Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors
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"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...
Keep in mind this is the same guy who blackballed CNET reporters for finding personal information on him through google search.
https://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology/google_cnet/
The guy represents every wrong with tech. Privacy for him, but none for thee. And that's not even including on his shady ties to government.
You mean anti-privacy I think? It took me way too long to get there.
Everyone leads a “double life” (or N lives) to some degree, and privacy is the societal etiquette allowing for the continued separation of those lives (without having to go to the effort of using real OPSEC to isolate them.)
Doesn’t this only work if all your interactions are online? Otherwise your family might meet your colleagues at your birthday party (or whatever you might celebrate).
Medical records are another good example. Most people are squeamish about reproductive and sexual health... but share such info with a doctor.
Only if I had made up my mind that I would have no - or only a small - problem with the photo going public. I may conceivably trust the partner. I do not trust partner's ability to keep things under sufficient lock.
What's your age, sex, and race? These are questions that, in and of themselves, are not private. Any stranger on the street who sees you could immediately answer them. And if you've ever posted a picture on the net, you can add far more people. And you probably wouldn't be bothered if every single person in the world knew the answer to this question. And in fact you've probably told everybody the answer to these questions, even if indirectly, in your own posts.
Yet in spite of all of this, you probably would not want to tell me. And that's largely because I have absolutely no justification in asking or knowing this. If I said I was surveying developers, and you believed me, then you'd probably be more than willing to submit this information to me however.
Google wants to harvest massive amounts of information on me to, at best, try to get me to purchase things I otherwise would have no desire to purchase. And that is, again, at best. This is the same company that literally black-listed the term "human rights" for their proposed engine in China. [1] To imagine they won't, if they are not already, use that information for even more nefarious ends is being naive.
So on this front I couldn't care less if every disinterested person in the world knows what I had for breakfast (it was muesli), yet I would not want Google to have this information, because I don't think they are justified in knowing it. More sensitive information just ends up reaching a higher and higher standard of required minimal justification.
[1] - https://theintercept.com/2018/12/01/google-china-censorship-...
Even if you are not any of those, it is our duty to provide a thicket where the free canaries can hide from the harsh environment. When they die, we best pay close attention.
Saying “I don’t care about privacy because I have nothing to hide” is uniquely selfish, on the level of “I don’t care about gay marriage because I’m not gay.”
(I say this while I agree with your post otherwise.)
That's hardly restricted to tech. It's pervasive with government officials.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_(software)
It's human nature to demonize folks.
Your point is?
> It's human nature to demonize folks.
Is that criticism of Schmidt or the parent comment? If Schmidt, he was not so much demonizing people as just not giving a shit about them.
And we hold our leaders to higher standards than the common man. In prior generations, our "elites" held themselves to higher standards as well. Not any longer, it seems. Regardless of how high you rise in society, as long as you can claim decent from the middle class, you hold yourself responsible for nothing outside of yourself and your in-group.
Probably that the "everything wrong with tech" statement was a bit strong if I could speak for the person you responded to. I'm not sure I'd go as far to say he's "everything wrong with tech", would you? He's certainly done lots of good too, along with bad.
"But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And [...] we’re all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."
His whole point is to NOT use their services because they are bound by law to turn over that kind of data. Not to shame you.
Specifically because Schmidt made a career as a lobbyist for privacy erosion, I think he's open to criticism on this basis, even if he is not guilty of coercion.
If it were some random person who was just developing a product I would agree with you to leave well enough alone, but I think the lobbying angle is enough to clear the bar of "theses actions should be publicly scrutinized".
Edit: for the record, I did switch off of gmail too :)
It is the United States government, their laws, and enforcement.
I just went and found the video clip, though, and I think that reading is incorrect. Schmidt isn't saying "don't do those things because we can't hide you from the feds". He's very clearly making two distinct different claims about privacy; the second half is about people with 'legitimate' reasons to need extreme privacy, while the first half looks like exactly the moral judgement everyone portrays it as.
But he’s also disregarding the fact that things people have done, historically, things that have been persecuted, but may only be “wrong” according to shifting cultural temperaments (e.g., loving somebody outside your race).
It’s pretty tone-deaf, in that sense.
"The homepages of popular sites placed cookies for 275 third-party hosts. In just visiting the homepage of popular sites, we found 32 websites placed 100 or more cookies, 7 websites placed 200 or more cookies, and 6 websites placed 300 or more cookies. We found that Google tracking infrastructure is on 92 of the top 100 most popular websites and on 923 of the top 1,000 websites. This means that Google's ability to track users on popular websites is unparalleled, and it approaches the level of surveillance that only an Internet Service Provider can achieve."
I'm not sure if this was the exception or norm - I was just curious because their website was soooo slooow.
Well, he did understand how to turn the customers data into a product. He is one of the key persons who formed the whole data economy thing; that's quite a big deal - he formulated the way of making money for the 21st century.
