Founder who sold startup to Google says G has lost its mission, is mismanaged | Hacker News Reader

Founder who sold startup to Google says G has lost its mission, is mismanaged

cnbc.com

37 pointsremote_phone27 comments

Original article discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34799308

I feel like lots of people react emotionally to Big Tech firms. Google gets hit pretty hard with lots of doom and gloom stuff. I thought the numbers below were appropriate here:

  Revenue ....... : US $282.8  billion (2022)

  Operating income: US $ 74.84 billion (2022)

  Net income..... : US $ 59.97 billion (2022)

  Total assets .. : US $365.3  billion (2022)

  Total equity .. : US $256.1  billion (2022)

(Source: wikipedia/alphabet)

I remember IBM from the 1980s. They were so fascinating to watch as a consumer company. Personal Computers, PC-DOS and a Chess Program - that's all I mostly knew them to be. I thought they were great!

Suddenly, they vanished. Yet, still to this day... they employ more people worldwide than Microsoft or Google (source: Wikipedia).

As endUsers we have expectations of companies. In our minds, we limit them to Search or Online Videos when in fact, they can be doing so much more.

The appSheet creator? I don't know what his expectations were. These expectations might have been selfish (ie; focused only on his immediate needs. A sprinter in a company running a marathon.)

Google is doing pretty well financially - it seems to me. It is a multinational and a leader of several tech sectors.

Maybe they are not in the business(es) lots of people think they are. Maybe they're just in the business of making money and in the process building (mostly) better solutions than their competitors.

Maybe decision making isn't done by looking at the next few weeks but by looking at the next several years.

Side note, what does "Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment." mean? That sounds like extremely poor journalism, has anybody ever immediately responded to anything?

The request to Bard timed out, presumably.

Yes, I'd consider that poor journalistic practice.

First, it means that they asked Google for their opinion, and would update the article once they get it.

Second, yes, media contacts can answer the phone and provide a prepared statement for certain news which makes it an instant response.

You see this all the time, and of all things to say is poor journalism, this one offends me the least.

Even a response of "let me get back to you" upon receiving a request is at least a response. That pretty much infers that you've caught your contact unawares and they need to get up to speed. So instead of looking out of touch, these contacts just let voicemails, emails, texts/chats go unanswered providing a bit of plausible deniability of sorts. Better to say nothing than the wrong thing.

It's actually a quite common practice. Google has an entire in house PR team literally at the ready to field media questions and respond. The fact they did not respond, or gave the infamous "no comment" does say _something_ though admittedly not much. But that's why it's a disclaimer.

Often "immediately" means something different than the literal definition too. I.e. it's a super safe way to say "they may have actually responded sometime since we asked, but not in time to be included here."

It's not _great_ journalism but it is transparent.

I see it as showing that other (possibly opposing) opinions were sought, in case of criticism of bias.

Google will have lots of people whose whole job is responding to requests for comment and CNBC will have specific contacts. Google was given a chance to respond and didn’t, and of course they didn’t, they wouldn’t want to.

In my cynical opinion, it's because comments from the target of a story have a chance of dismantling that story, so a practice of waiting until the last possible minute to ask for comment has maximized.

Writers for major outlets are sending emails the night before publishing a critical story in the morning, then responding slowly enough to the eventual reply that by the time they issue a confusing correction or addendum, they've already squeezed all of the juice out of the story they're going to get and everyone has moved on.

While this is only a singular opinion, Google’s problems to successfully innovate are in plain sight.

Google Research produces the seminal paper on Transformers - only to see others pick up their work and run with it.

Android is losing market share.

Stadia flopped.

ChromeOS is on life support.

Search is subjectively getting worse (albeit still insanely profitable).

Google Cloud market share is nowhere near AWS or Azure.

The whole company feels like it’s frozen in time.

> Google Research produces the seminal paper on Transformers - only to see others pick up their work and run with it.

Is the take away that they should have hidden it, or just that they should have come up with ChatGPT first? Would the researchers who came up with it have worked there in the first place if they weren't allowed to publish?

There are lots of copyright issues up in the air and going through courts now with generative models that Microsoft is able to presumably insulate from by delegating to an under-capitalized (relative to potential liability) startup. Especially if lots of their investment into that startup is non-transferable Chuckee Cheese tokens (Azure credits) that disappear as a liability to MS in an OpenAI bankruptcy.

Add one more to the pile. Seriously, though, why all the Google hate all of a sudden? It didn't seem like it was that much more mismanaged than any other big tech company.

As a Xoogler, I was really annoyed that Google has massive layoffs while raking in so much profit. It shows a level of short-sightedness that went against the ideal Google culture mentioned in the original article.

Devil's advocate but a company doesn't "owe it" to their employees to sacrifice their profitability (keep them hired) if they aren't bringing the company value. Or honestly, they don't even really need an explanation. It's a privilege to be hired by a company. You need to do what they want you to or else they'll replace you with someone who will. If they don't need you or don't want you, they reserve the right to look out for themselves for whatever reason and cut you loose.

If they ran around worried about "let's sacrifice profit to keep random people we accidentally overhired happy from a moral perspective", they would little by little seize to exist (and piss off their entire "profit-focused" board of directors, shareholders, etc.)

They most likely over-hired, like almost everybody else during COVID.

Why do they deserve criticism for laying people off instead of "praise" for offering 150,000+ people "good" high paying jobs?

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb....

I don't think it's a realistic view to say "they should sacrifice their profit to keep people on board".

Perhaps not in a fiduciary sense, but I feel it kinda does mean something if that's what they promised to those employees when they were hired.

What would you say is a realistic expectation when you are hired? "We guarantee you a job for the next 25 years of your life no matter what as long as you perform well?" You and I can both agree that's probably not realistic.

So what is a realistic expectation? 10 years? 5 years? 18 months?

It'd be pretty unfortunate for a company to hire you and then lay you off within 3-6 months but... to hold it against the company as if they should've treated you better instead of looking out for themselves is a pretty weird way to walk through life?

It all depends. If the company hired me knowing that there was a significant chance I'd be laid off so quickly, the company has behaved very badly.

If it was a surprise to everyone, that's just the breaks.

I think my point is that I'd have different expectations about duty of care from a company with billions in the bank, and a mom and pop general store.

I recognize "it's all business" but if either of said businesses are boasting "we have the best culture and our employees are like family" then dawg, it's not just about business anymore.

> It's a privilege to be hired by a company.

No, it's not. It's a business deal that benefits both parties. Nothing more.

Not sudden

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-did-i-leave-google-stay-s...

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/google-as-fat-...

Criticisms of Google have been piling up over the past half-decade especially. It's not that sudden.

We've been picking on the mismanagement at Google for years around here. Just look at the monthly discussion about Google's new chat app replacing the one released the previous month.

The company has a huge impact on the internet. If they are underperforming, we all suffer from it.

I wonder if perversely all the bad press could actually help Google by lessening antitrust scrutiny. If they're perceived to be setting themselves up for failure, do they become less of a target?

To add to this, can we put a rest to asking founders who sold out and are no longer connected with the acquiring company about their opinions?

It isn't like Google's advertising model was a secret or difficult to envision where it was going.

If that wasn't a problem when you sold out, why is it a problem now? Or if you were already worried about this, why'd you sell to Google?

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