Longtime Google Engineer Quits; Says Company Can No Longer Innovate, Is Mired in Politics, and Has Become Absolutely Competitor-Focused (medium.com) 392
Steve Yegge, a longtime Google engineer who gained popularity after his rant on Google+ went viral, wrote another rant on Wednesday, in which he announced he has left Google. His rationale behind leaving Google, in his own words: The main reason I left Google is that they can no longer innovate. They've pretty much lost that ability. I believe there are several contributing factors, of which I'll list four here. First, they're conservative: They are so focused on protecting what they've got, that they fear risk-taking and real innovation. Gatekeeping and risk aversion at Google are the norm rather the exception. Second, they are mired in politics, which is sort of inevitable with a large enough organization; the only real alternative is a dictatorship, which has its own downsides. Third, Google is arrogant. It has taken me years to understand that a company full of humble individuals can still be an arrogant company. Google has the arrogance of the "we", not the "I". Fourth, last, and probably worst of all, Google has become 100% competitor-focused rather than customer focused. They've made a weak attempt to pivot from this, with their new internal slogan "Focus on the user and all else will follow." But unfortunately it's just lip service.
You can look at Google's entire portfolio of launches over the past decade, and trace nearly all of them to copying a competitor: Google+ (Facebook), Google Cloud (AWS), Google Home (Amazon Echo), Allo (WhatsApp), Android Instant Apps (Facebook, WeChat), Google Assistant (Apple/Siri), and on and on and on. They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. They simply don't have innovation in their DNA any more. And it's because their eyes are fixed on their competitors, not their customers.
You can look at Google's entire portfolio of launches over the past decade, and trace nearly all of them to copying a competitor: Google+ (Facebook), Google Cloud (AWS), Google Home (Amazon Echo), Allo (WhatsApp), Android Instant Apps (Facebook, WeChat), Google Assistant (Apple/Siri), and on and on and on. They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. They simply don't have innovation in their DNA any more. And it's because their eyes are fixed on their competitors, not their customers.
They are customer focused (Score:5, Insightful)
but the user is not the customer - the advertiser is. All of those MeToo things he complains about are more ad real estate - that's what google is, an ad company, period.
This!!! On the MONEY!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
We are Google's product. Soylent green for the ad agencies.
Re:They are customer focused (Score:5, Interesting)
This. It seems that the guy who left doesn't seem to understand this, or if he does, he doesn't explain how Google is no longer being innovative for people who buy or display ads. I'm a user, not a customer. And yes, as others have said, by being a user, I'm the actual product; that is, my eyeballs and clicks on ads make other folks money. Which is why I have no compunction about using ad-blocking software.
Re: (Score:2)
he doesn't explain how Google is no longer being innovative for people who buy or display ads
To be fair, that's all NDA stuff. Still, I expect there hasn't been much innovation on the "creepy stalking of your personal information" front either. Once they know everything about you, what's left to innovate?
Re: (Score:3)
Well, they don't know what my prostate feels like. (Can't wait for them to innovate that.)
Well, they know your age, and likely know what doctors you've recently visited (if they sent appointment reminders to your gmail box), so they might have a first approximation.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm a user, not a customer. And yes, as others have said, by being a user, I'm the actual product;
That's very black and white thinking. Ultimately there are two business directions here, and whether you consider yourself a customer or a product there is no practical difference to you for Google. They need to keep *you* happy with new products and services or they will cease to be able to sell your to advertisers.
People who keep using the "you are the product" meme as an excuse for Google ignoring its customers fundamentally fail to realise that the product can't be sold if it isn't also a customer.
Re:They are customer focused (Score:5, Interesting)
This. It seems that the guy who left doesn't seem to understand this
Other than the relatively small part of the company that is focused on selling and delivering ads, basically nobody in Google thinks of users as the product. Everyone thinks of end users as the customer, regardless of the fact that 90% of dollars actually flow from advertisers.
(I work for Google.)
Re: (Score:3)
Everyone thinks of end users as the customer, regardless of the fact that 90% of dollars actually flow from advertisers.
Clearly not the people who work on G+, who have been soundly ignoring the user base since forever. "Whitespace sucks!" Here, have some more. "Disabling things in the right click menu doesn't work and is only annoying!" Disabled Save Image, so you have to save the whole page and pick the image out. "We want to see boobies!" Post boobies, get banned, maybe lose your gmail too. Inept puritans on bad crack.