Once upon a time money was in producing stuff, now stuff and people are so much varied so that the main problem is that of pushing adds. This is the way that this age got the tool to keep it going...
Of course the system has its bugs that can be called 'features'
No, this is a very misleading comparison. Schmidt (and others) have found a way to commodify your personal information and how to transfer ownership of your data, and as such wealth, from you to Google.
They're not the 21st equivalent of Henry Ford, they haven't unleashed new modes of production that suddenly unleash growth and drive down prices of material goods and services, they've figured out a way to turn attention into a mechanism to redistribute money upwards.
Also, the idea of paying to use a free service is an oxymoron. Google is not and has never been free, it is ad supported, and it has ruined the internet by normalizing this behavior.
Similarly most people wouldn't be too happy about a physical newspaper or a TV that tracked their eyeballs as they read/watched it - at least not without an opt-out option.
And yet this is very close to what Google does, albeit hidden behind the distancing effect of a search engine and a web browser.
Should we really be grateful?
That said, your comparison strikes me as rather reductive. Google Search, Maps, Chrome, YouTube, Android, and so on, are all things that have had a measurable impact on my life, and quite a bit of it positive.
I'd like to think these things could've happened without all the bad stuff that funds it, but at the very least I can't just dismiss all of it.
You keep repeating this as if it is somehow axiomatically good.
The surveillance capitalism business model is not one we should be proud of in any way.
https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/
This stuff was going on for a long time, FAANG just perfected it.
It is... but the top tier companies pay dramatically more than the next tier down. Like, we're talking 30-50% difference once you count total comp.
(it's interesting, base salary is somewhat comparable... but stock and bonus are a big part of comp if you work at a FAANG company, and those... largely don't exist at third-tier companies.)
The top-tier employers also do a lot to bring up salary pressure on the lower tiers; if the FAANG companies didn't pay so much, the most desirable people wouldn't leave the lower paying companies, wouldn't make room for someone less desirable, etc... That's how I got my start; I didn't go to college, but I did work my way up through those smaller companies, into larger companies that paid better and better.
Though, salary for software engineers has been ticking up lately. I suppose I can thank the demand for engineers created by these tech companies for that.
Yup, that's what I'm saying. I'm just a sysadmin; I'd never gotten a bonus in my 20 years working as a programmer or sysadmin, mostly at tier 3 tech companies... not until I started working at a FAANG company these last few years, but the bonus + equity is a really significant portion of my compensation now, and brings the whole package from "nicely comfortable for someone who didn't go to college" to "wow"
In any case, moving to SV would only be worth it if salary+bonus were close to half a Megabuck, and I doubt there are more than a dozen engineers in the world making that kind of money as a FTE.
It also normalizes that behavior and makes it more likely that other employers will take similar steps.
It’s a practice older than IT. Hard to judge the man on that alone.
Also, it's easy for other industries to then justify with: "hey, even Google is doing it, and they were they guys supposed to 'do not evil', amirite?".
That's the problem with unethical behavior, we're all into copying and generalizing stuff :|
I can't imagine this would have happened without Goog/FB/Apple/Netfix, etc. Every day I reap the benefits of their competition for talent without having worked at any of them.
Also, from what I understand (again, only hearsay, I don't have any proof for this), there were many employees at Google who thought "Don't be evil" was a joke.
And so they decided they will go to Facebook, which was more closely aligned with their morals, as explained in this rhyme -
Move fast and break laws,
Lets show these dumb fricks who's boss,
When shit hits the fan
The CIA will cover our arse
Well, and the wage theft conspiracy amongst other things proved them right. A smart and experienced CEO like Eric Schmidt would certainly have known that what he was doing was illegal and also that it would be profitable, zero risk to himself and low risk to the company, even if caught. His only possible mistake was to underestimate Facebook as a competitor and the cost of giving them probably more of a leg up than was wise in retrospect by handing them a huge bidding advantage for top tech talent by "defecting" from the collusion. In retrospect it might turn out to have been one of the most expensive rounds of prisoner's dilemma ever played ;)
Though maybe that's just what growth does in general.
EDIT: I singled out Larry Page before, but that's a bit skewed, given that he founded Google and was its CEO for the first few years.
There's plenty of reasons for why they started taking place, that have nothing to do with who is CEO. Societal expectations have changed, formerly unpopular ideas gained both a voice, and mindshare, and Google's influence over the Internet has grown - and with it, expectations that that influence should be wielded responsibly.
Intelligent people strongly disagree as to what 'responsibly' means in this context.
The responsibility for corporate culture is ultimately with the CEO and the board.
The one time I met with Schmidt to explain my cloud project, he was delighted and encouraging and helped shape the design in a way that made it much more effective. He was a very effective leader (although not everybody agrees- some people think he's an arrogant asshole).
