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Google Businesses

Google Executives See Cracks in Their Company's Success (nytimes.com) 84

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
The seeds of a company's downfall, it is often said in the business world, are sown when everything is going great. It is hard to argue that things aren't going great for Google. Revenue and profits are charting new highs every three months. Google's parent company, Alphabet, is worth $1.6 trillion. Google has rooted itself deeper and deeper into the lives of everyday Americans. But a restive class of Google executives worry that the company is showing cracks. The New York Times: They say Google's work force is increasingly outspoken. Personnel problems are spilling into the public. Decisive leadership and big ideas have given way to risk aversion and incrementalism. And some of those executives are leaving and letting everyone know exactly why. "I keep getting asked why did I leave now? I think the better question is why did I stay for so long?" Noam Bardin, who joined Google in 2013 when the company acquired mapping service Waze, wrote in a blog post two weeks after leaving the company in February. "The innovation challenges," he wrote, "will only get worse as the risk tolerance will go down."

Many of Google's problems, current and recently departed executives said, stem from the leadership style of Sundar Pichai, the company's affable, low-key chief executive. Fifteen current and former Google executives, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering Google and Mr. Pichai, told The New York Times that Google was suffering from many of the pitfalls of a large, maturing company -- a paralyzing bureaucracy, a bias toward inaction and a fixation on public perception. The executives, some of whom regularly interacted with Mr. Pichai, said Google did not move quickly on key business and personnel moves because he chewed over decisions and delayed action. They said that Google continued to be rocked by workplace culture fights, and that Mr. Pichai's attempts to lower the temperature had the opposite effect -- allowing problems to fester while avoiding tough and sometimes unpopular positions. "Google executives proposed the idea of acquiring Shopify as a way to challenge Amazon in online commerce a few years ago. Mr. Pichai rejected the idea because he thought Shopify was too expensive, two people familiar with the discussions said."
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Google Executives See Cracks in Their Company's Success More

Google Executives See Cracks in Their Company's Success

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  • rocked by workplace culture fights (Score:5, Insightful)

    by magzteel ( 5013587 ) on Monday June 21, 2021 @01:17PM (#61507048)

    Well, "rocked by workplace culture fights" seems like a readily solvable problem.

    Just specify in the employee handbook that it creates a hostile workplace environment and terminate violators.

    • Big, disruptive, innovative ideas are what turn startups into megacorps. But they are NOT what keep megacorps alive. For every startup that strikes it rich on their brilliant innovation, there are 100 others who were just as brilliant but that busted. We, of course, only ever see or hear about the winners.

      Innovation IS to risky for an established business. It doesn't make sense for them to keep trying to land the next big thing, as the result of such efforts are more-often-than-not tremendous amounts of

  • He's right you know (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Malifescent ( 7411208 ) on Monday June 21, 2021 @01:33PM (#61507094)
    There's no reason for Google to buy Shopify just to clash horns with Amazon. Google should invest in its Search business and everything that supports it, including Android and Google Assistant. Dueling with Amazon is merely a distraction.

    If the management team believes it worthwhile to keep the entrepreneurial spirit it should give its employees more leeway to pursue their own interests, and spin off those businesses if they can make a profit.

    • One of the most profitable types of search is when someone is looking to buy something. Increasingly people are just going straight to searching Amazon when they want to buy something.

  • Look at why customers want to leave (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Miles_O'Toole ( 5152533 ) on Monday June 21, 2021 @01:50PM (#61507166)

    Search engines like Startpage (the goog but more private) and DuckDuckGo are moving up, and average consumers seem to be reaching the end of their tolerance for the relentless tracking and marketing.

    Google was given considerable slack when they actually tried to go by "Don't Be Evil". Now that they've officially abandoned that part of their mission statement, they're just the biggest privacy rapist on the block.

    I, for one, won't be sad if they wind up taking a good whipping...maybe not today or tomorrow, but before too long.

  • Incrementalism is Needed and Isn't Being Done (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Monday June 21, 2021 @02:01PM (#61507212)

    If this is what their executives think its no wonder they have issues.

