Larry Page ignored Steve Jobs’ advice, and Google is doing great | Hacker News Reader

Larry Page ignored Steve Jobs’ advice, and Google is doing great

thenextweb.com

61 pointspetrel38 comments

The premise of the article is jobs told page to focus Google, and Page ignored that but succeeded anyway

However IIRR Page shut down dozens of projects (wave being a big example). Just because a large company is doing a lot of things does not mean they are not focused - I expect Page has a list of 5 things and thinks its all focused quite well

> However IIRR Page shut down dozens of projects (wave being a big example).

Indeed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discont...

And partially gutted some, forcefully shoving G+ in them (e.g. Reader)

On the contrary, Google Reader has barely any G+ in it. The major complaint of the redesign is that it stripped Reader of its social features without replacing it with anything. If G+ integration existed which provided the same use cases, people would be happy with it.

Whether or not the premise is true, can't we stop abusing the death of Steve Jobs to generate page views?

What a lame article. If you compare Google now to Google a few years ago, the difference is marked. I know think of Google in ters of a handful of products today; that was not the case then. Google has definitely put its wood behind fewer arrows.

The bigger question is did Steve Jobs have anything to do with it? It would surprise me if Page wasn't going to go down this path either way. Maybe a nudge of encouragement rather than a massive course correction.

But Page did focus Google. He focused it on Google+. Compare the current everything integrated around Google+ company and the company of two years ago. The difference is astounding.

I actually think Page's biggest test is to come over the next several years. With declining per ad revenue and potential competitors (in Amazon and Facebook) Google runs the risk of having its core revenue stream reduced significantly, while over in the OS space it has to deal with the death thrash of a Microsoft that knows its do or die time and several minnows (RIM, Ubuntu) that may slice off small chunks of market share and a whale in Samsung that may just walk off with the rest.

If Page can navigate all that then it will be worth writing articles about.

The mobile market is still growing, there's sufficient room for competitors to share the market with google. Also, samsung does not pose any threat, because samsung is bad at software development. The weakest part of samsung's products is the software. I don't think they're capable of developing a successful competing OS to android. As long as they're getting android from google, google is the one with the power.

> continues to be wildly and purposefully unfocused

Unfocused? Last two years Google killed tens of products. They even killed Google Wave. Moreover, they unified UI across many products.

In my opinion Larry is doing exactly what Steve advised.

This is a fluff piece. Weren't all of those products in production or development when Jobs passed away? And hasn't Page continued to cut and EOL products since then too?

What is it with blogs getting more and more clickbait-y with titles at the moment, even The Verge has gone that way.

Page smoothly managed Google into a position where they have many projects ongoing, and the core business is incredibly focussed. Saying he ignored Jobs' advice to focus is incredibly stupid, as he did bring a level of focus back into the business and it's working incredibly well for Google.

You can have multiple projects, and multiple exploratory avenues and these are healthy things, but Google for a period was throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck.

> Shortly after Larry Page re-took the reigns as CEO of Google

He re-took the what? You don't take the reigns, you don't give free reign, and you don't loosen the reigns. It's REINS.

You could argue that Google is using a barbell strategy. Play it safe with the core business (search has hardly changed in all these years, just a few minute layout changes and algorithm tweaks. The biggest change, real-time results from Twitter, was rolled back. They have also been very aggressive about protecting search from threats/substitutes, hence vast sums spent on Android and Chrome to protect the visibility of their search ads), then have lots of small-scale dabbling in diverse, blue-sky projects.

I'm sure Steve Jobs though Apple should do hardware, Google should do web software, and as long as they both stuck to their sides of the line, they would both dominate.

Google’s Product Bloodbath: The Full Rundown http://gizmodo.com/5837043/googles-product-bloodbath-the-ful... Ignored the advice they said.(chuckles to himself)

Steve jobs. Larry page Both mentioned in same title Who wouldn't click?

