Larry Page's first blunder

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9215666/Larry_Page_s_first_blunder

by fiaz • 15 years ago

162 120 15 years ago

mariusmg• 15 years ago

Can't wait for this social fad to be over.

cageface• 15 years ago

I hear you, but don't hold your breath. Best case scenario is it becomes boring and people stop obsessing about it, I think.

techdmn• 15 years ago

Me either, but I don't think it's a fad. I think it's the way a lot of people relate to the internet and computers in general. Queue stories about grandma who's on facebook but doesn't know how to use the address bar in her browser, etc, etc. I wouldn't expect that to go away. Social will get a lot more attention than other computing topics for a long time to come, because the user base is so much larger.

dhimes• 15 years ago

I'll go you one further: I think this will become more and more of everybody's life- like the automobile did. I think solving the problems with the social web (privacy, etc.) will also solve a lot of the problems faced, for instance, telecommuters.

One of the problems telecommuters face is dealing with a sense of isolation from the team. If (when) we solve that problem (and similar ones), and social media experimentation is going to be required to do so, probably, then we have an opportunity for a real virtual office, virtual college, etc.

I definitely see this happening.

robryan• 15 years ago

I wouldn't call it a fad, I think it's the natural progression of communication which will essentially be with us forever in some way. I think we are still in the period of experimentation, it's still new so there is a crazy amount of heat and investment in the area trying to work out what works and what doesn't where we end up with crazy and quirky ideas all tied to the idea of social.

I think eventually it will all setting down and there will be new pushes based on yet new tech.

revorad2• 15 years ago

Don't hold your breath. People are not going to turn into loners any time soon.

What's wrong with technology helping people become more social? I love it and apparently, millions of others do too.

regomodo• 15 years ago

"What's wrong with technology helping people become more social?"

Banality?

qjz• 15 years ago

That's like asking, "What's wrong with marriage?" I'd rather choose my own mate than be forced into an arranged marriage. The current state of social networking is more like the latter. The individual needs to be in the driver's seat, controlling the nature of the social interactions. Hopefully, Google can offer a new approach that provides the kind of fine-tuned controls that reluctant adopters and privacy advocates want, without spoiling anyone's party.

daniel1980fl4• 15 years ago

pretty weak explanations: "millions of others do". millions are in prison rotting for murder -- would you consider that a "good thing to do" ?

social in web is still inmature. most facebooker are on the war of whom got more friends on their list -- something in real society does not happen. most myspacers upload photos next to "cool" stuff, like friends porche claimed their own, owesome vacations that never took place, etc -- something in real society does not happen alot OR you are pushed outside the circle. what you see right now is very inmature social.

joezydeco2• 15 years ago

The "social fad" is the internet finally maturing to the point where the unwashed masses can finally post things on a web page, share photos, and communicate to a subset of users without having to learn HTTP, IRC, Jabber, FTP, etc.

It's just evolution.

gaius• 15 years ago

We had that a decade ago with blogs. Social is about linking it all up which - and this is what Google doesn't get - is not a technical problem. No-one yet has a seamless, intuitive way to have a work social network, a personal social network, a social social network (for want of a better term... People who aren't really friends but that you do stuff with) and manage them all via one service. You can have friends on Facebook and work colleages on LinkedIn and random people on Twitter, for example. But that's not the same thing. Google thinks everyone who knows me even slightly wants to know everything about me, the more the better. That quite rightly annoys people.

notahacker• 15 years ago

The unwashed masses had bulletin boards, instant messengers, profile websites and Geocities ten years ago, although obviously fewer people spent less time on the internet then.

The only real difference in is the increasing tendency for services to be dependent (for traffic, functionality and/or data) on an industry monopolist. It's easy to see why Google consider developing a Bing of social strategically important; less easy to see what they gain from making their litmus test for the success of that strategy public.

mrspeaker• 15 years ago

A similar take on it was discussed here: "You Can’t Threaten People Into Being Social" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2425512

Keyframe3• 15 years ago

IMO, Google COULD tackle "social", but not with the same approach that worked with facebook. They ought to forget about facebook's approach and attack from another angle. I have some ideas how it could be done, but it's a bit of a conundrum to say the least.

iwwr• 15 years ago

I have some ideas how it could be done, but it's a bit of a conundrum to say the least.

Would you mind sharing some of that?

Keyframe3• 15 years ago

Sure, but I don't think my general idea would suit google (as of their current behaviour). Allow me to elaborate a bit.

Google has 'social' platform already - Gmail. However, what they have tried to do so far is to force 'social' elements into their current offerings, and they have tried to append external turn-key systems like orkut.