Re: (Score:2)
But don't they need compelling products to attract consumers?
The grand bargain of Google with consumers only works when people want to use your products. Search, Gmail and Android aren't going away any time soon, but don't even those products kind of have to improve over time to keep people using them?
Re: (Score:3)
Once it goes corporate politics, make no mistake, everything gets thrown out and everything gets thrown in. All about corporate politics. Which group and individuals are in and which group and individuals are on the way out the door and which group and individuals will never be let in the door. All about stealing ideas and promoting them as your own, great looking spreadsheets and power point presentations, with the key words presented to the right groups with power to get you promotions. That includes stea
All large companies go through this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Most large companies get into this and never leave. I think the writing was on the wall with the alphabet thing. That was a sign that wall st. wanted more control (i.e. rape and pillage) of the investment.
The good news is that a replacement for google doesn't seem to be on the horizon, so there's that. But the bad news for engineers and developers who want to do their jobs is that they're going to be working on increasingly incremental and micromanaged products that will often not make sense or be informed
Re:All large companies go through this (Score:5, Interesting)
In the 1990s Microsoft was considered unassailable. Open source began growing and growing. Slowly. Gaining a toehold, then a foothold then a beachhead into everything that was NOT a desktop PC. Anything that wasn't a desktop PC ran Linux and open source by the 2000's. Today here we are with Microsoft trying to embrace, mimic, and copy open source. Offering SQL Server and a counterpart for SQL Server Management Studio on Linux seems to me to be an admission that their once monopoly wasn't safe any longer. Servers everywhere run Linux and it's simply too big to ignore. Offering Windows Subsystem For Linux is also an attempt to draw developers back to Microsoft. Who would have ever thought that Microsoft would need to draw in developers to their platform. I'm not saying Microsoft is dying. But it's monopoly pricing days are surely in the past.
A few decades ago I heard an interesting saying.
Once a company exceeds a certain size it is run by MBAs.
Then once it exceeds another certain size it is run by lawyers.
Why is this? Because at some point, the company is so big that the results of failure would be unthinkable. So the company becomes risk averse. And there is the pressure of always increasing shareholder value, even if you cripple yourself in the long run. Everything becomes short term focused. Then the lawyers take this to the next level because the organization is now so big it is a target of all kinds of meritless and maybe also legitimate lawsuits.
Even ten years ago people were saying that eventually we would see this all happen to Google.
Re: (Score:3)
PS/2 was the short name for the IBM Personal System/2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
PS/2 mice and keyboards are also a thing but not what the GP was posting.
Re: (Score:2)
That's not true (Score:4, Funny)
I heard Google HR invented thirteen new genders, five new categories of sexual assault, and TWENTY THREE ways of shaming white men in a fiel invented by white men.
That's innovation!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know about "men", but one man was gay, sure.
But transistors were co-invented by a racist.
So what?
Re: (Score:2)
You should ask parent-of-parent, he is the one that insisted that "white men created the field".
Re:That's not true (Score:4, Funny)
Narrow it down only to a theoretical machine invented by a gay man and ignore everyone else along the way. Diversity wins again!
Re: (Score:2)
Bzzzzzt. Gay white men did not invent the field. They invented the "feeled".
Re: (Score:2)
User name checks out.
Seems to be a trend (Score:2)
Apple lost St. Jobs some years ago and has been doing minor "courageous" upgrades for the past few years.
Microsoft had an initial flair for innovation back when Bill Gates was at the helm, then they too started down the path of "Me Too". Just look at Windows Phone.
Facebook is starting down that road with their intent to compete with Twitch.tv
Now Google is joining the club.
I'm curious what the next big idea that gets these guys off the couch will be.
Re:Seems to be a trend (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Seems to be a trend (Score:5, Informative)
"During the first run, they came up with innovative things like the digital camera"
They sure as fuck did not, that goes to Kodak in the mid-1970s.
Re:Seems to be a trend (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever. Dude, I owned a Palm back in the 90's. I also, shortly before the iPhone came out, bought my first "smartphone" -- a Symbian device -- which made me conclude that there just wasn't really any use for having a smartphone.
The iPhone completely changed the game for smartphones. They made it actually useful. Just like they did for mp3 players back in the day.
Re:Seems to be a trend (Score:4, Insightful)
I still don't see a use for a smartphone - I'd take a feature phone with Audible and Kindle if one existed. And Apple's MP3 players were shiny garbage - they were always the worst, from a geek perspective, and not well liked on Slashdot back in the day.
