Google CEO Eric Schmidt: Good or Just Lucky? | Hacker News Reader

Google CEO Eric Schmidt: Good or Just Lucky?

finance.yahoo.com

13 pointsphyscab11 comments

I think Eric Schmidt is pretty much the Meg Whitman of the current generation. Both jumped into hot companies that were destined for greatness and got credit for something that would have happened anyways

I don't think that's fair at all. Meg failed to extend the eBay brand into non-English speaking countries, and didn't extend the platform in any meaningful ways. Sure, not everything Google's touched has turned to gold, but Google Apps, Gmail (a two year incubation before the 4/1 release), App Engine, and a bunch of other things have been moderately successful. There's no parallel at eBay to any of those things.

But, as the article says, their "moderate successes" have failed to be profitable.

A startup can get away with not figuring out every monetization angle and focusing on developing cool stuff, as long as they're profitable overall. But once the startup hires a non-technical CEO and IPO's, the CEO's job is supposed to be monetization. Sure, some things can be out there to build public goodwill and brand image, but when you're a publicly-held for-profit, "cool technology" is no longer the benchmark for the CEO's success.

Yeah, he was just the ex-CEO of Novell and ex-CTO of Sun. What does he know?

Is anybody else amused by the fact that Joe Weisenthal listed a disclosure that he owns a few google shares but doesn't acknowledge the DIRECT conflict of interest of slamming a google exec on YAHOO?

You know, since they're major competitors in everything from search to mail to web products etc.

This article really hit on something I've been wondering about Google: will it grow beyond Adwords? Search is an expanding business as it becomes more important in our lives and it's nicely monetized through Adwords, but none of Google's other ventures have seemed so great. In fact, many of their purchases just seem like they're solving an excess money problem.

Blogger? Feedburner? Picasa? Dodgeball? Jaiku? Even the much talked about YouTube has yet to show that it will ever justify its purchase price.

Google is wonderful, but it leaves me wondering whether everything they do will have to be underwritten by Adwords on search. Can they build sustainable revenue streams off other products?

Can they build sustainable revenue streams off other products?

Do they have to? I think they will feel the pinch and need to create other, sustainable, revenue streams when they begin to observe a loss in search and advertising marketshare.

I for one, beleived that Google would be smarter than that. But as the article points out, many of their other ventures and business units have not been successful.

Maybe complacency in some areas is a result of being so successful in others.

Google is still basically a one-product company: Adwords. (AdSense is very successful, but far less profitable).

Are Adsense and Adwords not just two sides of the same coin? One could not exist without the other.

Not necessarily -- I think if Google only advertised on their search engine they'd still be a multi-billion dollar company. I don't think anything has higher CPM than Google's search.

Adsense, however, does make the platform more enticing to advertisers.

Good point, thank you.

The only way we'll know is after Dr. Schmidt's tenure as CEO of General Motors.

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