    Incrementalism is how you create, maintain and improve a product - Google for many years now has had the habit of launching half-finished products, not improving upon them, and often allowing even major successes to get worse over time followed by launching a competing product within the company. To me this speaks to a revolving door of employees, and managers failing upwards. Perhaps this should come as no surprise from a company run by a McKinsey [wikipedia.org]-ist

    Consider chat at Google: GTalk, Hangouts, Allo/Duo, RCS, Meet, and now Chat. That doesn't strike me as incrementalism or risk aversion, that seems like people wanting to launch products to benefit their own career not the company or the users.

  • I worked there as a contractor until very recently, and it's a real cesspool with a very toxic environment. Contractors, who probably make up the bulk of the workforce, are treated like second class citizens at pretty much every turn. They're not allowed to do almost anything the relatively few Google employees can and Google also appears to be using contractors to try to get around labor laws like those covering discrimination and retaliation.

    They are also extremely resistant to change. For... reasons... t

    • I think their PR has always been of major importance to their success.
      For a long time google was considered nice and cool. Their invasion of privacy [theonion.com]on which like Facebook much of their businessmodel is based wasn't considered threatening. Google now has become a lot less nice and therefor their intrusive datagathering is regarded as threatening. That PR problem by itself is very bad for the businessmodel.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gmack ( 197796 )

      The problem comes when employees are so busy with whatever politics that they forget to keep the company running. As an example: play.google.com/settings/ has basic functionality not working. No one can tell me when it broke or how long it will take to fix. How many bugs like that before customers stop buying things?

  • Just asking but how's that IBM stock doing? Better yet, GE?

    Successful companies can grow too quickly and then be bit by that growth. Eventually, they'll all become withered ghosts.

  • Startups are willing to take more risk because investors typically assume it's a risky proposition. Let's say the product causes consumer hardship and there's a big lawsuit. The startup could simply file for bankruptcy, fade, and that would be the relatively quiet end of it.

    But a big company risks loosing everything over one bad product. If the lawsuit itself doesn't take them down, their bad reputation would harm all their product lines. The scope of failure is bigger.

  • Maybe the should google it? (Score:3)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Monday June 21, 2021 @05:48PM (#61508230) Journal

    "Go woke, get broke"?

    • You should have read an earlier comment by somebody who actually worked there. Here, I'll help you out with a quote from it: "As much as some people will want to try and make it about being 'woke' or whatever moral outrage has the right falling dramatically onto their fainting couches this week, but the reality is much simpler. As the company grew the ratio between smart, competent and idealist employees to greedy, selfish, sociopaths became increasingly lopsided towards the latter."

      I hope that straighten

      • I find it amusing that you (and that former googlian) don't question for a moment:

        smart = competent = idealist

        and

        greedy = selfish = sociopath

        I've met a lot of smart idealists who would probably qualify as sociopaths as their "ideal" tends to be unrealistic extremist positions.

  • Many of Google's problems, current and recently departed executives said, stem from the leadership style of Sundar Pichai, the company's affable, low-key chief executive.

    Affable? Sundar Pichai, the mendacious bastard who lied through his teeth about the contents of James Damore's memo just to show how woke he was? (Pichai falsely claimed that Damore said women were not fit for tech jobs. Read the memo yourself; he never says anything like that.)

    Fifteen current and former Google executives [...] told The New York Times that Google was suffering from many of the pitfalls of a large, maturing company -- a paralyzing bureaucracy, a bias toward inaction and a fixation on public perception.

    "A fixation on public perception" -- yeah, showing everyone how woke you are is top priority, right?

  • Taking a look at Daisuke Wakabayashi (the authorâ(TM)s) Muckrack page shows that all he does is write about Google.

    Are tech reporters nowadays assigned to only work on stories related to specific companies as beats?

    These sorts of articles seem to be an odd mishmash of information, some inflammatory, some business-related, and some political. Sometimes the slant is negative, but always sort of meandering and rarely based on anything but self-referential editorials (minus the occasional number or two).

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