Larry Page's first blunder
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
First of all, wanting to get into social is accepting to play second fiddle to Facebook - google is not a leader but a follower in this game. They're known for innovating and this seems to be at odds with that.
Second, as the author points out, Google is not very good when it comes to people and how they work play and interact. This is what social is all about, and it's very hard to put into an algorithm which is the Google way of doing things.
Third, I agree that making all bonuses dependant on the success of their social endeavours is a huge mistake. What happens to the really good algorithmic search people at Google? Do they bust their ass of doing what they do best, or do they try to implement some kind of social search that they know nothing about because that's what their bonus depends on. What will happen to my search results because of this? Yes, it will get worse, and yes it will undermine Googles core product. What Larry has done is basically told everyone that they should start working on something Google is historically not very good at and not worry about their core business. Huge mistake.
Fourth, this shows a poor understanding of the dynamics of incentives, which is something that a CEO of a company as large as Google should be very good at. Paying everyone a bonus based on how one division performs is at best disillusioning to the people who don't work in that division and have absolutely no control over their bonus. It doesn't matter how hard a division works if it doesn't have anything to do with social. What will this do to their morale? At best they'll just hum along, knowing there's not much they can do, at worst they'll start cannibalising their product to try and make it social.
Google is a bunch of great add-ons without a message board.
Facebook is a great message board with mediocre add-ons.
Google needs a message board.
It would be interesting if, like facebook, you coukd do nothing on google without signing in. further upon sign in, if you were given a more cohesive iGoogle profile through which to access these services.
Clearly what google lavks is not the message board, but a cohesive ux to tie these all together - but only if thats how these services were of value, like facebook. But they do have intrinsic value as standalone services, thus the user base they do have.
Its a risky situation to try to glue all the already valuable services google has together with some ambiguous social duct tape. Im sure that would fail.
Creating yet another site where we can create an account wont work. Letting us share through some service like disco is a single channel through which to share info. That competes with twitter.
Additionally they cant provide a business profile as linkedin owns that space.
It seems as though they need to find a way fir people to create an adhock social network for various activities and provide the tools that support this group.
typed from phone, forgive typos
What kind of innovation has Google done?
They've done "better" successfully a couple of times, but they've rarely done new.
Microsoft put cheap GUI computing on everbody's desk and broke the vertical hardware micromonopolies, commoditizing hardware.
Microsoft gave me run whoever's programs you want computing, no permission needed computing on everbody's desk.
Apple put touchscreen microcomputer app technology in my hand. I don't care if they didn't invent any bit of it, they were the ones who made it available and synthesized the pieces to make a whole much greater than the parts.
Apple put cheap mostly individual digital music in my hand. Who cares that they didn't invent digital audio, compression, or mp3 players -- they were the ones let me have them.
etc etc
>"What happens to the really good algorithmic search people at Google? Do they bust their ass of doing what they do best, or do they try to implement some kind of social search that they know nothing about because that's what their bonus depends on."
If that good algorithmic search person only cares about his/her job and not the life of the company maybe he/she should leave. I'm sure he doesn't want everyone to make individual products, but they have an army of incredibly smart people that could give valuable input. Setting a company wide priority is the right thing to do.
[1] -- since this could use a source, see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/08/google_bonuses_tied_... and 'Page is tying a proverbial lamb chop around the neck of its new social thingy, "Google +1" [...]'.
There is a small backlash against "social". Google pushing social will not help that. Facebook and twitter own social right now. Next year, who knows? The better way forward is to figure out how to give users clean and excellent tools to manage the privacy/transparency aspects of social and integrate that into a platform with a great signal:noise ratio.
That's not an engineering problem. That's a people problem: a business, legal and UX problem sitting square in that gooshy, touchy-feely, soft side of how people think, operate, and want to manage their data. The question is, can Google play in that arena? Can they hire some flake fruity designer who totally groks how non-engineers think and integrate that understanding into the engineering teams?
And moreover, it needs to have a big, well-planned release. I didn't even know Google Profiles existed until a couple weeks ago. If Google were to release an entire social network on a single day with an Apple-esque release press conference, there's a chance it might get enough people interested to have an actual impact. Doing things like a limited beta release is a horrible idea when it comes to social features, and arguably a major part of why Wave failed so spectacularly.
