Google Hires Vint Cerf

hsuwh writes "Google has hired Internet pioneer Vint Cerf away from MCI as its "Chief Internet Evangelist". "He is one of the most important people alive today," said [Google CEO Eric] Schmidt, who has been friends with Cerf for more than 20 years. "Vint has put his heart and soul into making the Internet happen. I know he is going to jump right in here and start shoveling out new ideas for Google.""

Re:Do they have a strategy behind this?

[flatt]

PR, plain and simple. It will work.

Cerf at NASA on Google-like project?

[Red Flayer]

FTA: "[Cerf] also will continue as a visiting scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he has been focusing on a very Google-like project _ trying to figure out a way to connect the Internet to outer space."

How is this project Google-like, other than seeming to be pretty cool?

Cerf has been working on a network utility issue with NASA. I wasn't aware that Google is in the network utility game at all.

Re:Do they have a strategy behind this?

[pjkundert]

Non-linear, pure "invention" doesn't occur on a fixed time table. You cannot plan for it. You can't assemble a team, give them a deadline and some money, and say "OK, go invent the next great thing for me.".

All you can do is try to assemable the greatest group(s) of already provably inventive poeple you can find, put them in a positive, stimulating environment, and incent them to come up with something great.

That is what Google is doing. That is exactly NOT what Microsoft, HP, et. al. are doing.

And no, they don't expect you to understand this.

Re:Do they have a strategy behind this?

[qwijibo]

Smart people with a track record of good ideas will generally produce more of them. Google just wants a chance to get the ideas before anyone else. There are such positions in many large companies because good ideas with profit potential will pay many times over for all the unprofitable ideas.

Re:Do they have a strategy behind this?

[Alomex]

It sure looks like they have a surplus of money and a shortage of ideas what to do with it. So heck, let's hire Turing Award medal winners just for kicks.

Successful jocks collect supermodels, successful nerds collect supergeeks, I guess.

Something Big is Happening at Google

[guaigean]

This is a much different strategy than the Microsoft sieze and conquer. MS takes over companies to get technologies, and then through culture the effectiveness of the subsidiary becomes null. Google, however, invests instead in obtaining highly innovative, creative, and motivated individuals, and they're doing it en mass. I know there is a lot of speculation about them working on an operating system or something similarly large, but whatever it is, it is big. There are too many bright minds there for it not to be.

Like the great stuff Alan Kay did for Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's a sign of decay when a company starts collecting Big Celebrity Names.

sure

[diegocgteleline.es]

Sure they have. If smart people are hired by google, they can't be hired by anyone else, for one.

Re:Do they have a strategy behind this?

[Mannerism]

It's a marketing thing. Grey matter like Vint Cerf is always good for getting quotes in the press, getting keynotes, etc. At least they gave him an honest title: he's there to evangelize. If I had a few billion in market cap I'd buy Vint Cerf, too.

Re:Something Big is Happening at Google

[lessthan0]

Actually, that was Microsoft's strategy too when they were young. They really did obtain "highly innovative, creative, and motivated individuals" to create good software. Now, the acquire them to keep them from creating something that would threaten their monopoly.

Re:He did what?

[kinglink]

Yeah you know designing a form of networking that will last for 30 years, that's nothing major.

The fact that we can do so much with TCP/IP is evidence that the creator actually had more sense then most people in this industry, trivilizing his stuff because you can name stuff built off of that is a joke.

You make jokes about the size of ARPANET but what you don't realize is that those 9 computers were linked to each other, before that you'd have to have a direct line to each computer to call it a link, instead you could do one link to a central system to route the packages with out any major software really running. The idea of the ARPAnet is that it was a defensive infrastructure that could be attacked, and had nodes destroyed with out losing the entire network.

And as for size, yeah it's 9 computers, what ever you want to believe.

Just because you don't beliieve he's worth anything doesn't make him worth less. The fact is the guy actually invented something everyone uses now, that's incredible, a single standarized system of Control, that everyone can agree to, on all platforms, and hasn't been completely revolutionized for the most part for 30 years. Let's see your next development last more then 10 with out needing to be completely scrapped and reworked.

Re:Google TLD?

[Morgalyn]

I am wondering how long it will take for some sort of conflict of purpose to come up between working for Google and chairing ICANN.. Like a lawsuit that says it gives Google an unfair competitive advantage, since they have an 'in' with an independent overseeing agency...

Re:Do they have a strategy behind this?

[clambake]

Or are they merely collecting people and figuring out what to do with them later? From the outside looking in, it sure seems like the latter.

