The Fall and Rise of Larry Page 99
schnell (163007) writes "Slate has a long, detailed story about how Larry Page founded Google, how he struggled with its growth, and ultimately how he came back to reinvigorate it. The story recounts fascinating details about Page's relationship to Sergey Brin, the combative culture Page fostered in the company's early years, his resistance to having engineers managed by non-engineers, the company's struggle through its rapid growth, and how Page once even wanted to hire Steve Jobs as Google's CEO."
What I'd like to read... (Score:5, Interesting)
How the darkness spread through the heart of Google, infesting its ethos of "Don't be Evil" with its corruption and engendering a perverse desire to force Google Plus on all.
Google has sucked since Gmail (Score:2, Interesting)
pagerank, adsense, gmail...that's google
everything else is a major mistake...and the world will discover it one day
here's how I know this:
1. 'just search' Larry Page wrote the original algorythm for search indexing...that's it...that's why we *all* used google over webcrawler or yahoo when it came out...it was *just search*
2. Brin's relationship with current Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer. She was his girlfriend and spent millions of Google's money to justify her existence, then she hired her own PR team to get her a new bigger job...she didn't do *shit*...her title was "main page designer"...are you laughing? do you remember google.com's main page for about a decade? yeah just a logo, search field and two buttons
3. Glass, Google+, Google Wave, and maps redesign...it's clear now that Google has no idea how to make new products people want to use...and when they **do** Forrest Gump their way into a cool new thing (Wave) they cancel the project
4. this quotation from TFA:
why??? b/c of...idk...it's the most egregious copyright violation in computing....even bigger than a service like Napster
Page is a good engineer...Brin is an airhead....they stopped sticking to the knitting long, long ago
"growing up" != accepting exploitative biz model (Score:5, Interesting)
I want to end the notion that young tech founders need to "grow up" or find a "grey hair" to actually run their business.
It's bullshit and ruining our industry.
I'll be the *first* to admit that the techies who make the systems that define new awesome products/services are not trained or experienced in running a high finance business...that's well known
The dispute comes in the **fix** for the above problem.
Hiring some dipshit as a figurehead for investors...that addresses absolutely **none** of the **original problems**
When tech companies need to hire businesspeople, they need to hire businesspeople that are as innovative and progressive as the engineers, not someone to "hold them back"
What happens instead is that a new, user-centered company becomes spoiled by typical US MBA-type heirarchal capital hogging, data selling, evil corporation.
There is a 3rd way! Just say "no"!
AltaVista. How did Google really succeed? (Score:3, Interesting)
Contrary to what all journalists think, the first major internet search indexer was not Google but AltaVista, circa 1995. It was written by just three people at DEC. The goal was not to sell advertising, nor even to make money. The goal was to show off their new Alpha servers that were so powerful that they could index the entire web (which was tiny at the time).
In the early days the web was small, there were no spamers, and things like Meta tags could be depended on. PageRank only became useful when the web grew. It is sensible, but is exactly what academics have used to rank papers for centuries -- citation citations citations... It is also an old idea from the hypertext community.
So the question is, how did Google succeed as a start up several years later? I would have written off their business plan as hopless. Internet search is an obvious thing to do, it has already been done, and if anyone will compete with AltaVista it will be the big boys throwing money at it. Yahoo, Microsoft etc.
But I would obviously have been wrong. Partly the reason is that Google back then was not run by MBAs. They did not try to extract as much advertising out of the search engine as possible. Nor full of flashing banner ads. Main search results relatively untainted by advertising. But it is still weird.
Weirder is the success of Android. There were giants like Nokia with decades of experience and bucket loads of cash. How could Apple and then a nothing company like Android blow them away?!!!