I think they had a similar idea after Apple's iPhone started gaining traction, it's only that in the case of Android Google's execution was an order of magnitude better compared to what they did with Google+. I wouldn't put the blame for the failure of Google+ on Page only, I'd also assign it to Gundotra, after all he was the man directly in charge of it all, Page's fault is that he chose and supported the wrong man for the job.
I don't think it was super-obvious 10 years ago, but social has turned out to be a growth product that led to a minefield for the successful companies (look at Twitter and Facebook now) because the growth strategies were so sketchy that people and the government ultimately had to reject them.
Ultimately, it's on Page, though. He stood up at TGIF and told all the player to "get along" when Search had made a coherent argument that coupling the Social brand with search was brand suicide. I think Google could have made a much less obnoxious social network, maybe it would have been good, but without aggressive growth strategies, it wouldn't have been popular (a lot changed since the Orkut days, most people forget Google had a social network with half a billion users at one point!)
Those eyeballs weren't worth as much to advertisers, and I don't think Google valued the product highly because of it.
So, where's the actual profit? Or is this all mind control, friend-of-a-friend illuminati stuff that's assumed to make Google want to do this stuff?
Argue the points, or don't bother addressing the writeup. Good grief.
The reason why they kept it like that was because of the processing power that was needed to serve the pages. That was more than search. Every individual had to be served a different page. And computing at that time weren't as cheap.
Facebook was the first large practical social network among these where you can actually go and signup an account on your own when it was fully open. And they did it by heavily optimizing their code and hardware. That was a separate challenge, which seemed to me Google was unwilling to take for Orkut or anything social at that time.
That's what I felt was happening as an outsider.
Myspace, Friendster, Bebo…
That's doubly false :)
First, all social networks that preceded it (LiveJournal and MySpace were big amongst my peers) had open sign-ups.
Second, Facebook became popular because the sign-up was not open. You needed to have an .edu email address to sign up. This was a feature, as it kept parents and younger siblings off the networks. Having a FB account was a literal right of passage, something you can only get once you go to college. It spread because of that; those were the great days of FB.
I laughed far harder than I should have.
They cut Orkut because Brazilians aren't worth much in advertising. Plain and simple.
Even today, I think YouTube has a great potential for becoming a better social network, than G+ ever was.
Didn't know that, it's cool to learn about it.
About Twitter and FB being on a minefield I agree, but I don't think that will lead to any serious consequences for them, because there's almost no political will to make things right and that happens because the voters themselves (those FB and Twitter users) have almost no interest in how those companies reached their present size. In the end any skilled politician can smell that there's no sense in going to war against a company (or against a communication medium) that consumes at least 3 or 4 hours per day, on average, of their voters' time, it's like a US politician going to war against television in the 1960s, backed when TV had just emerged, it would be public opinion suicide.
Retrospectively I still do think that Page had the right idea to try and force Social (back at that time I also thought it as a crazy idea), like I said, I think that he had sensed that Search will be of almost no use in a world where the internet/web is not represented by websites anymore. I do agree though that even as seen from the outside Page could have done a much better job of getting the Google employees behind him and behind his idea, I think that that wood and arrows metaphor he used was really, really poor and, frankly speaking, quite condescending.
Seeing the FB revenue figures today I can see why he cared, but I think he undermined the long term prospects of the company with this shit quite a bit, and distracted it from more valuable pursuits as well. That's all on him, not on Gundotra.
Hell the fact that Snapchat succeeded in growing a credible threat to Facebook with a fraction of the engineering and marketing resources as Google+ should tell you how wrong that strategy was...
Each of the networks grew initially by providing an insanely better experience specific to a subnetwork (FB for alumni networks, Insta for narcissistic hobby photographers with its filters, Snapchat for horny teens who want to send nude pics, or who want to be goofy with its funny face filters...)
There were a few niches where Google+ unintentionally ended up being successful, such as internal to enterprise, and for pro photographers who liked that pictures had an option to be hosted uncompressed. But the vision overall had poor market fit and would never have latched on to a dense enough subnetwork to succeed IMO.
Google Buzz was closer to Twitter, and came and failed before G+ was a thing.
I'm not under 30, and can't really say, but I've read frequently in the media that young people don't use Facebook. I use it to a limited extent, and I think everyone I know that uses it is 30-40ish.
;-)
While current situation is far from perfect (looking at you Mark Z), I don't think having the Borg being the top dog on both Search and Social would have been a great thing at all.
It could have been a bit worse. It could have been a lot better as well: google already has one of its fingers on about half the pages of the Internet.
Uncle G has already too much grasp on the web as it is.
Those two are not at all in conflict, they're orthogonal.
I'd blame size and market position more. Google was left as one of very few profitable giants standing when the dot-com crash hit, and yet they were young enough to not have the institutional inertia of Amazon, E-bay, and Yahoo. That left them exceptionally well positioned to capitalize on the Internet's deployment phase, where the technology got good enough and widespread enough to really build huge businesses off it. They managed to own the next platform (mobile) but were too large, slow, and entrenched to really understand the implications of it, and they're not even attempting to play in the cryptoverse.
