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Comment by mrshoe | Hacker News Reader

I hate hate hate this kind of politicking and conspiring to team up during meetings. Not to mention the fact that he presented an entirely dishonest slide deck.

This is poison for any organization, and keep in mind that it can (and does) happen in even the smallest of startups. As a leader you need to be vigilant and stamp it out, if you want your company to be healthy.

Edit: And the way you stamp it out is to simply not promote the people who practice it, and promote those who don't. Once it has risen to the higher ranks I agree it is difficult to remove (although it can be done when, for example, Steve Jobs returns to Apple and cleans house).

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I hate it, too.

But hate it or not, this is reality in the corporate world. Knowing the correct technical answer is nowhere near as difficult as getting the powers-that-be to agree with you.

For small startups, perhaps you can stamp it out. At large corporations, it isn't quite that easy.

I agree with you but I'm not sure this type of conspiracies are possible to detect when so many senior managers and people close to the founder are in on it. Larry and Serge are completely dependent on the people who surround them and if they start questioning every single initiative, Google would risk becoming draconian and have a distrustful atmosphere.

Humorously enough, this kind of dynamic is why Skype at Microsoft is probably doomed.

It's exactly this sort of thing that's a big part of the big company atherosclerosis. Here, we are getting an account of how Google suffers from it.

Who's to say that not buying Skype will help Google in the long run?

we'll never know...

Suffering? Buying Skype would've been a bad move for the company, and the forces of rationality won out.

From the article, I only detected scheming and FUD, not rational decision making.

The "scheming and FUD" were used to get the company to make a rational decision. Their motivation wasn't to fuck anyone over, it was to get the deciders to make the right decision. There's nothing wrong with hacking deciders to get them to make good decisions; the alternative seems to be letting them make bad ones.

What techniques, specifically, should they have used to get their point across?

  > There's nothing wrong with hacking deciders
  > to get them to make good decisions

This assumes:

1. You are always right.

2. The deciders are a bunch of idiots.

If the hack is successful, either you are right or they are idiots.

If they trust you, and you deceive them, then maybe neither?

Which side was wrong or right is not the issue with "big company atherosclerosis." The issue is the very fact that parties now feel that decision-making requires deception and FUD. That's a clear sign that there is some serious dysfunction.

I'd offer that the it would have gotten Google zillions of video conferencing clients and a leg up on implementing that into their VOIP style offering. Instead, we're looking at Microsoft struggling to fit into an online platform that has almost no users. Now, if they integrate more Skype functionality into their Office suite, that could be interesting.

Corporate clients wouldn't use skype just because google started using it. They sure as hell would if Microsoft started using it, though.

Came here to post this. I'm really sad to see this kind of practice going on in Google now. Moreover, the fact that they cooperated with an article about it is slightly disturbing. How are all the other people involved with the deal going to feel when they find out they've been had?

I disagree. One guy became convinced, for honest and legitimate reasons, that the deal was no good, and he went to the right people and convinced them, using honest, legitimate reasons, that the deal was no good, and then the guy who was properly placed to make the decision scotched the deal while honestly presenting his reasons for opposing it.

Maybe I'm a little jaded, but that sounds pretty darned good to me. I would call it "politics" if the people involved did things for selfish reasons, hid their true motivations, spread misinformation to support their cause, or conspired to avoid oversight. When someone does things for the right reasons, is open about his reasons, and doesn't override other people using authority he doesn't have, it's hard to see him as underhanded. So the guy who made the decision stage-managed a meeting to dramatize his reasons for deciding as he did -- so what? The guy presenting the slide deck hid his opinion about the deal, but only for dramatic purposes, and only at a point where his opinion had ceased to matter because the exec in charge had already made up his mind.

wrt "honest, legit reasons" as opposed to selfish ones: the deal was scuttled by a person partly in charge of Google VOICE, which would have surely gotten killed if Google had bought Skype. Looks pretty selfish to me.

This is a very revealing article. Google is more dysfunctional than I thought.

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