Page Can't Turn Back Clock At Google 205
rsmiller510 writes "As much as incoming CEO Larry Page would like Google to be as quick on its feet as a small company, when you're as big as Google, decision-making gets bogged down in the management structure, and it's hard to make the company something it's not."
Re:Leave Page alone... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope. Google's still playing catchup with Apple and it's barely entered the race with Microsoft.
Of course, it's beaten Altavista and Yahoo. In other news, Jesus has more followers than Hubbard.
Good luck ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Having worked for a company which went from fairly small and agile, to being publicly traded and fully "corporate" ... it's a one way trip.
Once the accountants and management layers are in place, it's too late. Then, it's mostly becoming more bureaucratic and management heavy and filling out TPS reports.
Sure, if you try hard you can give some room to you engineering staff to actually do their jobs ... however, I have seen entire development teams grind to a halt as someone from finance gets everybody bogged down in paperwork and reports to explain what it is that we do.
Of course, nobody in finance was capable of recognizing that the labor costs of the people they'd derailed far exceeded the middle-level idiot who insisted that everything be done in the first place.
While I admit that these people actually do useful things, sometimes they can stop a lot of people from building the products just so their spreadsheets are up to date.
The search part of Google isn't that big (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is smaller than it looks. The core search engine team was about 90-100 people as of a few years ago.
97% of the revenue still comes from search ads. Google has a huge array of money-draining services, some of which are labor-intensive. They're not generating much revenue. Mostly, they're defensive measures to ward off Microsoft. GMail, Google Docs, the free hosting service, etc. exist to threaten Microsoft. It's not like offering spreadsheets on line is a viable business. Even the whole Android phone thing is mostly there to prevent Microsoft from monopolizing that space. (It's also a threat to Apple. Google pays Apple $100 million a year to stay on the iPhone. If it weren't for Android, Apple might provide their own closed iPhone search engine.)
Google spends an incredible amount of money on non-revenue defensive measures.
Just a self promoting blogger (Score:5, Insightful)
Looks like we have some joker promoting hits on his own blog with /.
Re:Leave Page alone... (Score:1, Insightful)
Microsoft: Founded 1975
Apple: Founded 1976
Google: Founded 1998
Both companies have a two decade lead. That has to count for something.
Re:they should breakup up before the Feds make the (Score:4, Insightful)
I actually think that is a good idea. The problem is that Google doesn't have 10 profitable enterprises, it has one profit center and a number of initiatives that might become profitable some day, but which have almost no chance of standing on their own without the search engine's money and market share behind it at the moment.
So, the choice is either, take a risk with them and break off, or see if you can shepherd them to profitability and then spin them off. The former is probably going to be the path to the small, dynamic business he wants to be with again, but its an open question if he wants to accept the bad parts of that model (chaos, long hours, uncertainty, significant possibility of abject failure) along with the good.
Re:Leave Page alone... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good luck ... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's funny how that works. The bean counters manage to assign an actual cost to every bit of trivia and insist on tracking it and justifying every last penny. Except for accounting. They assume that accounting costs nothing and so it's all pure benefit. You'll never see a cost/benefit analysis of requiring quarter hourly time accounting for salaried workers.
Re:The search part of Google isn't that big (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody wants to "own" music anymore. Its a chore. People just want to listen to music.
I take exception to that. I want to own music. A good part of my collection is made up of rare LPs CDs and Tapes that I have converted to MP3s. They are not offered by any service out there. I am worried that plenty of what they do have, will go away because it to much bother for them to keep it online.
The only way I know of keeping all the music I like is owning it. Even if I was willing to rent it, the major labels are not willing to be land lords.