You can't force social behavior onto your users, as they have successfully demonstrated. As I see it, only two successful platforms so far, facebook and myspace (which died) had a different start. They started out from human element, which is people started banding together and dragging along their friends into it - onto a central place. Email is social too, but it isn't one central place, but more peer to peer.

What I think Google should do is to do something they have never done before. Humanize Google. Introduce customer support, active engagement with current user base, expand into traditional media, and not only with google ads, but with interactive shows based on google platform, editorialized part of google news, etc... only then will users start to feel google is something they can empathize with and concentrate around it vs only using their services and go away.

tl;dr; humanize google, bring human element to it. Actual humans into their services.

yanw2• 15 years ago

I wish people would keep some of their opinions to themselves, classifying something as a 'blunder' because you don't agree with it is just bad reporting.

You wanted a startup and there you have it, with startups there is a certain amount of risk involved which galvanises people to succeed.

ivoflipse• 15 years ago

Actually his suggestion at the end of grouping all the different features together on one cohesive page would be an improvement over being spread out over all the separate products.

But whether the decision is a blunder remains to be seen... We'll see in a couple of months if its for better or worse.

yanw2• 15 years ago

They might just do that, he doesn't know and that's my point, he's quick to judge.

jbooth2• 15 years ago

It's opinion, so it's not bad reporting.

But, yeah.. he's just a hater. Whatever Page does there'll be some joker with an op-ed calling it a huge blunder, so who cares.

brown9-22• 15 years ago

It's not even reporting, it's just commentary - speculation on the success or failure of something that hasn't come to pass yet.

kunjaan• 15 years ago

I wish Google continued to being an awesome Information Retrieval company that they always were. I loved Google's original mission, the automation and the algorithms.

arctangent• 15 years ago

I don't have a source for Google's original mission, but I think it is fair to say that their current mission is to collect as much information of all kinds as they can, make it findable by people, and make money by selling targeted advertising accordingly.

If Google make their products more social then their is a clear value-add for the consumer of the data, and also a value-add for advertisers. I don't think Page is making a mistake here at all.

waqf3• 15 years ago

Google's original mission was predicated on the existence of Web as it was in the late '90s. Doing just what they did then is not an option, and it's not merely because they've grown.

raju• 15 years ago

Interesting article. I agree - Google is now singing FaceBook's mantra and potentially losing sight of their own.

Today, Google knows who I email most often, who my contacts are, what's happening in my life (via my Calendar), what I like to read and bookmart (via Reader), what I like to talk about (via Google AdSense/Analytics on my blog and via Search), even places I tend to go often or plan to go (via GMaps). The list goes on.

That is a huge piece of the puzzle. They need to figure out a way to put all of that together rather than push (and potentially fail) new "social" incentives.

There are two parts to this that escape me -

1. Whatever happened of "Google Me"? How is it that no one ever mentions that anymore?

2. Google has (IMO) always been a company that places emphasis on being algorithmic than having humans do the work for them (if that even makes sense). It's part of their DNA. That's hard to change.

Finally, this is Google chasing the current fad, and forgetting to focus on what's the next thing.

[Edit - Formatting]

stevenj2• 15 years ago

To get me to change social networks, Google will have to convince my friends to switch; especially my close ones, as using Facebook to communicate with many of them has replaced email.

pdaviesa• 15 years ago

That's really the heart of the issue - no matter how good your social product is, people are only going to make the switch from facebook if a significant number of their "social network" switch as well. I wonder if the next big social site needs to incentivize entire groups to switch rather than just individuals, e.g. promotions that only go into effect after x number of your friends sign up.

spinchange3• 15 years ago

My comment there seems to have been immediately flagged as spam, so I'll say it here.

I think it must be much, much easier to write articles like this about managing Google than it is to actually manage Google.

We're talking about tying a portion of bonuses to performance in an area that is crucial to the success of this company! What a blunder, indeed.

vixen99• 15 years ago

Much easier to write the article, yes (of course) but why make the point? It's utterly irrelevant to whether the author has a valid criticism or not.

rbanffy2• 15 years ago

I think it's implied the article author has to deal with a much simpler analysis than whatever is needed to manage Google. It's therefore implied the article is based on faulty/incomplete information.

abbasmehdi2• 15 years ago

Agree vix.

spinchange3• 15 years ago

My point is that there is little empirical basis for these criticisms. In the absence of this, what basis do I have to trust this author's intuition? His experience running enterprises like Google? His experience managing some of the brightest engineers in the world? Or his experience chasing an ephemeral position on Techmeme?

dangero• 15 years ago

"I think it must be much, much easier to write articles like this about managing Google than it is to actually manage Google."