Jobs's genius was in turning personal electronics into jewelry. Having an iPod, and later an iPhone, was a status symbol. He invented that! Didn't matter whether the actual products were any good. Pure genius.
Re: (Score:2)
The iPhone completely changed the game for smartphones. They made it actually useful.
What, exactly, in the first iPhone made it "actually useful"?
Re: (Score:3)
You're looking back at the first iPhone with rose-tinted glasses. With a Symbian phone of the era, you could take pictures that did not suck, which you couldn't do with the iPhone because it h
Re: (Score:2)
Apple went without Jobs twice. During the first run, they came up with innovative things like the digital camera and the PDA. Only thing was they were too far ahead of their time. When Jobs returned, he dumped the innovative projects and started selling Macs in fancy colors. He had timing and flare, not necessarily innovation. He made people want the products. Technically, the iPhone wasn't any more innovative than what Palm had already created. But it combined the right things at the right time to make people want to buy it.
I think it was more than that, he had a talent for design, not just aesthetics, but taking a device that was fairly cumbersome (mp3 player, smartphone, desktop computer) and making into something not just functional, but actually enjoyable to use.
I haven't used Apple products for years, but when I interact with them now I'm surprised by how hard to use they are the moment I step outside the narrow set of use-cases they've set out. I suspect that's a symptom of the loss of Jobs' influence.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm amazed that after going from 0 to billions of iPhones that some people still think the product was not revolutionary. It's like Trump denying aliens exist as the they go door to door eating your children.
Re: (Score:2)
Revolutionary technologically? That doesn't follow simply because a lot were sold. That would imply that only revolutionary products sell a lot.
Re:Seems to be a trend (Score:4, Interesting)
Without Jobs, computers would be ugly and unpleasant things to use.
Now, I didn't think OS/2 was that bad...
For explanation, without Jobs working on MacOS, Gates and Microsoft wouldn't have been scared enough (or able to) steal the MacOS code to create Windows 1.0. It also means that OS/2 might actually have been finished earlier instead of being sabotaged by Microsoft. Presuming that Microsoft sabotage OS/2 because they didn't need it once they had Windows. Now, Microsoft might have just stolen the OS/2 code, but that might have more difficult to do. In any case, it's conceivable that we might have had two decades of IBM's OS/2 operating system instead of Windows.
I'm not sure how Smartphones would have turned out without Apple, though. Maybe they'd all be Blackberry clones, or maybe the iPhone touch screen design is so obvious that someone else would have created an equivalent at around the same time.
Re: (Score:3)
without Jobs working on MacOS, Gates and Microsoft wouldn't have been scared enough (or able to) steal the MacOS code to create Windows 1.0.
You're crazy and this is crazy talk. Microsoft started working on Windows 1.0 in 1981, before the Mac ever shipped. Both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had seen demos of GUI computers at Xerox PARC and both determined that their respective companies should make GUI computing products. Microsoft fearing Apple was not in any way a factor. In 1981 the standard Apple compute
Re: (Score:2)
LOL. Is that why everyone is using it and competitors (like copycat google) are cloning it.
I wouldn't call 12% of the market [statista.com] and falling as "everyone is using it". Perhaps in the tiny bubble of the Bay area you see more than typical, but when you're the choice of less than one in eight, that's hardly "everyone".
Re: (Score:2)
So the post you're responding to says "Technically, the iPhone wasn't any more innovative than what Palm had already created. But it combined the right things at the right time to make people want to buy it."
Then you say "LOL. Is that why everyone is using it and competitors (like copycat google) are cloning it."
You do realize that even if true the fact that "everyone is using it and competitors (like copycat google) are cloning it" does not disprove OP's argument? It's a mistake to assume that only innovat
Re: (Score:2)
Timing is a big part of innovation. To be innovative you've got to have something that can be sold to users today but nobody is making yet. What you end up when you try too hard to be innovative is making a technically impressive thing that turns out to be a dead end because not enough people want to buy it.
For example I at one point was carrying around a Hitachi SH-G1000 [amazon.com], an early converged device what was a technical tour-de-force in its day, but utterly uncompelling to the public at large.
I was a mobil
Are we making money? (Score:4, Insightful)
2) Innovate.
Re:Are we making money? (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM was making money by the truckload while Microsoft was bumbling around with DOS. If you wait with the innovation step until it shows up in revenue, you are too late.