What exactly is this and what business is doing well in it?
On the other hand, in the same time period (actually in a shorter time period!), machine learning driven technologies like voice and image recognition have gone from sci-fi to commonplace. I ask: which is more innovative?
If you wait until it's obvious to everyone that something's a good idea, you're not being innovative, you're just an opportunist. Similarly, if it turns out that it's not actually a good idea, you're not being innovative, you've just wasted a whole lot of time.
Innovation happens at the intersection of contrarian & right. You have to be willing to stake your time, energy, and ego on an idea that many people believe is bad, impossible, or not worth it (otherwise it would've been done already), but you also have to be right in your judgment.
1. That Google didn't research crypto internally and purposely decide not to pursue it.
2. That crypto is worth staking Google's time, energy, and ego on.
3. That crypto involvement is a direct reason a company is or is not innovative.
Internal research is useless.
The only way to know whether a new idea will work is to try it: put some minimal form of it in front of people and see if they actually get use it. People are complex; sometimes they do things that all rational thought says they shouldn't (buying Bitcoin and investing in ICOs would both fit into that category, IMHO), and many times they don't do things that all rational analysis says they should (I participated in research projects while at Google for both micropayments for content and for labeling trustworthy sources on the results, both of which most people would agree are good goals but neither of which has ever worked, and I founded a startup afterwards to provide career guidance to undergrads, which every adult we talked to said "I love what you're doing, and totally wish that existed when I was a student" and every student said "I love that idea and would totally use it", and then promptly never looked at it again once we built it.)
There's no guarantee that external research works either, but at least you've learned something applicable to the next idea.
And then get skewered left and right for shutting down products? You can't have it both ways.
Fast forward to today and 10x to 1000x the number of us wonks are getting an overlapping amount of Reader's value (plus new value) from Twitter. The purging of Reader is a distant memory, but it doesn't mean it's necessarily bad to try a bunch of things and kill the non-viral losers (in a relative sense).
> The only way to know whether a new idea will work is to try it: put some minimal form of it in front of people and see if they actually get use it.
And in the face of a universe of potential ideas how do you determine whether you invest time into prototyping pre-sneezed tissues? Internal research. You’ve just moved the goal post.
b) 'Wasting time' is a part of research. If you never fail, you're missing opportunities. That said, you pick your failures with the hope of getting the right kinds of wins... which brings us to...
c) Giant centralized cloud-based businesses have giant centralized and for-the-most-part trusted datastores. There's no reason to use a blockchain if a standard distributed database suits your needs. From where I sit, blockchains are mainly a solution in search of a problem.
(and just imagine the press cycles if a FAANG company rolled out a blockchain, and thus burnt god-knows how much coal bringing it mainstream...)
I'm equally convinced - and I suspect I disagree with most HNers here - that there are also some problems for which blockchains are the only solution - they just don't work with centralized data stores, mostly because nobody would trust a single entity to manage that data store. Google isn't even looking for those problems. In general, Google does not look for problems, it takes problems that everybody knows about and looks for solutions. There are thousands of entrepreneurs in the cryptoverse who are looking for those problems.
There was a time, early in its history, where Google was willing to take a solution - download the web and keep only the links - and then find the problem (search) for which it was the solution. And then they leveraged that solution into all sorts of other problems - webmail, navigation & directions, news, academic papers, video, etc. But the thing is that this is a risky business: most solutions in search of a problem don't actually solve anything, so the time spent solving them is wasted.
Name a single actual problem that is only solved by the blockchain.
I'm not sure if you're being facetious, but assuming Amazon is a member of "FAANG": https://aws.amazon.com/managed-blockchain/. Does that count?
Just like every other gold rush in history. Fortunes get created, but often not for the folks who think they're going to get rich.
The tech has had 10 years and so far it has produced absolutely nothing of value. In fact considering the damage it has done to the environment, it has been only contributing negative value to the planet.
One could argue that getting enormous amounts of money without needing to produce any results for it is the very definition of "doing well".
All this would happen even if backed by Larry.
It is a miracle that new projects happen at all in companies, though Google of course actually bought many successful projects.
macOS are the Apple II series iPhone clobbered the iPod.
The Apple II product line lasted until 1992, by which point the Mac product line had become affordable to the people at which the apple 2 line had been marketed.
The iPod continued as the iPod classic and iPod touch products until 2015, nearly 10 years after the iPhone was released.
Can you still extrapolate from this that the tipping model is even anywhere near a threat to Google's ad based business model that they should be incorporating it? And is it even an apples to apples comparison? Many creators don't use Patreon in spite of or to replace ads, they use it as a supplement.
