Ballmer Says Google's Growth Is 'Insane' 420
eldavojohn writes "Steve Ballmer spoke to the Seattle PI this week, commenting that Google's pace of employee growth is 'insane,' and the company has few successful businesses outside of Internet search and advertising. He referred to Google's non-search efforts as 'cute.' Google's current number of employees is nearly doubling each year. 'I don't really know that anybody's proven that a random collection of people doing their own thing actually creates value.' Mr. Ballmer went on complain that, in general, competition for good programmers has become an issue. Even 'hedge funds' are looking for skilled coders, making the HR fight between the two companies that much more challenging."
Are you kidding me? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if this is more telling about a potential waning of MicroSoft than anything else. Or is it that Balmer is still trying to step out of a shadow... Gates has had a number of exceptional sound bytes over the years.... Positive ones. Balmer, not so much.
Microsoft jokes aside, (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I worked for Microsoft
Google's approach to growth right now resembles something like a gold rush, assuming that they know where the gold really is. I dont think they do exactly, but are hedging their bets on a number of ideas. The search engine makes money, but Google knows that they will need to do more, and I hope the phone rumors are true, but even so, just gathering a lot of great programmers together under one unbrella does not guarantee innovation.
I think Microsoft proved that good programmers dont necessarily make great programs. Every one of Google's businesses are cases of doing someone else's idea better. Cant wait to see what is coming, but for the moment, I cant see the fault in Ballmer's logic.
Balmer hates Google, film at 11 (Score:5, Interesting)
Have some cheese with that whine (Score:4, Interesting)
Second, if Mr. Balmer is correct, and Google doesn't have a sound or sustainable business, then it really doesn't matter; in a few years Google will implode, and Microsoft can sweep up all the Google alumni it wants.
Re:Slasdotters Say Ballmer Is 'Insane' (Score:5, Interesting)
Something that is scary, though, is that Google has a very unique position in the marketplace. They know trends before they are public trends. With their stats program that is popular with startups, they can see new sites and new ideas before they get big. That is tremendous power, in both terms of capital (buying out early), and could be used for good of "evil" very easily. Imagine if they started selling that data to investment groups. "Based on search queries it looks like MSFT might face a major wave of backlash, you should short their stock." They are in position to even influence the global market through Google News and search results ranking.
Time will tell. (Score:2, Interesting)
The question of the 20% time is very interesting. One of the innovations Enron touted was how its employees were free to work on whatever projects they wanted. Then it turned out Enron really was only good at trading energy, and not good enough at that. On the other hand, Google is delivering. Things like the phone will determine how deep they get. I think skeptical optimism is the stance to take.
On the hiring note, of course Google can't keep up its hiring practices forever. They'd run out of warm human bodies eventually. More broadly, I heard Chad Fowler last month note that as baby boomers retire, there won't be enough developers in the US to take the software jobs the boomers leave behind. Even tapping talent overseas and outsourcing like mad, there's likely to be tremendous demand. I liked the comment that someone in the gathering made to Fowler's observation: then let's hire fewer developers.
Re:Microsoft jokes aside, (Score:4, Interesting)
Businesses don't need to be innovative. They just need to keep money coming in. It doesn't really matter if you try to do one thing well or if you exploit your market position to get away with doing something barely good enough. In either situation, you get the money and that's all the business cares about. Doing something better than your competetor is good enough to bring the money in.
Energetic transformation (Score:1, Interesting)
This is true of all biological systems, and it has been observed in higher organizational systems as well, including human psychology as well as human society. Businesses are no exception.
So Google is in a bit of a chaotic phase. It has resources streaming in and out at a wild pace, and it is growing rapidly. It is full of developmental efforts spiraling out in multiple directions simultaneously. All of this fits the pattern of high-level reorganization amid chaos. Is it risky? Of course. Might they crumble? Of course. However, this is not the only possible consequence. They could also settle into a strong business with innovative offerings and a very sustainable business model. We will just have to wait and see.
Google looks more bloated (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Slasdotters Say Ballmer Is 'Insane' (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem for Microsoft is two-fold. Everything Microsoft does ties in to their core business. And that core business is under constant threat.
Everything Microsoft does points back to their OS. And in turn, their OS is the platform on which they build everything they do. The concept of lock-in is not only about immediate profit, but it also ensures that they have a clear path ahead of them. Its easier to see and plan for the future if you control the present. Anything that does not feed the need for a Microsoft OS stack is a threat to this strategy.
Why would Microsoft worry about losing control? Ask IBM what its like. Consider a time where IBM seized the microcomputer market - a time where "IBM PC" was a product reference and not a place-holder for a box produced by one of several thousand possible vendors with an unknown combination of commodity components. IBM is still a power-house in the Industry. But they no longer control it. It's hard to not only make money in a commodity market, but it's also hard to control one. And when you don't have that control, it is difficult to determine what directions such a market is going to take. What happened to hardware may very well come to pass for the OS as well.
Um, no... (Score:3, Interesting)
Very few people did. And hardly any of the gold-diggers did. Do you know who really made out? The guys selling shovels/picks and food to the guys digging for gold. They made out and became rich.