Re:Are we making money? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe you should ask Nokia and research In Motion how they are.
Re: (Score:2)
RIM: $1.7billion in revenue
Why do you ask?
Re: (Score:2)
Don't be too quick to think it couldn't happen to Google at some point.
Hubris is one of the first signs.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I remember one bit quite well:
Someone explained, big companies never get it. They never see the next paradigm shift coming, the next disruption that will affect their comfortable business. Sometimes they realize that they can't see the paradigm shift coming. So they hire people who will see it to tell them. Then when th
Re: (Score:2)
4) Profit
Neck Deep in Google Tech Mire, Time to Escape (Score:4, Insightful)
I've grown to trust Google less and less. After the Damore letter and now this, i'm seriously considering switching to an alternative email service.
Thankfully, adblocking keeps most of their shenanigans at bay, but just the other day I discovered Google Maps Timeline. WTF is this?!
Why, it's a complete list of every location i've been to logged by Google for the past 4 years. Google even had the audacity to post one of their little surveys next to it.
"Does Google make it easy to control your private data?"
Hell to the NO!
Re: (Score:2)
I can vouch for Fastmail and Zoho. Both great, switched to the latter as I'm penny pinching.
Re: (Score:2)
ve grown to trust Google less and less. After the Damore letter and now this, i'm seriously considering switching to an alternative email service.
As I've said here before: outlook.com doesn't suck. I switched to it a few years back out of frustration with the changes to the gmail UI, and haven't regretted it. I'm not sure it's better in some objective way, beyond not sending your data to Google, but if the goal is to live a Google-free life, outlook.com is fine.
OTOH, I've come to like duckduckgo better than google search, mostly for the handy "bangs" (try "!wa erf(x)" or "!a go the fuck to sleep").
Re: (Score:2)
Places like https://myactivity.google.com/ [google.com] are worth a look.
It saved my day today, so despite all the creepy implications of a list of all websites I accessed, I like it.
Re: (Score:3)
He really doesn't get it (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, they have some people researching some really cool technology, but so does Microsoft and we saw how little of that managed to gain any traction whenever they bothered to let the public catch a whiff of something. It's the same with Google and for the same reasons that it doesn't go anywhere. They just don't truly care about it as a product and load it down with bloat or other cruft to tie it in with their existing programs or services instead of letting it be something useful on its own.
Accuracy (Score:3)
They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. They simply don't have innovation in their DNA any more. And it's because their eyes are fixed on their competitors, not their customers.
Their eyes on fixed on their shareholders, not their competitors or customers. As I pointed out in another topic related to broken business models, this is EXACTLY what happens to every company. They start out nice, innovate, do good, then IPO, then this, focused on profit, on protecting their market share, etc etc. Another good idea turned to an evil entity.
Took a lot of balls for this guy to step out and speak up about. My hat is off to you sir. Awesome.
Confused... wasn't this always the case? (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't Google start you know... a search engine? Like Netscape and Yahoo and AltaVista? Then they started a webmail service... just like Hotmail and Netscape and Yahoo before them. Oh, then they also started a online map service... just like MapQuest before them. When were they ever anything other than a "me too" company? Have they in their entire history made a single product that wasn't a dig at some other established market? I'm seriously expecting them to target Amazon or Netflix's business plan next.
Re: (Score:3)
They were first, as far as I know, to offer wide-scale terrestrial virtual presence* in their mapping software.
*aka Google Street Viw
MapQuest was the first (Score:3)
No, MapQuest was in existence *long* before Google and had their first web product in 1996 (two years before Google was founded).
What Google did was make quality maps available for free, easy to use and then, listening to customers (see my post below), added Street View.
Re:MapQuest was the first (Score:5, Informative)
If you had actually read what I wrote, you'd know that it was Street View I was actually talking about.
I even put an asterisk beside "terrestrial virtual presence" in case you didn't know what i as talking about.
Being able to actually see what your destination looks like from ground level before you go to an unfamiliar location is damn convenient, and has remained a significant reason why Google Maps is so preferred to many alternatives.
On a slightly related note, I don't recall seeing a map like Google Earth by MapQuest... all I can remember them having was the standard Miller Cylindrical projection, and certainly nothing resembling an actual 3 dimensional globe.
Re: (Score:2)
You're right - Street View was the first to display street views.