Everything they've tried up to this point has been completely disjoint and confusing.
That's like saying that Google getting into email with Gmail years ago was accepting to play second fiddle to Hotmail (or Yahoo Mail). We know how that worked out. It's too early to say who will be second fiddle to whom.
Facebook is moving, it isn't resting thinking "Work's done."
Not a huge monetary incentive, but you can bet that social ideas will get all the backup they need from infrastructure, marketing, etc.
Every organization has a culture, and every culture has blind spots: things that it doesn't value and is not good at. Because it doesn't value them, it doesn't bring in people who are good at them. Because it doesn't have people who know about them to remind everybody else about them, it continues not to value them.
The only way out of this is for senior management to realize that their beliefs about how to build a company -- the very foundation of their success to this point -- are now what is limiting them.
In this case, Google has gone massively overboard on hiring engineers, and has neglected designers, UX experts, human factors experts, people who understand the "soft side" of computing. What they need to do is to bring a bunch of such people in and give them power. But their whole hiring process is built around finding the very best engineers; they have no process for hiring "soft side" experts. Worse, they have nobody who even knows how to evaluate such people.
Now if Page realized all this, he could do something about it. But to realize it he has to see the limitations in his existing beliefs about who he wants working at Google, about what skills are important. He has to realize he needs people unlike himself. And he has to make a fundamental change in his vision of what kind of company Google is and how it can be most successful. It is very rare to see a CEO with the level of self-reflection to be able to make changes like that.
Letting dodgeball languish and pushing Crowley out of Google really ought to be the subject of a bunch of management self reflection and probably even some firings, all the way up to the CEO level.
I was with you until you said this.
If the problem was a company-wide cultural mismatch, it strikes me as somewhat absurd to declare that the answer is to fire the people who happened to be posted near the border of that mismatch. That doesn't fix anything.
Punishment is overrated. The blame game is a game with no winners.
The new CEO is setting a new tone, new structure and new priorities. Getting rid of people who fail to adopt the new vision is fine and reasonable. Firing people for pre-pivot problems isn't.
Frankly, I think your suggested action would have one major effect: killing innovation.
After all, who would dare to innovate if they knew that if the project failed (no matter if the cause was them, or if it was a company-wide cultural issue) that you might capriciously fire them, long after the fact?
I want to see someone spend their time finding evidence to support that assertion, rather than working on their way of typing as an authority.
More anecdotally, I find that the best design and illustration I've seen from Google is usually on a very small thing: Google doodles, the CR-48 pilot program videos and illustrations, the Google TV quick tour. Some amazing work has gone into Chrome marketing.
But it's almost never on a product. Their products often feel like the design was managed by committees of engineers. That's not to knock any of Google's product designers, but it often feels like they're not allowed to make decisions on anything that really matters.
In 2009 she was Vice President of Google Search Products & User Experience. It's 2011 and there's still no Maps selector in search. How long did it take to get blog search as a selector? Years. She's been VP of Location and Local Services since October 2010 - she lost that to 4sq.
She has a background in AI and not UI or design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer
Video from 2009:
http://youtu.be/Ybbk-6-P3Dk (fail)
Reading Willfred's article below from 2009 makes me think that he could've seen the cap that Mayer might've been placing on Google's UI. He writes: "But I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data" vs wikipedia article "She acts as a gatekeeper for their product release process, determining when or whether a particular Google product is ready to be released to users."
Beware of some power blondes - will write off everything they touch, and block out those that can do something useful.
Let her go. She's the old Google.
Google, like with Facebook, acquire to hire - make entrepreneurs replace the old guard.
She's married now anyway, we'll see how deep the bond goes.
Google Ventures should do micro-seeding. Google should also remunerate against project traction and returns, and maybe disconnect pay from position.
It's often said that Google's weakness is the human side, and I agree, but what's not clear is whether Facebook is so culturally different. Much of what I hear about Facebook indicates a hacker culture that is not dissimilar to Google's engineering culture in this respect, i.e. not necessarily "softer" in the way you describe. Do Facebook emphasize "human factors experts"?