It would be nice if the submitter RTFA (Score:3, Interesting)
As far as Ballmer, I don't know if he is the man to run MS anywhere, but into the ground. Ok, maybe that is a bit of a reach, but he does seems to act and speak more on emotion than on logical reasoning. This all strikes me as him speaking up on Google because they are one of the first companies to actually give them a run for their money out in the market. Not being the only top dog, he is lashing out now (and before many times).
IMHO, Ballmer should in some ways welcome this challenge. If MS is up to it, and there is no reason they shouldn't be, then they can use this as a way to truly innovate and improve their products, in ways that are really helpful for the consumer.
RonB
Re:Slasdotters Say Ballmer Is 'Insane' (Score:2, Interesting)
But the apps (Calendar, and word processing) won me over and actually work well, the homepage customization is actually useful in terms of organizing what you like and making it easy to find new things to stuff in and evaluate. Gmail despite this, is in the same neighborhood, and filters spam rather well, so it'll pay to actually figure out how to organize items their way.
Contrast this ease of use with outlook 2000->2007 filter writing dialog boxes and their insane rigid modality and you have a case study for what Google does right where Microsoft does wrong. 2007 is much improved from a general interface ease of use and prettiness standpoint, but they kept enough of the bad to put me off.
Re:Time will tell. (Score:4, Interesting)
The reality is that anybody worth hiring is going to be curious about things, will have their own interests, and will have their own research projects on the side. The only decision an employer must make is whether such projects will be on the employee's own time and expense, or is it something the employer can support (i.e. related, even if only tangentially, to the business). It may, after all, turn out to be the Next Big Thing and make the employer a buttload of money.
To paraphrase a line from JAG, anybody who wants to mess around with things that badly should be messing around for us.
...laura who messes with Linux and GPS on company time, but who pays for her own telescopes
Re:Slasdotters Say Ballmer Is 'Insane' (Score:5, Interesting)
What we're hopefully seeing here with Google is a company that can face up to and outperform Microsoft and continue to do so while Microsoft burns through money trying to put them out of business. Then end of Microsoft's ability to do whatever it wants and put down whoever it wants would be a great boon to the world of computing.
The slow uptake of XP and the potential even slower uptake of Vista only feed into the process. Truly we are living in interesting times.
Rich
Sounds like a end of 19th century (Score:3, Interesting)
"'I don't really know that anybody's proven that a random collection of people doing their own thing actually creates value.'"
well, Edison did that to some degree, and his people produced a boat load of stuff.
Re:Slasdotters Say Ballmer Is 'Insane' (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, It HAS Been Proven (Score:3, Interesting)
A bunch of people doing their own thing? This is very much like a free market. At Google, it sounds like they're harnessing the power of the free market, and giving it just enough direction to satisfy management goals.
A bunch of people working through multiple levels of management to achieve management goals? This is very much like a centrally planned economy with a beurocracy. It's proven to be less efficient than the other system. Yes, you still need some management at a software company. The political analogy, like all analogies, breaks down at some point. MS is, however, much more of a centrally planned beurocracy than Google.
Reading about the way MS is run reminds me of the airlines before deregulation. The United States had many features of a centrally planned, socialist economy (and still does), but we never admit that because if we did, the CIA would have to overthrow the government (heheh... digress). At any rate, if I were Balmer, I'd consider airline deregulation as a way to transform and re-invigorate MS. Start by firing half your PMs and flattening the hierarchy a bit. At the very least, there should be less degrees of separation between you and your most distant employee than there are between that same employee and the President of the USA. The average is 6, right? I've heard that at MS, you have something like 11 degrees of separation! And it's not even a planet, it's just one company. Classic sign of a company hog-tied by management, procedure, beurocracy, inflexibility, etc. It's no wonder Google and a bunch of loosely affiliated coders (Linux community) are both out-coding MS.
Absolutely, he's the perfect nutbar (Score:4, Interesting)
Google is using M$ HR tactics (Score:3, Interesting)
1) M$ had the best.
2) Everyone else didn't.
Personally I suspect that all of this development at Google means that M$ can't just pick one idea and counter it. There are hundreds and they don't know which ones are real threats.
Is this part of Google's strategy - decoy projects? Confuse the competition until they deploy their killer app?
Or maybe it's the idea that if you have hundereds (thousands?) of Google employee's with post-grad degrees spending ~400 hours a year (1000 employees -> 400,000 hours -> 200 man years), one will eventually deliver a M$ crushing killer app?
Me thinks Balmer just wants someone to tell him what to compete against. Paranoid yet Steve?
Re:Slasdotters Say Ballmer Is 'Insane' (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't quite agree with this statement. Google didn't start with "hey, we want to sell ads, how can we do this on the internet?" That's just boring... Google was started by two incredibly intelligent individuals who have an eye for the future and what services and apps work well on the web. Any company needs money to fund research, pay salaries that will attract the brightest minds, etc. They started selling ads because it fits in nicely with the products they were developing, and they are non-intrusive to most users.
Now that google is a public company, there is a need to pay the stockholders who invest in them. That's why they sell ads. They have grown, and they are making people very wealthy, but I still believe that innovation is the key motivation behind the big wigs at google.
Re:Robotic, cookie cutter hiring (Score:3, Interesting)