But only if you discount Street Atlas, which showed 3D representations of buildings along routes in cities going back to the early/mid 1980s (I saw a demonstration of their *"terrestrial virtual presence" technology when I was in university). And you should also discount Veredi that sued Google in 2012 for patent infringement regarding their technology showing street images at specific locations.
Street View is a great product, but it wasn't f
Re: (Score:2)
On a slightly related note, I don't recall seeing a map like Google Earth by MapQuest... all I can remember them having was the standard Miller Cylindrical projection, and certainly nothing resembling an actual 3 dimensional globe.
Google didn't create Google earth. It was developed by keyhole and funded with U.S. tax payer dollars.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm seriously expecting them to target Amazon or Netflix's business plan next.
Uh, you mean like the ability to buy and stream movies, TV shows, and music through Google Play? Or do you feel that doesn't count until they either offer the ability to buy physical goods directly to counter Amazon or expand their Google Play Music subscription service to include TV and movies to counter Netflix and Hulu?
Re:Confused... wasn't this always the case? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Yahoo, did not start as a search engine but as a serchabl ehumann maintained 'catalog' of the web.
I don't recal the timing, but at some point google outclassed any other search engine by figuring what is relevant.
Now is a super bbad searcch engine as it filters results depending on your search history and other things.
You basicaly can only use it efficient in anonymous mode and by not being logged in and probably clearing all stored data.
I was very longe an Altavvista fan and of MetaCrawler.com (or was it o
Re: (Score:2)
I'm seriously expecting them to target Amazon or Netflix's business plan next.
Arguable, they've already kind of done both of those. I'm pretty sure they built in some kind of shopping interface into Google search a long time ago, and YouTube is a streaming service and you can buy access to TV Shows and Movies on it. They're nowhere near as good as Amazon or Netflix, but they're probably as close to those markets as they can get without investing heavily into warehouses and a streaming library.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Hm. I'm sure they probably weren't the first, but I'd say the closest they've come to innovation is turning personal data into a currency, thereby making various services like Gmail "free" in terms of classical payment methods. The problem now of course is more and more people are wising up to it.
Re: (Score:2)
In mail and maps, at least, they innovated by changing how they worked. Docs too. Google (again, probably to protect their core ad/search business) made some pretty early bets on moving what had been desktop-centric (or realatively static web) applications into more or less fully-featured web apps. Might not seem that innovative today - but they got there early enough to dominate both web mail and web maps. Didn't dominate Docs, because Microsoft's advantage was too deeply entrenched - but they did forc
Question should be can Google listen to customers? (Score:4, Insightful)
I originally started this post by asking when did Google ever innovate as I would argue that from a product/solution perspective Google has never produced anything before anybody else or entered an under-serviced market with a truly game changing product.
It seems to me that Google's success was in its ability to listen to customers, hear their complaints and produce (or improve existing) products to address their concerns. Google's innovation comes in the form of better/simple UIs and the underlying algorithms.
I think the ability to understand what the customer is saying/complaining about existing solutions is what has driven the innovation and growth at Google. The question is if this is still true.
I suspect, the answer is a qualified no - like any huge company, Google reach has increased and the people with the passion/perspective/skills that made the company a success in the first place can't be a part of/don't have the expertise of the various business groups of the company, which is the cause of the innovation dilution that Mr. Yegge has experienced.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think the ability to understand what the customer is saying/complaining about existing solutions is what has driven the innovation and growth at Google. The question is if this is still true.
The question is, who are the customers? For the most part, you, me, and John Q Public are the product, not the customers. In the modern era, Google is there to connect advertisers to relevant eyeballs, and to do so in a way that doesn't piss off said eyeballs.
New Guild Order (Score:3)
Microsoft spent decades queering the word "innovation" until the conversation degenerated to this level.
Look up every time a Microsoft executive spouted the word "innovation" as one of their first-paragraph talking points. (Try not to break Google while do
Search is getting worse, too (Score:4, Insightful)
When you stop making "page quality" your primary focus, the search results are going to stop reflecting page quality. Even yahoo search is as good as Google now.
Isn't that why Alphabet was started? (Score:2)
Perhaps Google needs a Skunkworks (Score:2)
They are good in tech, but not in lek. (Score:5, Interesting)
Google docs is also improving and chrome browser is improving where google wants improvement. They want auto play videos, no matter what I do they sneak it in.