There are people here who have worked at both companies. I'd like to hear some comparisons on this point.
What that means in practice, who knows, but with Google's engineer-heavy focus, I would venture to guess that Google at least is (and has been) heavily focused on a machine-driven philosophy.
If you've been reading Hacker News for the last few months you'l' probably have read two major complaints about the company.
1) their search results are getting spammier
2) if you're an employee on the inside, there's more politicking than engineering going on.
In terms of spammy results, if millions of people are applying upvotes to good results every day, true human-eyeball search QA will be working at massive scale.
And YES the spammers botnets have probably already started +1'ing their spammy links, but hey, answering that is part of the bonus. (I can think of a few algorithms already that might actually further identify spam by finding 'unnaturally correlated voting blocks)
+1 directly improves Google's core business, which is finding good results in web search. Having 25% of your bonus tied to the success of Google's core business is appropriate.
The second major issue I've read about (nearing the point of deluge) is the problem with 'internal politicking'. It happens at all mega-corporations I'm sure, but how in the hell do you address it? Individual departments work against certain other departments, they willfully work a little slower or protest a little too much and some projects that didn't deserve to die do.
The complaints about Google's ability to innovate are evidence of this stuff. The internal middle managers' squabbles.
Well what better way to ensure that you cut through the corporate squabbles than by looking at all the projects you've got going on, picking the one that you think has the best chance of helping the bottom line and saying to everyone in the company "you can either help or get the fuck out of the way. 25% of your bonus is tied to this project"
If morale is going to be take a hit if this project fails, then the answer is don't fail.
There are many different perspectives at Google, and by focusing the entire organization on "social," he attempts to tap into the creativity of individuals throughout the entire organization. That type of engagement leads to unexpected benefits.
There are some good ideas in the article, like, "People want to isolate social from nonsocial aspects of their lives."
I suspect there is something to that, although there is also another factor the author may want to consider... the how much better are you than the current leader factor?
If a great new search engine launched tomorrow, that was a little better than Google, would it beat Google? No. Years ago at a Kelsey Group conference (2004ish) an executive at Google talked about the 50% rule. She said that for a search engine to beat Google, it had to be 50% better.
The point is that it is very difficult to persuade humans to change their behavior, and they will only do so when there is a huge benefit.
And if a disproportionate number of those humans who bother to vote are spammers?
Definite humans do certain things, like browse the web in certain predictable patterns, their +1 votes might cluster around certain interests, and generally "human looking stuff". Without enough data to look at I can't tell you exactly what that means but I'm assuming that patterns would emerge once compared with computers.
Assume that spammers manage to automate a certain number of google accounts to vote +1 on their web properties. At the click of a button (in low orbital ion cannon style) thousands of robot-accounts log in to +1 against an individual link.
Now the spammers may find a way to stagger the automation of the logins, but unless they're particularly sophisticated how do they manage to create the rest of the simulation of a web-browsing individual?
Do they automate "fake humans" to run google searches from time to time? Click about on links? What about the analysis of the 'clustering' of accounts? A given group of 1000 accounts always voting on the same things together? What about the odd similarity that all the +1's seem to be routed through the same handful of IP addresses? What if +1'ing is closely related to other people +1'ing near your own geolocation?
I'm not saying it's going to be perfect, indeed they're buying themselves another "arms race" - it really would be interesting to investigate what proportion of Facebook's like button is being "astro-turfed"
There's definitely going to be mechanical turk jobs to search my link, click +1 and such, but that exists for facebook as well.
I firmly believe that as clever as spammers are, there're not going to be able to accurately simulate the behavior of real humans for long. There are too many factors that can trip them up.
Again, this is probably one of the things that 25% of the bonus is tied to addressing. Clever, interested engineers now have a serious incentive to spending their 20% time addressing your concern.
Right?
They're just not counted.
Ghost banning can give you a a large number of false-positives without the same level of risk of upsetting others.
In fact, with google's version of ghost banning, they could further tie your votes to the accounts of your friends.