Based on comments like this getting so many votes, I'm starting to wonder how many Google fanboys use this site. This is true for any critic in any industry. If you have to be the de-facto source of information on something before you can comment on it, then nobody would ever be able to comment on anything. "It's much easier to eat food from a restaurant and pick it apart, then actually go in the kitchen and cook it yourself." True, the critic doesn't risk much.

Motivation is when you give someone an incentive to work hard. As mentioned in the article, if I work on search algorithms, how is a bonus contingent on social networking going to motivate me? I think it's a valid question, and if that's really what's happening at Google, then I would agree, it's a blunder.

spinchange3• 15 years ago

Where you see fanboyism in my comment, I see an echo-chamber narrative being advanced in posts like these that give little context to numerous unique business and management complexities that must be faced running a company like Google at time like this in its existence.

Last week writers like this were saying Google was dying because of stagnation and because 'social just isn't in its DNA'. This week they're saying Google is dying because it's trying not to stagnate and 'get social.'

notJim• 15 years ago

I think this comment would have been equally true, and better-received if you hadn't made the fanboyism jab.

waqf3• 15 years ago

No, we're talking about tying a portion of bonuses to performance in an area that Larry Page believes is crucial to the success of the company. That distinction is the basis of several of the criticisms made in the article.

AlexC043• 15 years ago

I completely disagree with the article. The 25% bonus is not a blunder at all. It's a big shake-up that's certain, but based on what I've been reading about Google recently, I think it's actually quite a visionary move.

If you've been reading Hacker News for the last few months you'l' probably have read two major complaints about the company.

    1) their search results are getting spammier
    2) if you're an employee on the inside, there's more politicking than engineering going on.

The +1 bonus addresses both.

In terms of spammy results, if millions of people are applying upvotes to good results every day, true human-eyeball search QA will be working at massive scale.

And YES the spammers botnets have probably already started +1'ing their spammy links, but hey, answering that is part of the bonus. (I can think of a few algorithms already that might actually further identify spam by finding 'unnaturally correlated voting blocks)

+1 directly improves Google's core business, which is finding good results in web search. Having 25% of your bonus tied to the success of Google's core business is appropriate.

The second major issue I've read about (nearing the point of deluge) is the problem with 'internal politicking'. It happens at all mega-corporations I'm sure, but how in the hell do you address it? Individual departments work against certain other departments, they willfully work a little slower or protest a little too much and some projects that didn't deserve to die do.

The complaints about Google's ability to innovate are evidence of this stuff. The internal middle managers' squabbles.

Well what better way to ensure that you cut through the corporate squabbles than by looking at all the projects you've got going on, picking the one that you think has the best chance of helping the bottom line and saying to everyone in the company "you can either help or get the fuck out of the way. 25% of your bonus is tied to this project"

If morale is going to be take a hit if this project fails, then the answer is don't fail.

bostonscott• 15 years ago

I agree that rallying their entire company around a key strategic initiative like this is not a blunder. It's an act of transparency that clearly communicates Google's direction both internally and externally.

There are many different perspectives at Google, and by focusing the entire organization on "social," he attempts to tap into the creativity of individuals throughout the entire organization. That type of engagement leads to unexpected benefits.

There are some good ideas in the article, like, "People want to isolate social from nonsocial aspects of their lives."

I suspect there is something to that, although there is also another factor the author may want to consider... the how much better are you than the current leader factor?

If a great new search engine launched tomorrow, that was a little better than Google, would it beat Google? No. Years ago at a Kelsey Group conference (2004ish) an executive at Google talked about the 50% rule. She said that for a search engine to beat Google, it had to be 50% better.

The point is that it is very difficult to persuade humans to change their behavior, and they will only do so when there is a huge benefit.

sunchild• 15 years ago

"In terms of spammy results, if millions of people are applying upvotes to good results every day, true human-eyeball search QA will be working at massive scale."

And if a disproportionate number of those humans who bother to vote are spammers?

AlexC043• 15 years ago

As I touched on - that can be taken care of in part by algorithms. Consider that each vote requires a google account & IP address. Assume also that google will be able to identify at least a handful of "Definite Humans" and monitor their behavior.

Definite humans do certain things, like browse the web in certain predictable patterns, their +1 votes might cluster around certain interests, and generally "human looking stuff". Without enough data to look at I can't tell you exactly what that means but I'm assuming that patterns would emerge once compared with computers.