Moreover, just because something is technically simple to integrate, doesn't automatically make it the correct business decision to do so.
> Can you still extrapolate from this that the tipping model is even anywhere near a threat to Google's ad based business model that they should be incorporating it?
No, but we can extrapolate from twitch, and guess that it probably would be.
> Many creators don't use Patreon in spite of or to replace ads, they use it as a supplement.
Because it is a third party site, there is no such option. It would be trivial to incorporate an ad-free experience for donations/subscriptions similar to how twitch does.
This exists, already competes with Twitch, and is part of an even bigger portfolio of media services from Google. You're arguing for Google to do something they have been doing for years.
https://www.youtube.com/premium
You're vastly overestimating what people will actually pay for and underestimating how big and critical the ads industry is.
Google has launched multiple micropayment products as replacements for ads. Nobody uses them.
They aren't even attempting to play in snake oil or astrology either
At least I hope it's not Bitcoin. The power use is obscene.
* Never say never. Basically I don't think it could possibly be viable because it would require the total cost of transaction to be less than pennies. That includes the shopkeepers time to manage the automated store, the electricity used in the transaction, and a bunch of other non zero components.
Hell even transactions with real pennies today are almost a net loss. We eradicated 5c coins in NZ because they cost something like 6c to make.
And to be clear I understand you mean micropayments in general and maybe it is something possible im just not yet convinced the electricity costs will allow it unless it's subsidized in an unsustainable way.
Why would that matter? A 5c coin is spent thousands, millions of times. Why would there need to be any connection at all between how much it costs to make the coin and the value that coin represents in a transaction?
There were other reasons like inflation making 5c coins largely irrelevant (we also had 1, and 2c coins phased out years earlier) (also 1nzd=0.5usd at that time)
NZ has also been largely cashless for at least 20 years now. (Link below has some interesting info/graphs)
https://www.paymentsnz.co.nz/resources/articles/two-sides-of...
I think the only reason this happening was even a big deal at the time was because they replaced all coins at the same time with much smaller, lighter and cheaper versions. I.e. it wasn't a big deal at all but rather the swap over was.
Which is a good thing considering how much of the population's life is already intertwined with and recorded by Google. I can't imagine anything more dystopian than a Google issued currency.
I liked Google as a company a lot better during Schmidt's tenure as well. Best of luck to him in his next role.
What's with the persistent narrative of google not being "just another company" and then (sadly?) becoming one? that's some fairytale nonsense.
The last time someone asked me what it’s like to work there, I said “it’s just a job” on instinct.
It's better for the company to help the delusional embrace the "it's just a job" mentality ASAP so that they and the rest of us might be spared the weekly public hissy fit.
This was their response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14540332
It's well worth a read.
From a business side, they really haven’t done too much.
Myopic. They've greatly increased the eyeballs available to them through new products and business relationships
The “eyeballs” they are creating are less valuable and are more expensive to acquire.
Isn’t that the same business plan of every startup? Get “eyeballs” and worry about profit later? What’s going to happen as more people start using ad blockers?
They are still just a one trick pony.
Nothing wrong with that when it got them to a trillion dollar valuation. And Google Cloud has the potential to be even bigger than their entire ad business.
If “valuatoon” is all that counts, Uber is a successful company.
Google Cloud isn’t exactly capturing the hearts and minds of most companies compared to AWS and Azure.
The former includes things like not being good at enterprise sales, the history of allowing employees to veto customers, and ADD induced by the wacky promotion system. The latter includes a legion of techies burned product shutdowns and abandonments that will never, ever believe that google really cares about back compat and long term support no matter what kind of contract language it puts out.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Role_in_illegal...
He also wrote this, to make it clear that he knew he was doing wrong: [let's share this with competitors] "verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?"
He was also the one who, with a straight face, said "if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to fear" in response to widespread surveillance. Of course, he would not then open himself up to any scrutiny.
It is that all of this happened, was well documented and publicly reported... and Google’s board did absolutely nothing. He continued in high ranking positions there for another ~decade. They sent a clear message that they find this sort of criminal conspiracy to be A-OK, nothing worth firing the guy over, or indeed reprimanding him in any meaningful way whatsoever.
To me that’s a bigger story than the Andy Rubin thing.
If you can start a company that breaks the law, the only punishment is a $0 fine, your competitors don't do it, and doing it brings you large financial rewards, many would do it 10/10 times.
From the press release: https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2019/0430/
It was a pretty bad response in the terms of actually fixing the messed up IM situation. It only made it worse, basically axing XMPP adoption. Game theory doesn't advise doing that. Compare it to one ally defecting. Others defecting in response (instead of looking for more allies) means losing the whole campaign right away, which is exactly what happened.
I don't use XMPP at all today and naturally none of my IM contacts are from Google or FB. Good thing something like Matrix is gaining traction. But I have little respect for Google today because of the above.