This article is a little fanboyish. Google hasn't actually invented anything either. Google Now, Glasses, self driving cars, Google+ have all been done before many years ago.

What Google is doing is simply executing them in a far more polished and integrated way. Similar to what Apple does.

I personally believe that the real raw innovation in the industry is surprisingly coming from Microsoft.

When you say self-driving cars and Glasses had been done before many years ago, you must mean experimental prototypes that never made it to market, right? Making a self-driving car that "kindof, sort of" works along some desert route as part of a competition is so different from bringing one to market that successfully completes hundreds of thousands of miles in traffic, obeying road rules, and along a less predictable route.

Bringing something like Glasses or autonomous cars to market and making it work well enough to be a success counts for more than creation of prototypes that are never more than a cool experiment, in my opinion.

Did I miss the news that Google brought Gogole glaass/autonomous cars to market, and that those products were successful?

IMO, autonomous cars will be a success at some time. Who will be the first to sell them is anybody's guess, but Idonit think it is a given it will be Google. Car companies such as Volkswagen and Toyota have the advantage that they already can build cars.

Glasses? They might sell at some time, but IMO, the call is out whether these will be niche products or not. I think something must be done on the 'when not in use, they obstruct my view; when in use, they are so tiny' problem before such products can become mainstream.

Did you know that the team that won the DARPA Grand Challenge[1], was run by Sebastian Thrun [2] - who went on play a big part in the creation of Google Street View?

And did you know the Grand Challenge winning cars made use of LIDAR and machine vision to identify road features and obstacles, high precision GPS, and inertial navigation? And that very similar sensors can be seen on Google Street View?

If you wanted a test data set, to refine your self-driving car by simulating driving every road in the developed world, you could scarcely do better than Google's data. This could be valuable in advancing from a car that works well on wide, well maintained freeway to a car that can work well around towns and cities.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoiJeIb0wBA#t=21m50s [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Thrun

Did you know that that Stanford team only came second in the Urban Grand Challenge, a likely more relevant measure, as far as succesfully bringing autonomous driving to market goes? Did you know that in both challenges, the relative time differences between the top 3/4 competitors were so low that they may not tell anything about the quality of their software? Do you know why, in both competitions all teams were US based (my guess would be that large external players such as Mercedes-Benz and Toyota do not want to give away too many secrets for little gain. US competitors who do well there stand a chance of getting orders from the US military, but non-US ones? Unlikely.) Do you know that Mercedes-Benz claims that this year's S-class model could ride autonomously, if laws permitted it (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/its-the-dawn-of-t...)?

Do you know none of that has anything to do with the issue at hand (the OP lauding Google for bringing successful products to market, while they didn't even bring them to market yet?)

I'd certainly agree that all the teams that completed the Grand Challenge did a good job, whether they finished first or fifth.

Although DARPA rules require that the team have an American representative, teams like Team Berlin [1] and CarOLO [2] were run by German universities. I certainly agree that universities produced a lot more entries than the vehicle industry did - but I don't know if that means Mercedes and Toyota had secrets they didn't want to give away in 2005, or if it means they didn't have anything worth showing off.

Of course, we'll know much more when companies actually start bringing these products to market, and we shouldn't count Google's chickens before they've hatched. But by my reckoning they got a pretty good head start - I certainly wouldn't bet against them.

[1] http://archive.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/Teams/Teamberlin.asp [2] http://archive.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/Teams/CarOLO.asp

Volvo has plans to sell autonomous cars in 2014.

And this idea that Google has invented something that the car companies haven't is just ridiculous. Car companies have been selling millions of self-parking and auto avoidance cars for the last few years. So they clearly have the ability to deliver intelligent control systems.

As for Google Glasses well all I've seen to date is a video camera on your head (around for years) and a science fiction promo video.

My point is that "inventing" isn't what I value. What Volvo and Google are doing is what I value. Apple do it too.