Assume that spammers manage to automate a certain number of google accounts to vote +1 on their web properties. At the click of a button (in low orbital ion cannon style) thousands of robot-accounts log in to +1 against an individual link.

Now the spammers may find a way to stagger the automation of the logins, but unless they're particularly sophisticated how do they manage to create the rest of the simulation of a web-browsing individual?

Do they automate "fake humans" to run google searches from time to time? Click about on links? What about the analysis of the 'clustering' of accounts? A given group of 1000 accounts always voting on the same things together? What about the odd similarity that all the +1's seem to be routed through the same handful of IP addresses? What if +1'ing is closely related to other people +1'ing near your own geolocation?

I'm not saying it's going to be perfect, indeed they're buying themselves another "arms race" - it really would be interesting to investigate what proportion of Facebook's like button is being "astro-turfed"

There's definitely going to be mechanical turk jobs to search my link, click +1 and such, but that exists for facebook as well.

I firmly believe that as clever as spammers are, there're not going to be able to accurately simulate the behavior of real humans for long. There are too many factors that can trip them up.

Again, this is probably one of the things that 25% of the bonus is tied to addressing. Clever, interested engineers now have a serious incentive to spending their 20% time addressing your concern.

Right?

cookiecaper• 15 years ago

As long as they count votes in a reasonable manner, I don't expect it to hurt. If Google can get normal people to vote up good results, the intentional spammers will never make a big enough dent to matter anyway. And even if they can't, the user votes won't make up the entire placement process, so hopefully they'd be no worse off now if they get useless results. Perhaps they can just leave it out of the mix entirely until they get a realistic-looking profile of user votes.

jdp233• 15 years ago

Agreed. If Google's incredibly talented and distributed employee base can pull their networks in to whatever their new social initiatives are, it's a huge aset to them in the battle with Facebook and everybody else for "who owns social". Tying everybody's bonus to this encourages each individual employee and team to think creatively about how they can help. It's a strong signal that "this is our top priority and yes we really mean it".

Which doesn't mean it will work, of course; see ScottBurson's points above. But from a strategy perspective it's a classic way to align priorities around the critical corporate goal.

zokiboy2• 15 years ago

Imagine one central place where all Google products would be conneced. It would look like an improved Facebook main page: stream of information from gmail, reader, picasa, groups, docs, news, link recomends (+1) from friends, ORDER BY important; with search bar at top and gmail chat at the bottom. Fail or win?

stevenj2• 15 years ago

For the average user, that seems like an overly complicated thing.

zokiboy2• 15 years ago

Facebook is complicated for the average user. At least based on questions I get about it.

riffraff• 15 years ago

wasn't this the Buzz mission? It also has gmail chat and search :)

chmike• 15 years ago

My impression is that the fundamental factor in play is catching eye balls. Social networking like facebook is a success on this perspective. But facebook can't be the end of the story, I hope not.

Stop aping existing social networking services. Make something people want, something that provides a new dimension to human interaction.

Smart phones is a disruptive technology change which should provide opportunities for new usage and applications which would be disruptive too. This "market" opportunity emerged post facebook and because of Android, google has a significant advantage over competitors it could and should leverage.

The wise points at the moon and the fool looks at the finger. Social networking is the finger. Look where it points to and target this. Restore the initiative of creativity and invention. Reconsider google wave for instance.

maverhick• 15 years ago

In a sales organization you can tie people upto a similar performance incentive structure, because everyone (the majority) sell. The key being, the people you are incentivizing should have the ability to move the story forward. I find it odd about the entire co's bonus being attached to social, when the entire co is not allowed/designed to 'do social'.

What is the point of incentivizing gmail/maps/apps/search to do social? (some social widgets make not a coherent social strategy).

Its a textbook wrong move. May be implementation details differ - but that info is available in the article

hieronymusN• 15 years ago

Personally, few things rile me up like a manager giving me directives to 'evangelize' products to my family & friends on my personal social accounts. I am currently in this situation. I have no problem evangelizing on social accounts tied to the company (the company's official twitter, facebook, etc.) or writing posts on the company blog, but I do not use my personal social accounts for company business and don't plan on doing so in the future. Maybe I'm just old, but I need a separation between my business and personal life on the web.