There was a hilarious moment at the company meeting when rank-and-file learned from the news that Eric and Larry met with Trump. Somebody demanded explanation, as if it is something strange that business leaders meet with the president. Sundar mumbled something like "yes, I didn't know they are going to meet, but this was a single meeting and many business leaders attended...". Eric rushed on stage and said "To clarify: I met with President Trump more than once, bla bla".
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl...
Google's response: "Nothing was said at that meeting, or any other meeting, to suggest that any political bias ever influences the way we build or operate our products."
Which of course is not true, as was ironically demonstrated on the same meeting pre-election, when instant answer cards in search results were popping up for Hilary queries, but not for Trump queries.
He doesn't come off very well in "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" either.
edit: as guessed, I got down voted for an Obama reference. Here's a quote from the book:
"First, Google demonstrated that the same predictive knowledge derived from behavioral surplus that had made the surveillance capitalists wealthy could also help candidates win elections. To make the point, Google was ready to apply its magic to the red-hot core of twenty-first-century campaigning, beginning with the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. Schmidt had a leading role in organizing teams and guiding the implementation of cutting-edge data strategies that would eclipse the traditional political arts with the science of behavioral prediction"
Wow, didn't expect that. I used it back in my uni days for a compiler project.
Hard to compare Eric and Larry as CEOs because they both led at very different times in the company’s history, each with their own unique set of challenges.
He was very approachable and understood well the technology that we were building. Most of my colleagues seemed to like him, too. He wasn't the money guy at the top of the org chart that doesn't understand his own products. That was even clearer when I talked to him in person once, after a company-wide meeting. He wasn't in a rush to get away from us plebeians, either.
Someone next to me made a comment about surveillance and he replied along the lines of "You know, I grew up in the Hoover days", explaining that he had seen the potential for abuse of power or personal information since a young age and that he held that as something to keep in mind or avoid when making strategic decisions.
I’d never heard of Bill Campbell before, seems like he was a huge influence around Silicon Valley.
The book is also a great way to understand why Twitter is such a shit show of an organization. The fundamental mismanagement from day one until now also shows the power of finding product/market fit. As the saying goes, you can mess everything else up and still succeed.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18656827-hatching-twitte...
I would love recommendations for similar books that aren't just hagiographies of startups/tech giants.
My high-level take away though is that it is directionally correct regarding Twitter and its (mis)management.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Campbell_(business_exe...
Is Google wasting all their resources creating dozens of incompatible chat apps, but no blogging platform?
It's in many ways a good story for tech.
Every year, the British commonwealth celebrates the end of that war.
Every year, I ask why after the war, the public didn't string up every one of the leaders that was responsible for plunging the world into that pointless, industrial bloodbath. The silence I hear is, sadly, deafening.
Nobody cares to actually look at what caused that war. Nobody wants, or wanted to hold anyone accountable. The world collectively shrugged its shoulders, and forgot all about it.
And all that schoolkids here are taught is "The noble British Empire led the glorious allied fight against some bad German people because reasons, here's some pictures of trenches, sometimes soldiers played soccer, now shut up and don't ask any more uncomfortable questions."
I also find it truly repulsive that so many people in this country keep repeating the lie that Canada was "born on Vimy Ridge", as if sending wave after wave of terrified and browbeaten conscripts to die in some shell-blasted hellhole is what "made" us. I'd argue that the true birth of Canada was the Suez Canal crisis, when we openly defied the motherland on the world stage and instead spearheaded a peaceful solution to the mess via an international consensus.
Fun fact: the Canadian politician who led that peaceful solution to the Suez crisis and would later keep Canada out of the Vietnam War, Lester Pearson, volunteered as a field medic for most of WW1. I can't think of any job more likely to permanently rewire one's brain into a "Never again!" orientation.
It took listening to Dan Carlin's podcast [1], which I couldn't recommend more, for me to learn much of what I know and pique my interest to read further.
[1] https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-bluepr...
He made it clear he was just trying to unite his people, not take over the world, and under Wilhelm I, this system was stable.
All of the major western nations were undergoing industrial militarization at this point, particularly with naval technology.
When Wilhelm II came into power, he removed Bismark whose sole goal at this point was managing peace in Europe.
At this point all of the tension was in the Balkans, Wilhelm was eyeing new conquests, the Serbians murdered the Austrian heir to the throne, and every major power thought they were God's chosen people. They also thought any new conflict would be short and sweet just as the recent Prussian wars had been. No one understood how new technology and tactics would change the dynamic of war.
Bismarck was chancellor until 1890 and died about 10 years later. WWI didn't start until about 25 years after he was no longer running the show. People had moved on from his notions of European peace and wanted to play with their new toys.
Additionally, the chancellor was elected by the nobility. It was not as if he could have handed the role down to a successor. He would have had to find someone that appeased the new king, a younger nobility, and the public at large who were quibbling over democracy vs a semi constitutional monarchy.
