businesses, both in local and organic.

To be fair, they only lead the world in AI because they bought DeepMind.

Photos, voice recognition/assistant, search, smart reply etc. are not made by DeepMind. Same for their tensor processor hardware and tensorflow.

Google's current vision is to try and shape/control the tech landscape to a point where you have to pay them to be found, distributed on or otherwise operate over the internet. They would like to have all search, social interaction and business services to be transacted or facilitated by them, so they can make money from it. That's at direct odds with all the missions you just stated, and is inevitble because of where the dollars ultimately come from.

Maybe.

But once you most people blindy trust the first answer Google gives them , you know what an awesome sales tool that is ?

And instead of advertisers having 4 Adwords + 4 local search(sometimes) + Google shopping + SEO to target placement for - what if everyone competed for the same, single ad placement location ? What would that do ad prices ?

First of all, they want to make money. By selling ads, primarily.

They cloned iOS not because they think they can make it better but because they saw how big mobile would get, and didn't like that apple was in control.

They want to cut costs by trying to automate everything with "deep learning and AI."

> They want people to really trust the first answer they get from Google.

Yeah they already messed up this one by going for their ai crap here. I still remember the article about the journalist who google claimed was dead when you googled her name. Not just that but it was nearly impossible for her to contact anyone at google to correct that. Which is not surprising if you consider the arrogance of google. Nobody there even considers that their automation could make mistakes, so why have any way of contacting a real person there that could do anything? Seriously I mean it. That's the only explanation I can come up with after having read countless articles about how google locked down people's gmail for "suspicious activity" and made it impossible to reactivate, or contact anyone who could even provide any information about what exactly is wrong. All the stories about YouTube's inconsistent flagging of videos, false copyright strikes and no way of getting help. Even big channels that have a dedicated representative get a "sorry can't do anything" in many of those cases. If you ever get fucked over by google your only hope is that you can make a post on some big website that will blow up to the point where google sees it might damage their reputation.

We're not the target audience.

When grandma googles something, and sees a "quick answer" does she trust it ? probably.

The #1 priority for Google is to sell ads. That's it. Anything else is marketing/nice to haves.

Not an insider, but I was under the impression that Jeff Dean was that visionary. He seems to focus on AI, which sounds like a conscious pivot from Google. Have I missed something?

It’s likely that anyone who works on other projects might feel left out and that would explain your reaction and the article.

They have many visions and no cohesion and no one technical with wide-sweeping power apparently. That's how you get Hangouts + Google Meet + Allo, and evidently, how China gets it's great search blocker. It feels to me like there are many divisions and teams and no one in charge of the collective, from a technical point of view. So yeah, kind of like microsoft in recent years. A many-headed hydra. Cut off a head, grow a new privacy or ethics violation.

Literally none of those are cto decisions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com