I'm sure the techs who keep the servers running in the Google data centers love having 25% of their bonuses tied to social products they may truly dislike, don't use, etc.

frossie• 15 years ago

"few things rile me up like a manager giving me directives to 'evangelize' products to my family"

Few things make me worry more about the product too. If it was good, you wouldn't need to order people to evangelize it. They would be doing it because showing off something cool is fun, doubly so if you had a hand in it.

millerc• 15 years ago

How is the incentive a blunder? Google employees can voluntarily devote a large portion of their paid time to any project of their choosing. By announcing this incentive, Larry is actually focusing the efforts of whole company into the market he thinks they need to grab.

I say the move is genious. There might be a little fewer tomato gardens on the campus at the end of the year, but he'll be leveraging the ideas and strength of the whole workforce into that single market. Zuck might very well have something to worry about now.

daniel1980fl4• 15 years ago

I agree with your first sentence and strongly disagree with second.

I think its the dumbest move on Page part. Let Google be AND REMAIN the best what it is the best SIMPLE SEARCH.

if not, then Page may wake up in 5 years with half of Goog valuation as a zombie-lunatic who still tries to create a Social network when his main money making machine is broken dues to poor maintenance.

NathanKP• 15 years ago

I don't necessarily agree that social is a blunder, but I do agree with the analogy of comparing social to a party. Just like having a party everywhere, all the time is not appropriate, so having social elements everywhere can quickly get old.

I go to Facebook when I want to see what my friends are doing, but I don't necessarily want to see what they are doing all the time. Imagine if social elements were deeply integrated into Google search, distracting you with stuff from friends every time you tried to do a Google search on a programming topic.

The challenge I think will be to see if Google can properly integrate social aspects where people will appreciate them, and leave them out of places where they will just be a distraction or a frustration.

ajays• 15 years ago

These are all just cheap shots.

If something goes wrong down the road, the writer can crow "I told you so" and strut around like a rooster. If nothing goes wrong, then who remembers some unknown writer in some forgotten rag?

The beauty of these naysayers is that, like a broken clock (or a stuck display ;) ), they're right about the outcome (and not the cause) once in a while by sheer chance.

Confusion• 15 years ago

I could make the exact same argument about any criticism of any random thing, because it does not address the correctness of the criticism at all. If I made this argument against some criticism you fully agree with, you would probably lash out against me for not addressing the issues raised. I haven't even read the article and yet I can safely judge your comment to be completely irrelevant.

waqf3• 15 years ago

I think that's a fair criticism of all of GP's post except the first sentence, "These are all just cheap shots." That single assertion is a meaningful one, albeit one with which I totally disagree.

divtxt• 15 years ago

I found the article pretty good. It states clearly the issue:

Google need to be clear to their employees what the definition of success in social and they should define it based on their strengths rather than the competition's product.

I believe Google is very close to getting there: they need to deliver a great ChromeOS experience and they improve their apps.

I wait impatiently to give Google 2 photo-sharing customers who won't make it to facebook: my parents.

Cossolus• 15 years ago

It's only a blunder if it doesn't work. And that depends not on the bonus but whether there's a clear top-down plan for a well-defined social product. Bottom-up development, where each team figures out whether/how to integrate into +1... that will probably amount to nothing revolutionary. If social "features" are just spread like jam around all of Google's offerings, the result will be a sticky mess that nobody wants to touch.

But Google has a good fall-back position with +1, since the worst case scenario is that it simply evolves into a global digg/reddit-style thumb's up signal for the relevancy of a search result (which alone would be a great result). Beyond that, success in "social" will depend on having a well-defined product that's good enough to sell itself, so I basically agree with the article.

ScottBurson2• 15 years ago

Huh, interesting that people here don't seem to be getting this article.

Every organization has a culture, and every culture has blind spots: things that it doesn't value and is not good at. Because it doesn't value them, it doesn't bring in people who are good at them. Because it doesn't have people who know about them to remind everybody else about them, it continues not to value them.

The only way out of this is for senior management to realize that their beliefs about how to build a company -- the very foundation of their success to this point -- are now what is limiting them.

In this case, Google has gone massively overboard on hiring engineers, and has neglected designers, UX experts, human factors experts, people who understand the "soft side" of computing. What they need to do is to bring a bunch of such people in and give them power. But their whole hiring process is built around finding the very best engineers; they have no process for hiring "soft side" experts. Worse, they have nobody who even knows how to evaluate such people.