Google algorithmically thinks your a spammer, you're ghost-banned - except to you and except to people who have elected to count you as a friend.
It will be very hard to feel slighted if you never know that your votes don't really carry an impact.
Obviously there's work in getting this right, but it's got a good chance of being a very solid quality filter.
I think it's a deliciously evil solution to spammers and trolls, as you've described.
Which doesn't mean it will work, of course; see ScottBurson's points above. But from a strategy perspective it's a classic way to align priorities around the critical corporate goal.
I think it must be much, much easier to write articles like this about managing Google than it is to actually manage Google.
We're talking about tying a portion of bonuses to performance in an area that is crucial to the success of this company! What a blunder, indeed.
Based on comments like this getting so many votes, I'm starting to wonder how many Google fanboys use this site. This is true for any critic in any industry. If you have to be the de-facto source of information on something before you can comment on it, then nobody would ever be able to comment on anything. "It's much easier to eat food from a restaurant and pick it apart, then actually go in the kitchen and cook it yourself." True, the critic doesn't risk much.
Motivation is when you give someone an incentive to work hard. As mentioned in the article, if I work on search algorithms, how is a bonus contingent on social networking going to motivate me? I think it's a valid question, and if that's really what's happening at Google, then I would agree, it's a blunder.
Last week writers like this were saying Google was dying because of stagnation and because 'social just isn't in its DNA'. This week they're saying Google is dying because it's trying not to stagnate and 'get social.'
Today, Google knows who I email most often, who my contacts are, what's happening in my life (via my Calendar), what I like to read and bookmart (via Reader), what I like to talk about (via Google AdSense/Analytics on my blog and via Search), even places I tend to go often or plan to go (via GMaps). The list goes on.
That is a huge piece of the puzzle. They need to figure out a way to put all of that together rather than push (and potentially fail) new "social" incentives.
There are two parts to this that escape me -
1. Whatever happened of "Google Me"? How is it that no one ever mentions that anymore?
2. Google has (IMO) always been a company that places emphasis on being algorithmic than having humans do the work for them (if that even makes sense). It's part of their DNA. That's hard to change.
Finally, this is Google chasing the current fad, and forgetting to focus on what's the next thing.
[Edit - Formatting]
I'm sure the techs who keep the servers running in the Google data centers love having 25% of their bonuses tied to social products they may truly dislike, don't use, etc.
Few things make me worry more about the product too. If it was good, you wouldn't need to order people to evangelize it. They would be doing it because showing off something cool is fun, doubly so if you had a hand in it.
If something goes wrong down the road, the writer can crow "I told you so" and strut around like a rooster. If nothing goes wrong, then who remembers some unknown writer in some forgotten rag?
The beauty of these naysayers is that, like a broken clock (or a stuck display ;) ), they're right about the outcome (and not the cause) once in a while by sheer chance.
I've been out of the 'plex for a year. But when I worked there, every year things changed; from bonus plans, to quality of life 'perks', to who ran what. Google is good at change, they change things all the time.
Google measures a lot. For some it seemed like extreme surveillance but it really was mostly about measuring effectiveness. Of course it also reduced the time to catch the contractor who helped his friends help themselves to some laptops to about 15 minutes after they were noted as being missing :-).
They don't always interpret what they measure well. The feedback loop on that seems poor.
From the outside it would seem that Larry is embracing one of the core Google beliefs which are "Change things to be what you think is the better way, measure what you change, fix what you break." Does that belief scale to the CEO's office? Guess we'll see. If its broken it won't stay broken since I'm sure there are a number of experiments in place to provide feedback on its effectiveness.
The only danger to Google at that point is whether or not they can understand and internalize the feedback effectively. That was a skill I didn't see a lot of when I was there.
If Google make their products more social then their is a clear value-add for the consumer of the data, and also a value-add for advertisers. I don't think Page is making a mistake here at all.
One of the problems telecommuters face is dealing with a sense of isolation from the team. If (when) we solve that problem (and similar ones), and social media experimentation is going to be required to do so, probably, then we have an opportunity for a real virtual office, virtual college, etc.