They are not good in lek. ( A lek [thespruce.com] is a clearing in the forest/woodland where male pheasants gather and strut. Females choose to mate with fancy foot work strutting males, in theory. In practice, it is crowd behavior. [gatech.edu] Females pick the male picked by most females. It is an unstable system. Using robots scientists could make the females gravitate towards one, and on command, the robots to another one and the females follow suite. My sincere sympathies to the frustrated males in that experiment, would perfectly understand them going postal ;-).
On platforms like Facebook, Twitter, the winner is whoever most of your friends and family pick, regardless of quality, price or security. It is a lek. It is very difficult to break into lek dominated apps. One can only wait for it to collapse (like myspace or geocities before that) and pick the pieces, and bide your time. Build capacity, build the technology to be ready to capitalize when the lek leader fumbles.
In personal computers Microsoft was an early lek winner. All the companies picked Microsoft because all other companies are picking microsoft. When it stumbled, Firefox pounced, when it was fending off firefox, Google pounced and reduced the cash flow from Office apps.
So all these me too platforms from google are simply waiting for a fumble by Facebook or Twitter or Apple.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Continually improving my ass. Google Maps was much better a couple years ago before they switched to the clunky and confusing new google maps, I'm sure pushed along by UX bros and MBA types.
Makes sense for Google (Score:2)
Googles goal is to amass as much data as possible for sale and their side projects (AI etc.) and in order to achieve this goal they have to replace every application every user may ever want with their own data-farming product. Making new stuff may be fun but copying existing stuff is enough to farm 99% of the user base.
Seems like a disgrunted employee, nothing to see (Score:2)
I think this engineer has a serious lack of understanding how a large company works! First off of course they're conservative! What they're doing is obvious working because they're making money and succeeding in what they're doing. They're not going to do a risky change just as an experiment which could risk sinking the entire company. Second politics are obvious! There's no large organization that is politics free, the only way you're going to not have politics is either everyone is the same which is
Patent Hoarding has fucked Innovation. (Score:5, Insightful)
Props for the rant feedback (a good rant is always entertaining and often enlightening), but Steve has also failed to see that The Patent Wars have not merely stifled innovation. It has destroyed it altogether.
I can try and innovate something very specific, and even if I'm somehow lucky to get my product off the ground, some overly vague patent barely related will be politically pushed into a courtroom by an army of litigators with the end goal of ass-raping the "competition".
No shit innovation is dying. The MBAs of a world fueled by litigation get what they deserve.
New startup idea (Score:2)
Lets all create startups full of marketing slogans, innovative jargon and doublespeak. Then sit back and watch Google's and Microsoft's of the world rush to compete. It'll be great.
I've numerous innovative projects on the table. Here is a small sampling:
Internet connected toasters with a hadoop "smart counter" able to count slices of bread toasted separately from bagels or waffles. Smart AI technology automatically shares information with all of your Facebook "friends".
--
Light bulbs with cameras and int
Working hard at willful SV ignorance (Score:3)
From one of the links in TFS:
But in the U.S., people love to hate on Uber because “their drivers are slave labor.” The driver has to pay for a car, maintain the car, insure it, pay for fuel, clean it, etc., so on the whole Uber is viewed as somewhat predatory. I honestly don’t know how much of this is truth vs. perception. But given that millions of drivers are opting in, and given that people are generally pretty clever about optimizing their income, the economics would seem to be at worst a moral gray area in the States and Europe, and more likely a pretty good deal for most drivers.
It's a pretty big and highly questionable assumption that people are good at optimizing their income. If he did just a little math on being a ride-sharing driver, he'd see that it amounts to something like a reverse mortgage against your car. You're not making money, you're just extracting bits of it over time against something you own.
agreed with small exception (Score:2)
they are mired in politics, which is sort of inevitable with a large enough organization;
is wrong. It's inevitable in a large organization with weak leadership. Strong leadership creates predicatability of accepted behavior. Weak leadership necessitates community bonds which can only result from politics.
That's the old Me Too :( (Score:3)
They even Me Too'd Me Too from Microsoft!
Re:The fate of all monopolies (Score:5, Insightful)
Na, the previous CEO's were innovators.
The current CEO is an MBA.
Put an MBA in charge of a company and they simply chase the next big thing instead of innovating and creating the next big thing.
They do this because they are not innovators and creators, they are simply followers and maintainers.
It seems to be the plight of large companies to not want to take the risk of hiring an innovator. So they look for someone who "knows how to run a business." They get what the look for, stagnation.