Now if Page realized all this, he could do something about it. But to realize it he has to see the limitations in his existing beliefs about who he wants working at Google, about what skills are important. He has to realize he needs people unlike himself. And he has to make a fundamental change in his vision of what kind of company Google is and how it can be most successful. It is very rare to see a CEO with the level of self-reflection to be able to make changes like that.

jdp233• 15 years ago

It's very analogous to Microsoft's situation earlier this decade: the hiring process, power structure, and rewards have been optimized for years around a certain kind of person with certain skills. Now, other people with different skills are just as important -- but the people in power have blind spots about what will motivate or attract that kind of person, or make them effective once they're there.

earl3• 15 years ago

Dennis Crowley has to be one of the single best examples of jdp23's point. Google bought 4square v1 nee Dodgeball, and had one of the people with what seems to be the best insights into social / gamification / local in house. That he left so pissed at Google really understates how hostile Google is to people who aren't amazing technologists. Social seems to require a different type of person / knowledge / skills, and Google seems incapable of hiring, promoting, and supporting anything but technologists.

Letting dodgeball languish and pushing Crowley out of Google really ought to be the subject of a bunch of management self reflection and probably even some firings, all the way up to the CEO level.

awakeasleep• 15 years ago

"Google needs to give designers power" -- often asserted, to the point where it is now an expected comment in any thread about Google's failings.

I want to see someone spend their time finding evidence to support that assertion, rather than working on their way of typing as an authority.

willifred• 15 years ago

This is an older but relevant post from a former Google designer: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

More anecdotally, I find that the best design and illustration I've seen from Google is usually on a very small thing: Google doodles, the CR-48 pilot program videos and illustrations, the Google TV quick tour. Some amazing work has gone into Chrome marketing.

But it's almost never on a product. Their products often feel like the design was managed by committees of engineers. That's not to knock any of Google's product designers, but it often feels like they're not allowed to make decisions on anything that really matters.

adrianwaj2• 15 years ago

I'm going to continue my troll comments from last one that likens YC to American Idol to blaming Marissa Mayer for Google's current predicament.

In 2009 she was Vice President of Google Search Products & User Experience. It's 2011 and there's still no Maps selector in search. How long did it take to get blog search as a selector? Years. She's been VP of Location and Local Services since October 2010 - she lost that to 4sq.

She has a background in AI and not UI or design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer

Video from 2009:

http://youtu.be/Ybbk-6-P3Dk (fail)

Reading Willfred's article below from 2009 makes me think that he could've seen the cap that Mayer might've been placing on Google's UI. He writes: "But I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data" vs wikipedia article "She acts as a gatekeeper for their product release process, determining when or whether a particular Google product is ready to be released to users."

Beware of some power blondes - will write off everything they touch, and block out those that can do something useful.

Let her go. She's the old Google.

Google, like with Facebook, acquire to hire - make entrepreneurs replace the old guard.

gruseom• 15 years ago

Google has gone massively overboard on hiring engineers, and has neglected designers, UX experts, human factors experts, people who understand the "soft side" of computing.

It's often said that Google's weakness is the human side, and I agree, but what's not clear is whether Facebook is so culturally different. Much of what I hear about Facebook indicates a hacker culture that is not dissimilar to Google's engineering culture in this respect, i.e. not necessarily "softer" in the way you describe. Do Facebook emphasize "human factors experts"?

There are people here who have worked at both companies. I'd like to hear some comparisons on this point.

PakG1• 15 years ago

I don't know if this answers your question, but Zuckerberg often answers in questions that machine-driven data is often not good enough, and there needs to be core social elements in a technology to delivery quality data for many applications.

What that means in practice, who knows, but with Google's engineer-heavy focus, I would venture to guess that Google at least is (and has been) heavily focused on a machine-driven philosophy.

ScottBurson2• 15 years ago

This is not the insider view you're hoping for, but I think Zuckerberg is a different kind of hacker from Page and Brin. He seems to have a much better instinct for UX and for what users want. I'd wager, based admittedly on little evidence, that he has much more of an artist's soul. Page and Brin seem much more like pure engineers.

melling• 15 years ago

How do you know it was an "accident?" He wants the entire company to think about integrating social into their products. He wants people to be thinking about how to accomplish this. Android, Chrome, Ads, Docs, etc.

By the end of 2011, a lot of "social" is going to appear in places you didn't expect.

digitalvisions• 15 years ago

I'm actually surprised Google is trying to compete with Facebook. Their whole premise is they develop products outside the realm of chasing someone else's product or service. This is what separates them from every other company out there.

To me, this decision is WAY too late, as the article points out. You can't win the game when you haven't even been on the field for the majority of the match. This is going to be a HUGE blunder and cost them dearly. Dropping a ton of cash and effort into chasing a dead horse is going to come back and haunt them. I give Page about 2 years tops before they pull the plug on him.

mixmax2• 15 years ago

It seems that I'm one of the only people here who thinks the author of the article is on to something substantial. Here's why.