Bismarck's talent was uniting people and keeping them happy, even when not everyone got what they want. He was respected by his enemies because he illustrated that he was just trying to unify the remains of the Holy Roman Empire, a gelatinous blob of bickering principalities that had been central to European conflicts for hundreds of years. Unification finally stopped the bleeding, and Bismarck made it clear that he was after global stability, not conquest.
If you want to blame someone for WWI, there's not really one person you can point to. However Wilhelm II would fit that mold much better than Bismarck. If he had been alive and in power, he would not have wanted to start a massive war of attrition.
The analogy with software is right-on, in my view. He crated a system that was complex, sure, but very manageable and powerful if you understood it in sufficient detail.
For a fast-and-loose comparison, he was running foreign policy in Vim/Emacs, while his contemporaries were using Notepad, and of course he did a damned good job. His biggest fault is that he never taught any of his subordinates how to use Vim/Emacs.
He didn't seem to have a succession plan for himself. It's a mystery to me why (hubris, lack of interest?), but it regardless goes down as a fault against him, IMO.
I'm not familiar with the history, but it almost sounds like Bismarck was a brilliant individual contributor to diplomacy. Maybe what he needed was to work with an executive who would know how to systematize what Bismarck did - and building an organization to systematize what one brilliant person can do is a skill in itself!
But of course this perspective seems way more obvious now, more than a hundred years later, than it would have at the time. And even if you knew that this was what Germany needed, it would have taken a very, very well-run foreign ministry to pull it off.
His contemporary Hohenzollern monarch (Wilhelm's II predecessor) largely allowed Bismark to take free reign over diplomacy, recognizing him as a generational talent.
If Bismarck was an ideological juggler, capable of accepting political loss in the short-term to catch out his adversaries in the long-term, Wilhelm was a firebrand, who refused to play games with "the enemy" (especially the Russians), even if they benefited the long-term survival of his state and person.
The cartoon shows Bismarck stepping off the ship, leaving Wilhelm to take over. While this is perhaps an unflattering characterization of Bismarck, it reflects that, even in 1890, it was known that Wilhelm would not be able to lead the nation better than this forcibly-retired titan of European diplomacy.
Bismarck probably could have stayed on the ship, because its sailors were largely aligned with him, but he was getting old (75 when he retired); and he tired of suffering the youth and ignorance of the not-so-subtle monarch. His most immediate, and unfortunate legacy was the black hole he left unfilled.
The aftermath was a complete lack of long-term thinking, that led to all the European countries (even Russia!! who had a hard time getting along with the UK/France in particular) agreeing to form alliances against Germany. It's quite reasonable to point to Bismarck's departure as the first big slip down the slippery slope that led to WWI.
Compare this to Eric Schmidt leaving Google (filled with young Wilhelm IIs?) how you will.
Google's problem now is that anything smaller than a billion-dollar business is not on their radar screen, which means that by definition they are going to miss the next growth industry. And they don't really have anyone in the company who can do anything about that, because you don't go to Google because you want to work on the small problem that might become big, you go to Google because you want to work on big problems.
That seems quite wrong, given that: 1. Google can buy into growth opportunities by making aquisitions. 2. Google is invested in many, many pre-billion-dollar businesses.
Question is, can we undo the damage done. In 2019 lingo, reverse the Thanos snap. Not sure of Sundar but I still hope that Google twins might do the right thing.
Press release: https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2019/0430/
The question is, do we want a largely unregulated private corporation to hold that much sway over entire populations?
A monopoly is typically deemed so when it has inordinate power, no serious competition, and can increase costs without needing to increase quality
Case in point, it’s extremely hard to get discovered on internet without paying google/Facebook. Even if you are not running ads, google can wipe out a significant chunk of your internet traffic with their algorithm changes. Or google’s insane policy for Android OEM manufactures (which EU took a notice of). Amazon controls your retail presence - you can’t have cheaper products anywhere else. If you have a particularly popular product, Amazon will make its own version.
The average consumer still has an abundance of choice and low prices so the current market powers of these companies do not fit the definition of monopoly that was applied to Microsoft in the 90s. I think there needs to be another word or the definition of a monopoly needs to be updated. These companies still have an influence which teeters close the impact created by historical monopolies.
There doesn't have to be a law, for an individual or organisation, to notice and opine that these companies DO have an impact which would be very hard to achieve in free and fair markets. Law usually follows disruptive innovation and capitalism and capitalists generally try to run circles around policy making.
>> Undertakings possessing market share that is lower than 100% but over 90% had also been found dominant, for example, Microsoft v Commission case.[78] In the AKZO v Commission case,[79] the undertaking is presumed to be dominant if it has a market share of 50%. There are also findings of dominance that are below a market share of 50%, for instance, United Brands v Commission,[74] it only possessed a market share of 40% to 45% and still to be found dominant with other factors. The lowest yet market share of a company considered "dominant" in the EU was 39.7%.