Re:The fate of all monopolies (Score:5, Insightful)
Tim Cook knows how to run a business, but since he's taken over the company their products aren't revolutionary, but evolutionary. They're often released before they're ready and riddled with bugs / issues. Apple is so focused on making a buck with iPhone they leave profit on the table. (The Mac mini hasn't been updated in over two years. The Mac Pro just got dusted by the iMac Pro, which is absurd.)
Steve Jobs was for all intents and purposes a smelly bastard to work for, but he drove people to innovate like mad! He really did strive to change the world and didn't much give a fuck about the competitors.
Law of big numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
Tim Cook knows how to run a business, but since he's taken over the company their products aren't revolutionary, but evolutionary.
So were most of the products that came out under Steve Jobs. Apple only makes 1-2 "revolutionary" products per decade. Their last big one was the iPhone/iPad (really the same product) which hit the market 10 years ago (7 for the iPad). Prior to that was the iPod which came out 18 years ago. Prior to that was the Powerbook (1991) and the Macintosh (1984). The real question is can Apple do another product on that scale again? They are so big now that it's hard to develop products that really move the needle revenue wise. For them to grow just 10% they have to basically build a business the size of eBay from scratch. There just aren't that many things you can do to generate that many billions in revenue. It's (comparatively) easy to look innovative and grow fast when you are small. Not so easy to make the elephant dance.
Apple is so focused on making a buck with iPhone they leave profit on the table.
Well the iPhone does account for well over 50% of their revenue. It is fair to point out that the Mac has been somewhat neglected of late though.
Steve Jobs was for all intents and purposes a smelly bastard to work for, but he drove people to innovate like mad! He really did strive to change the world and didn't much give a fuck about the competitors.
If you think Jobs didn't care about competitors you are mistaken. He cared a lot. See the "I'm a mac and I'm a PC" ads. The difference was that he was really good at product design and keeping the company focused so it didn't seem like he cared. But he had flesh eating lawyers on speed dial (ask Samsung) to deal with competitors.
Re:The fate of all monopolies (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple in a perfect example of this! (I'm a fan, so moderate your opinion accordingly...)
Tim Cook knows how to run a business, but since he's taken over the company their products aren't revolutionary, but evolutionary. They're often released before they're ready and riddled with bugs / issues. Apple is so focused on making a buck with iPhone they leave profit on the table. (The Mac mini hasn't been updated in over two years. The Mac Pro just got dusted by the iMac Pro, which is absurd.)
Steve Jobs was for all intents and purposes a smelly bastard to work for, but he drove people to innovate like mad! He really did strive to change the world and didn't much give a fuck about the competitors.
Where/when the REAL innovation took place was when Woz, Jobs, and Gates were working out of garages.
Small businesses and startups are where real innovation occurred most of the time in the past. The problem is a Jobs, Gates, or Woz could not do the same today. A large reason why much "innovation" happens in megacorps today is that there are so many regulatory/legal/financial/taxation barriers in place that a random guy in a garage stands almost no chance even with a radically innovative idea with large potential. The lower rungs of the "ladder" have been sawed off by existing businesses using government taxation, legislation, and regulation to keep raising the barriers to entry for potential future competition.
Without serious competition, stagnation becomes inevitable.
Strat
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Almost the entire landscape in every area has changed radically since the 1990's
Technological landscape? Yes, absolutely so. Taxation not so much. In legal front two things happened — software patents and rise of closed source model, in which MS and Apple thrived.
I don't think that regulation plays a large role, because IoT is having it's own Cambrian explosion and regulations don't seem to matter. Microsoft gained foothold because it gave cheap OS (and later cheap GUI) on cheap PCs. World now is littered with free operating systems and graphical shells. Reason why Apple and MS c
Change is NOT an option. Not even a bug. (Score:3)
Good comment and deserved the insightful mod. Reminded me of an aspect that hasn't appeared in any part of the discussion I've read so far:
Change is going to happen. The questions are not not "if" or "how to control it", but "when" and "how much" and "does it hurt". I actually think evolutionary change is better than a revolution. The defining characteristic of a revolution is that someone gets badly hurt, and the huge problem of a revolution is that there is no assurance that the outcome will be better.
Yes
Re: The fate of all monopolies (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
This is why they created Alphabet; to be the holding company of their cash cow (Google) and all of their other innovating companies. If you think that Google is not innovative, then transfer to one of the other bets that are more innovative.
The search engine market is mature, as are most of the other technologies developed under Google. There's not much we can do about that.
But this isn't news, someone quitting because they've realised that the company they work for is just a company isn't newsworthy.