First of all, wanting to get into social is accepting to play second fiddle to Facebook - google is not a leader but a follower in this game. They're known for innovating and this seems to be at odds with that.

Second, as the author points out, Google is not very good when it comes to people and how they work play and interact. This is what social is all about, and it's very hard to put into an algorithm which is the Google way of doing things.

Third, I agree that making all bonuses dependant on the success of their social endeavours is a huge mistake. What happens to the really good algorithmic search people at Google? Do they bust their ass of doing what they do best, or do they try to implement some kind of social search that they know nothing about because that's what their bonus depends on. What will happen to my search results because of this? Yes, it will get worse, and yes it will undermine Googles core product. What Larry has done is basically told everyone that they should start working on something Google is historically not very good at and not worry about their core business. Huge mistake.

Fourth, this shows a poor understanding of the dynamics of incentives, which is something that a CEO of a company as large as Google should be very good at. Paying everyone a bonus based on how one division performs is at best disillusioning to the people who don't work in that division and have absolutely no control over their bonus. It doesn't matter how hard a division works if it doesn't have anything to do with social. What will this do to their morale? At best they'll just hum along, knowing there's not much they can do, at worst they'll start cannibalising their product to try and make it social.

AndyJPartridge• 15 years ago

I agree the author is onto something substantial.

Google is a bunch of great add-ons without a message board.

Facebook is a great message board with mediocre add-ons.

Google needs a message board.

maxwell• 15 years ago

Buzz.

Metapony2• 15 years ago

Buy Reddit.

anamax• 15 years ago

> [Google is] known for innovating and this seems to be at odds with that.

What kind of innovation has Google done?

They've done "better" successfully a couple of times, but they've rarely done new.

mixmax2• 15 years ago

Innovation isn't necessarily inventing something new, it can just as well be taking something existing and making it better. Pagerank, adwords and gmail are examples of this. They all took something existing and made it much much better.

entangld• 15 years ago

If Facebook really is a serious threat to Google, he needs everyone in the company to realize that and fight against it.

>"What happens to the really good algorithmic search people at Google? Do they bust their ass of doing what they do best, or do they try to implement some kind of social search that they know nothing about because that's what their bonus depends on."

If that good algorithmic search person only cares about his/her job and not the life of the company maybe he/she should leave. I'm sure he doesn't want everyone to make individual products, but they have an army of incredibly smart people that could give valuable input. Setting a company wide priority is the right thing to do.

scythe• 15 years ago

But... but social is an adjective. As far as I can tell, Google is talking about implementing social feedback in a sense similar to Slashdot (also Digg, Reddit, HN, etc), not social networking a la Facebook. And this feedback mechanism on search results is the basis of the 25% bonus[1]. How does voting on search results relate to Facebook?

[1] -- since this could use a source, see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/08/google_bonuses_tied_... and 'Page is tying a proverbial lamb chop around the neck of its new social thingy, "Google +1" [...]'.

cpeterso2• 15 years ago

Social software and slick UI design is not in Google's "genes". That's OK, but they should just admit the fact based on past performance. Google's engineers are great at building computing infrastructure that scales. They should acquire a bunch of young, promising social startups. Then let those engineers and designers expand their services on Google's infrastructure. Google could organize into nimble app teams building on platform teams' work.

pnathan• 15 years ago

The author has a good point which should be contemplated in the context of one's company. Incentives should be tied to your performance.

There is a small backlash against "social". Google pushing social will not help that. Facebook and twitter own social right now. Next year, who knows? The better way forward is to figure out how to give users clean and excellent tools to manage the privacy/transparency aspects of social and integrate that into a platform with a great signal:noise ratio.

That's not an engineering problem. That's a people problem: a business, legal and UX problem sitting square in that gooshy, touchy-feely, soft side of how people think, operate, and want to manage their data. The question is, can Google play in that arena? Can they hire some flake fruity designer who totally groks how non-engineers think and integrate that understanding into the engineering teams?

FaceKicker• 15 years ago

I actually thought the most on-point part of the article was its suggestion of a strategy for Google's social features. Like the author said, if they want to have a chance at beating Facebook in the social realm, they really need a "social network", not a random smattering of social features tacked on to already existing Google features. There needs to be a single URL you can type to easily access this social network and easily navigate to every feature from it, and it needs to have a common, clean UI like Facebook does.