I definitely see this happening.
I think eventually it will all setting down and there will be new pushes based on yet new tech.
What's wrong with technology helping people become more social? I love it and apparently, millions of others do too.
Banality?
social in web is still inmature. most facebooker are on the war of whom got more friends on their list -- something in real society does not happen. most myspacers upload photos next to "cool" stuff, like friends porche claimed their own, owesome vacations that never took place, etc -- something in real society does not happen alot OR you are pushed outside the circle. what you see right now is very inmature social.
It's just evolution.
http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...
It's all about the problem where social circles overlap.
The only real difference in is the increasing tendency for services to be dependent (for traffic, functionality and/or data) on an industry monopolist. It's easy to see why Google consider developing a Bing of social strategically important; less easy to see what they gain from making their litmus test for the success of that strategy public.
I go to Facebook when I want to see what my friends are doing, but I don't necessarily want to see what they are doing all the time. Imagine if social elements were deeply integrated into Google search, distracting you with stuff from friends every time you tried to do a Google search on a programming topic.
The challenge I think will be to see if Google can properly integrate social aspects where people will appreciate them, and leave them out of places where they will just be a distraction or a frustration.
What is the point of incentivizing gmail/maps/apps/search to do social? (some social widgets make not a coherent social strategy).
Its a textbook wrong move. May be implementation details differ - but that info is available in the article
People should share social features because they want to, not because they're getting a bonus. Google is ignoring an intensely valuable internal feedback mechanism by re-aligning their employees to adopt new social features without skepticism.
The other big problem I see is tying bonus compensation to an area where you are looking for passion and innovation is the easiest way to replace intrinsic motivation with external motivation, the latter having been proven ineffective in research over and over and over again. You can't incentivize passion, you can only create the environment for it. They will likely end up with products built for bonuses instead of products built out of passion as a result.
To me, this decision is WAY too late, as the article points out. You can't win the game when you haven't even been on the field for the majority of the match. This is going to be a HUGE blunder and cost them dearly. Dropping a ton of cash and effort into chasing a dead horse is going to come back and haunt them. I give Page about 2 years tops before they pull the plug on him.
I say the move is genious. There might be a little fewer tomato gardens on the campus at the end of the year, but he'll be leveraging the ideas and strength of the whole workforce into that single market. Zuck might very well have something to worry about now.
I think its the dumbest move on Page part. Let Google be AND REMAIN the best what it is the best SIMPLE SEARCH.
if not, then Page may wake up in 5 years with half of Goog valuation as a zombie-lunatic who still tries to create a Social network when his main money making machine is broken dues to poor maintenance.
Stop aping existing social networking services. Make something people want, something that provides a new dimension to human interaction.
Smart phones is a disruptive technology change which should provide opportunities for new usage and applications which would be disruptive too. This "market" opportunity emerged post facebook and because of Android, google has a significant advantage over competitors it could and should leverage.
The wise points at the moon and the fool looks at the finger. Social networking is the finger. Look where it points to and target this. Restore the initiative of creativity and invention. Reconsider google wave for instance.
Additionally, many people will be in positions entirely irrelevant to social: This includes non-engineers, perhaps sales, and people working at lower levels of the engineering stack (i.e. people working on large scale filesystems, racking servers, the chef...). These people are more likely to be alienated or more simply confused, rather than encouraged in the long run.
I think there's two things that google can do to be a leader in the social space. Maybe you won't agree.
First. Buy Reddit. Buy all of Conde Nast if you have to, Larry.
Second. Given that search is an instant gratification thing (which google does so well) what would happen if, like in a subreddit, I wanted to be aware of goings on in a certain subject? Facebook is great for checking up on what a bunch of my friends are doing all over the world. But if I want a good daily overview of what's going on in a subject I'm interested in, with generally good coments, I go over to Reddit. Google could rule in this "automated newsgroup" space quite well. You would turn to this space to get commentary on articles all over the web. Google could keep it free from bots and not easily gamed. But Reddit's doing it right, and has the biggest userbase. (And yes, I find it pretty annoying most days, but now I filter out a lot of the subreddits I don't like.)