Re: The fate of all monopolies (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm... No relation to diamonds? I still think you should have gotten a nice mod point or three, but moot to me since I never get a mod point.
Per my longer comment on types of people, I think management is only concerned with two types of people: Humanists are good for lower management and Materialists for upper management. The innovative founders are idealists and normally disposed of as soon as the corporation has become sufficiently cancerous.
Re: (Score:3)
Paradoxically, the reason they're shipping more Macs than ever is that the desktop is becoming less relevant - and as that happens, and Windows becomes less necessary for more users, alternatives like Macs and Chromebooks become viable. So, yeah, they can sell more Macs - because they still have an aura of 'the computer for artists, etc.'. But how long is that going to last?
And in any case, Mac minis (the OP's example of Apple no longer innovating) never had that aura - precisely because they were cheap a
Because it is wise. (Score:3, Insightful)
The innovators are always in the spotlight, but for every successful innovator there are 1000 failures.
When you are small and have nothing, it absolutely makes sense to risk being an innovator. You don't have much to lose, and if it takes you can win big.
Once you are big and have a lot, that stops making sense. There is a lot to lose, and you have safe money sitting right on the table.
What I am getting at is....there is no moral failing in ceasing to be an innovator once you have built your empire. It is
Re: (Score:2)
What I am getting at is....there is no moral failing in ceasing to be an innovator once you have built your empire. It is natural and ok to shift to the conservative. And it is also ok for people who dislike that corporate environment to leave (and be replaced by people who prefer the new, less risk-takey corporate environment).
There is no cause for lamentation here.
Unless you're a stockholder. Alphabet is priced at about 3x what it should be for a company that's done innovating, and it doesn't even pay a dividend. At least Microsoft had the common decency to start paying a dividend when it was obvious that the days of innovation-driven growth were behind it.
Stock price ultimately comes from profit (Score:2)
Unless you're a stockholder. Alphabet is priced at about 3x what it should be for a company that's done innovating, and it doesn't even pay a dividend.
I'm not a shareholder but I think Alphabet is priced reasonably fairly for the amount of profits the company generates and seems likely to continue to generate. The company is something of a one trick pony (advertising) but it's a really good trick. Innovation doesn't drive stock prices except insofar as people believe it will result in future profits. (intentionally ignoring bubble cases like Tesla as they are temporary exceptions) Alphabet's profits are about as good as they get and their stock price
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They're still innovating - just that, like most innovations, they rarely see the light of day. You only ever heard of Google's original innovations because they were wildly successful. I think Google was pretty early in, say, self-driving cars. And they're doing a lot of innovative AI stuff. But none of that is (yet) poised to take the world by storm like their web search did.
Yes, they have to chase lots of 'next big things', because owing to the size of the target on their back, a lot of those things
Scapegoating (Score:2)
Put an MBA in charge of a company and they simply chase the next big thing instead of innovating and creating the next big thing.
Scapegoat much? And who would you put in change instead? Running a large company requires a very particular skill set which not a lot of people actually have. Going to school to learn some of those skills isn't something to be looked down upon any more than going to engineering school. Furthermore when you have revenues in the hundreds of billions it isn't easy to come up with ideas that move the needle. For Apple or Google to grow by 10% they need to build a company the size of eBay from scratch. You
Re: (Score:2)
Na, the previous CEO's were innovators.
The current CEO is an MBA.
Put an MBA in charge of a company and they simply chase the next big thing instead of innovating and creating the next big thing.
They do this because they are not innovators and creators, they are simply followers and maintainers.
It seems to be the plight of large companies to not want to take the risk of hiring an innovator. So they look for someone who "knows how to run a business." They get what the look for, stagnation.
I think MBA executives can be very intelligent and innovative, but mostly in their area of expertise, which is why corporations have so many reorgs and tax dodging schemes. It's unreasonable to expect MBAs to be innovators in tech. They can appoint techies who are the actual tech innovators, or they can pick up on innovations that others are doing and copy those ideas, but the only way they might approach being tech innovators is in the same way that Gene Roddenberry was an innovator, i.e., imagining what
Re: (Score:3)
I think you're mixing your metaphors. Maybe he's burning a bridge, bearing a cross, or grinding an axe.... but I'm pretty sure he's not burning a cross.
As it happens, he was planning on bearing a cross, but while grinding his axe, sparks set fire to the cross, which he then dropped onto the bridge...