I had the chance to listen in on a google interview last week for some kind of QA position. It was very strange. The questions that were asked had nothing really to do with trying to get to the heart of whether or not the guy was a good programmer, or that he understood the basic QA concepts and how to test properly, etc... Instead it was a kind of game where the candidate was supposed to recall as many esoteric bits of pseudo-knowledge as possible. Like, name all of the character encoding standards in the world that you know, or which RFCs describe HTTP, and explain how the protocol works...

Questions that are essentially meaningless as far as QA is concerned... in fact, meaningless as far as any position they could offer is concerned, unless they are planning to hire an Internet Historian. I think in that entire conversation, which went on for about an hour, only a single question that cold be considered something pertaining to "QA" or testing was asked, and that was oddly half-hearted (I believe it was something like, "In one minute, please name all the test cases you can think of for a web form that takes credit card info").

I got the impression from the questions posed in that call that Google really don't have a clue how to hire. They seem to hire based on same technique as Japanese entrance exams.. i.e. pure knowledge bits are more important than conceptual understanding or problem solving...

Now I am beginning to think that Google isn't actually as smart as people think... They are just remendously lucky...

Re:Wikipedia link

[Spankophile]

You get a +5 for linking a wikipedia article now huh?

Re:Do they have a strategy behind this?

[Tumbleweed]

They could be copying the Microsoft strategy of buying out, err, hiring all the best and brightest, sticking them in labs to play with whatever they want, and then never doing anything with what they come up with. It prevents those people from going elsewhere and actually making good products.

no

[diegocgteleline.es]

Surplus of money? sure

Shortage of ideas? Not so sure. I don't see why Cerf , being the father of the medium in which google is based, wouldn't be a uself hire.

Re:Do they have a strategy behind this?

[WilliamSChips]

Bell Labs? Xerox Parc(a commercial failure, but that was because Xerox was afraid of the computer destroying its business)?

Re:Vint

[topical_surfactant]

Vint has been working with NASA / JPL and with these projects:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=161582&thresho ld=1&commentsort=0&tid=95&mode=thread&pid=13510971 #13512140 [slashdot.org]

Which support the development of international standards for protocols that don't break over long distances with lossy data link layers. The point being that with a proper delay-tolerant protocol, reliability goes up and long-distance links become more efficient. No one intends to surf the internet from Mars, but it would be nice to reliably send commands to and receive data from a rover via a secure link on a computer with just a standard internet connection. On top of this, a good deep-space protocol would get the information from source to destination whether or not the rover has a line-of-sight link or must go through an orbiting probe, and it would not require the scientist to worry about the messy details of setting up the link.

All of this is missing from current space protocols. Interestingly enough, if you read through the delay-tolerant-networking research group's website ( http://www.dtnrg.org/ [dtnrg.org] ), you'll see that these protocol standards have terrestrial applications with civilian, miltary and scientific projects.

Re:You have to wonder what they are up to...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not hard to imagine if you put the pieces together. Google knows that today's Internet/WWW is much like the late Wild West. They also know that the technology for total transformation already exists and all they need to do is assemble it in the right order using their new $$$ and brains.

My guess is that in eight or so years Grandma will be comfortably using something like the rumored GoogleOS that she carries around on a small PDA with a flexible roll-out screen. Think "the network is the computer" and stretch yourself to think "the user is the operating system." Think voice recognition and complete wireless context awareness. Adsense will be so refined that it will actually be considered helpful because the ads will be so relevant. Anyone who uses Amazon a lot can imagine just how far that personalization of information can go. You don't type the search keywords, you ARE the keywords.

One of their bigger challenges will be security. The better the security, the better the system, but this will take away much of the Wild West element that we so enjoy. But it will be required to ensure integrity of transactions and information relevance (bye-bye spammers and trolls). Big Brother concerns will loom but the system is so fun and useful that people will accept the risks.

Don't think they're out to trample Microsoft Windows. Windows will suffer in the home market especially, but this is not just another operating system; you have to think in terms of when the automobile first arrived. Back then few people imagined how it would transform the world.

To me the exciting part is watching this digital evolution happen before our eyes. It has such a sense of inevitability almost as if some otherworldly intelligence guides it. Illuminati anyone? ;)

Re:Do they have a strategy behind this?

[pjkundert]

Very, very few truly inventive poeple find money (eg. personal enrichment, leisure, prestige, etc.) an incentive. Name two.

Isaac Newton

Francis Bacon

Claude Shannon. Father of modern information theory. Published (Not Patented) "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in 1948. Died a Professor Emeritus.

Nicola Tesla -- Modern multi-phase power systems. Edison was a puny shadow ofthe same era. Slaved for 10 years as a New York street cleaner to bring his 3-phase power system to reality, and then "gave away" the patents, worth Billions (perhaps even Trillions) in todays dollars, to Westinghouse.

Evariste Galois -- Galois fields (eg. Reed-Solomon encoding). Died in a duel protecting the honour of a woman.

Need I go on?