My point here is that Google should look at and learn from Reddit's model so much that it'd be better if they just bought it outright.
It focuses Google on Facebook's mission. Google's mission is to "organize the world's information." Facebook's mission is to "give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." In a way, Page's edict tells employees: "Stop working on Google's mission and start working on Facebook's.
But Google has a good fall-back position with +1, since the worst case scenario is that it simply evolves into a global digg/reddit-style thumb's up signal for the relevancy of a search result (which alone would be a great result). Beyond that, success in "social" will depend on having a well-defined product that's good enough to sell itself, so I basically agree with the article.
By the end of 2011, a lot of "social" is going to appear in places you didn't expect.
I agree with that. I reported a problem with search localization 3 times for the last 2 years to my friend who is working at Google. And monthes after the last time I saw the bad localization behaviour in the search.
I also had to involve my friend for this bug and a few gmail ones because I just could not find the feedback form.
1. That was a one-three years ago. 2. The bad behavior is that Google search invited a new user (without its cookie) with a locale based on geolocation instead of much better indicator - browser accepted languages. 3. This behavior is extremely annoying when you search from the Linux console in Links (or Lynx) that has no yet native language installed.
Would you mind sharing some of that?
Google has 'social' platform already - Gmail. However, what they have tried to do so far is to force 'social' elements into their current offerings, and they have tried to append external turn-key systems like orkut.
You can't force social behavior onto your users, as they have successfully demonstrated. As I see it, only two successful platforms so far, facebook and myspace (which died) had a different start. They started out from human element, which is people started banding together and dragging along their friends into it - onto a central place. Email is social too, but it isn't one central place, but more peer to peer.
What I think Google should do is to do something they have never done before. Humanize Google. Introduce customer support, active engagement with current user base, expand into traditional media, and not only with google ads, but with interactive shows based on google platform, editorialized part of google news, etc... only then will users start to feel google is something they can empathize with and concentrate around it vs only using their services and go away.
tl;dr; humanize google, bring human element to it. Actual humans into their services.
you are not talking here about hiring a customer team of 50 folks answering the phone. you talking about half a million team of humans sticked to the phone 24/7 in order to accomplish that and succeed. I dont think AdSense revenue would cover the payroll and still keep GOOG stock going up.
here is the blueprint as of HOW google can win social: take me as an example: I am a web programmer, mostly php and mysql. google can determine that from my searches I am sure. but no matter how much I google I am still getting pages of C++ and Oracle results to my php/mysql problems.
To win social they should let webadmins of all sort of websites and all subjects (not only programming but anything else there is) implement more narrowed down system that would let them talk back to Google spider (sort of key tagging or GQL some sort of Google Query Language that would let admins describe what google boot see in more mechanical/technical language), and this way Google search results will be more precise, near to perfection! who goes beyond second results page?? I only found garbage after that! All I need is an answer to my question, not 50 pages of results. Accomplish that, Google, and I am stick to your search for next 10 years at least!
Going head-on Facebook is stupid. The one who succeeds will not have invented a better Facebook - will have invented the next social thing, whatever that is.
Google need to be clear to their employees what the definition of success in social and they should define it based on their strengths rather than the competition's product.
I believe Google is very close to getting there: they need to deliver a great ChromeOS experience and they improve their apps.
I wait impatiently to give Google 2 photo-sharing customers who won't make it to facebook: my parents.
"Social media is hot. Let's wire social deeply into our successful search engine, web apps, and operating system. What could possibly go wrong?"
It reminds me of the first part of the 20th century (well I'm not really that old :-) where every kind of business reacted to the disruptive change of the automobile by simply bolting on drive-through windows. It fundamentally misses the point and will seem silly in the long run.
"Page wants employees to advocate Google's social networking features to family and friends."
Sounds like the Amway approach.
You wanted a startup and there you have it, with startups there is a certain amount of risk involved which galvanises people to succeed.
But whether the decision is a blunder remains to be seen... We'll see in a couple of months if its for better or worse.
But, yeah.. he's just a hater. Whatever Page does there'll be some joker with an op-ed calling it a huge blunder, so who cares.