Companies like Apple, Google, and Volvo were not the first with tablets or autonomous vehicles, but they were the first to adapt such inventions into products that the market can accept. (I am making the assumption that Volvo & Google will produce autonomous vehicles that the market will accept)

It's almost like the difference between "having an idea" and "achieving product-market fit".

"When you say self-driving cars and Glasses had been done before many years ago, you must mean experimental prototypes that never made it to market, right?"

Ford, GM, BMW and Toyota are among manufacturers working on what Google is getting virtually all the press for. We'll compare them when you can buy a Google Self-Driving Car at your local dealer.

How can you judge Glasses and compare them to others? How many have you used and tested?

"I personally believe that the real raw innovation in the industry is surprisingly coming from Microsoft." <-- can you give any examples?

yeah , i'm curious about that too , MS is a follower with big money , not a leader in innovation.

Well, that's an often repeated meme, but I'm not sure it's true, really. Didn't Microsoft create Tablet PC (without multi-touch) long before apple? Isn't same true for smart wristwatches, etc?

Microsoft has good ideas but doesn't execute on them any good.

Apple had the Newton before Microsoft, and other companies launched "tablet terminals" even earlier.

It's usually rather hard to know who invented a concept like tablet computers. After all, the concept existed long before they were even possible to fabricate (e.g. in sci-fi).

Microsoft was late to the party. This is a pretty good overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tablet_computers

Their product side is definitely a follower. But Microsoft Research is a whole different story:

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/catalog/default.aspx

Examples:

"Wearable Multitouch Interaction" - http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/dl.aspx?id=160684

But also things that are closer to market - like:

Kinect, Photosynth, Metro

Their retail devision has still the worst image i can think of in this industry. But their research teams seem to be far forward.

Ideas are cheap. Execution and delivery are hard and at the end of the day they are what matters.

For example, how could Bill Gates recognise back in the 90s that mobile was the future of computing, but a decade later Steve Jobs walked away with all the market share and money from it? Because Steve figured out how to execute and deliver, and Bill for all his genius and achievements in other areas (I am not doing him down in general, just in this case) didn't. Great artists ship.

That's why the intellectual property patent system is such an economically damaging disaster.

Apple had its own mobile failure in the mid-90's with the newton. You wonder if steve's presence could have made the mobile revolution happen a decade sooner, or whether the technology of the day simply couldn't deliver the experience of the iphone. Its strange when i look at my old palm pro how competent that device was. I keep wondering how palm managed to lose it all.

By this standard no one is really inventing anything anymore, and future inventions may in fact prove impossible.

I think it was one of the All Things Digital talks with Bill Gates / Steve Jobs were they thought that much of the new innovation would come from startups. It could well be that the future of the industry revolves around acqui-hires.

Google has some really strong engineers, and has some incredible internal tools. Its build system (Blaze) is world class. As I get older, my admiration for its engineering culture (and emerging courage in product vision) only grows.

Its problem is its decrepit HR system. It needs to fire the people who came up with the "calibration scores", the 18-month lockout, and the whole closed allocation regime, yesterday.

If you make the error of thinking that technology is smart people stuff and HR is stupid people stuff, you end up with stupid people writing your HR policies, and disaster ensues.

If Google takes out the trash and reinvents itself as an open-allocation company, it'll be a real powerhouse.

Is there any place we can read more about their culture, or its something you have to pick from the tidbits that leak on blog posts and the way they act publicly?

"Larry Page ignored Steve Jobs’s deathbed advice, and Google is doing great"

First, they were competitors so take your competitor's advice with a grain of salt, Jobs or no Jobs.

Second, there is a lot more to it than just saying "focus on a few things."

Third, Google has a lot of goodwill from way back, any potential downfall will take years. That means that people could tolerate G+, the many ads etc for a while even if unhappy.

Fourth, Maps, Gmail, Now etc can all be folded under one: "Mobile Apps" so Google can say we're focusing.

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