I. Where the monopolist lies not the exclusive power of production but only certain exclusive facilities as a producer, and can increase, with imdimimished or even increased facility, the amount of his produce....
II. A second kind of monopoly is in the opposite extreme. It exists where price is checked neither by the hopes nor by the fears of the producer, where no competition is dreaded, and no increased supply can be effected. The owners of some vinyards have such a monopoly....
III. A third and more frequent kind of monopoly lies between these two extremes, and is neither so strict as the last, nor so comparatively open as the first. This comprises those cases in which the monopolist is the only producer, but, by the application of additional labow and abstinence, can indefinitely increase his production. The book trade affords an illustration....
IV. The fourth and last class of monopolies exists where production must be assisted by natural agents, limited in number, and varying in power, and repaying with less and less relative assistance every increase in the amount of the labour and abstinence bestowed on them.
-- Nassau William Senior, An Outline Of The Science Of Political Economy, (1836, 1872) pp. 103-106.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.59405/page/n11...
How can you have a large scale security breach with a brutal tech hiring process, sky high salaries and a whitepaper-producing workforce? Hell, when you interview at much smaller firms, the tech groups copycat the Google hiring techniques, that's the extent of the influence. Google is a reference implementation that everyone copycats.
Then is the Pixel 3's lack of creative innovation symbolic of a strong tech culture that seems to prize science and tech over creativity? For reference, they copied the iPhone in numerous ways aesthetically and marketing-wise: the size is identical, glass replaced metal, the price was pumped up to make it appear premium, even the color names have goofy Apple-y names, etc.
They've become bloated.
1 - https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/google-bought-manhattans-c...
If you want to talk expansion, look at the new Hudson Square expansion about a mile south of Chelsea Market: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/17/18144448/google-nyc-camp...
Isn't that true for a large amount of large tech companies?
I was under the impression that a large amount of the workers are working on incremental improvements to existing services or working on new features/services entirely. If those people stop working that shouldn't disrupt the service and you shouldn't see the revenue fall until a competitor catches up & out innovates.
It's possible to give the appearance of being busy and valuable if you make every project way more complex than it needs to be by scheduling lots of meetings that end up mostly involving bike shedding, publishing lots of design docs and spreadsheets to gain visibility, submitting mediocre code so that you can subsequently submit lots of cleanup CLs, and so on. The game is easier to play these days because the company is so large that entire teams can go off the radar and not have to be accountable.
This happens at every big company and it isn't the norm at Google, but it happens quite often. It's really hard to fire employees, and a pain for managers. It's way easier to just let them be, and for a low-mid level manager that can even make it easier for them to justify additional headcount, which makes their org bigger and increases their standing.
Because when you are billions-of-dollars profitable, and you go ahead and fire a lot of people, it tanks morale, and good performers start looking for the door. (Note: This does not hold in the middle of a recession. We aren't in the middle of a recession, though.)
Because a company could be just as successful without XY% of its workforce, but nobody can correctly identify which XY%. (This one still holds in the middle of a recession.)
Because a lot of that XY% would be more productive, if they were instructed to do something that's more useful to the bottom line.
But I've seen people just temporarily work really hard and/or get lots of help while they're on a PIP, succeed at it, and then revert to old habits. In a lot of cases rather than go through the trouble to put a report through a PIP, which may not have the desired outcome anyway, the manager will just put them off in a corner and give them unimportant tasks, making it that much easier for them to just coast.
This is a lot of work just to appear "busy"... are you saying they shouldn't be documenting?
Do all your friends who work there include themselves in the 30% by any chance? I assume not. And I also assume whoever you ask they will also say 30% could be fired, but they will then also all say it should not of course be themselves...
Wasn't it a security vulnerability? IIRC they were returning data they shouldn't have for some calls, but didn't have conclusive evidence that anyone had ever made those calls because of log rotation policies. (Maybe I misremembered, or maybe you're talking about a different issue?)
Ad revenue is not down. Ad revenue is growing slower than in the past.
> How can you have a large scale security breach with a brutal tech hiring process, sky high salaries and a whitepaper-producing workforce?
Security is stupendously hard. It is also not a stable state. Software engineering as a discipline does not have methods of turning dollars into security with confidence. There is no company on the planet that avoids getting pwned.
It's also a second degree derivative, which is inherently noisy. A single data point isn't enough to show a trend.
> Security is stupendously hard.
It also wasn't a breach. Breach implies it was exploited. They actually found the bug and fixed it, and there was as far as they could there no signs that it was abused.
Google has some of the best security security researchers out there. Look at Project Zero, they've found the majority of the largest zero days in the past few years.
As would be expected from the class of hackers that would be able to exploit it.
https://9to5google.com/2019/04/29/alphabet-q1-2019-earnings/
The Google worship around here...