And moreover, it needs to have a big, well-planned release. I didn't even know Google Profiles existed until a couple weeks ago. If Google were to release an entire social network on a single day with an Apple-esque release press conference, there's a chance it might get enough people interested to have an actual impact. Doing things like a limited beta release is a horrible idea when it comes to social features, and arguably a major part of why Wave failed so spectacularly.

Everything they've tried up to this point has been completely disjoint and confusing.

tokenadult• 15 years ago

First of all, wanting to get into social is accepting to play second fiddle to Facebook

That's like saying that Google getting into email with Gmail years ago was accepting to play second fiddle to Hotmail (or Yahoo Mail). We know how that worked out. It's too early to say who will be second fiddle to whom.

cycojesus• 15 years ago

Gmail arrived in a field where having 10 or 50MB was considered normal and it disrupted that by letting people not having to care about mail storage. It rendered email weightless to most. Hotmail & Co. were stagnant, they thought that webmail was a solved problem and Gmail blew their little world.

Facebook is moving, it isn't resting thinking "Work's done."

usedtolurk• 15 years ago

Except that it probably equates to around 5% of the total remuneration package.

Not a huge monetary incentive, but you can bet that social ideas will get all the backup they need from infrastructure, marketing, etc.

dstein• 15 years ago

When I heard that Eric Schmidt was stepping down I couldn't help but be reminded of the "free ice cream" video from a few months earlier (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbg8IOfdbA0). I wonder if that video hit a nerve. It should have, because this is the way a lot of people are perceiving Google these days. And I think that perception is primarily the reason Google hasn't been very successful in their social offerings.

ryanhuff• 15 years ago

Considering that Facebook has comparable (potential) privacy issues, I don't think people are avoiding Google because of such concerns. Its simply a matter of superior execution from Facebook on social.

rbanffy2• 15 years ago

I think there is plenty of space for Google to be more "social" without building a Facebook. FB is a form of aggregating and extracting value from tenuous social relationships that would be too much work otherwise. Google needs to make the same within their space - which is search, mail for end users and ads for content/service providers.

Going head-on Facebook is stupid. The one who succeeds will not have invented a better Facebook - will have invented the next social thing, whatever that is.

tomx• 15 years ago

How much of an incentive is a 25% bonus modifier? I can imagine people (who presumably are already paid well) ignoring the incentive entirely, and continuing to work on more interesting projects.

Additionally, many people will be in positions entirely irrelevant to social: This includes non-engineers, perhaps sales, and people working at lower levels of the engineering stack (i.e. people working on large scale filesystems, racking servers, the chef...). These people are more likely to be alienated or more simply confused, rather than encouraged in the long run.

snissn• 15 years ago

It seems like the Page move is a step in the right direction. The article takes that premise as an assumption, and then goes on to argue that Page's first few leadership plays won't be a panacea against Google's problems, which I think is missing the point, that they're taking a good first step, at the cost of saying that it won't solve all of their problems.

gallerytungsten• 15 years ago

From the article:

"Page wants employees to advocate Google's social networking features to family and friends."

Sounds like the Amway approach.

abbasmehdi2• 15 years ago

For everybody hating on the author, he is not just a nay sayer, he actually offered a valid solution. Also there is nothing that will disenfranchise employees faster than tying their income to something that they cannot control. Also, Google has dominated search, web mail, smartphones, this author is just lending advice on how to bring it all together for social. It might be just me but I would rather have friends tell me what's wrong with me than praise me all the time.

colinhowe• 15 years ago

It strikes me that Larry Page shouldn't be making this decision about bonuses at all. It should be up to the head of social to make the call about how he wants to motivate his folks. One of the biggest complaints you hear in large organisations is that they don't get to reward their people how and when they want to. Larry Page just made this a problem for Googlers, big time.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

I think large changes to complex systems are fraught with risks, and Larry's changes are quite large. But given how different Google is, as a company, than any other company out there, its not really possible to evaluate this change apriori as a 'win' or as a 'blunder.'.

I've been out of the 'plex for a year. But when I worked there, every year things changed; from bonus plans, to quality of life 'perks', to who ran what. Google is good at change, they change things all the time.

Google measures a lot. For some it seemed like extreme surveillance but it really was mostly about measuring effectiveness. Of course it also reduced the time to catch the contractor who helped his friends help themselves to some laptops to about 15 minutes after they were noted as being missing :-).

They don't always interpret what they measure well. The feedback loop on that seems poor.

From the outside it would seem that Larry is embracing one of the core Google beliefs which are "Change things to be what you think is the better way, measure what you change, fix what you break." Does that belief scale to the CEO's office? Guess we'll see. If its broken it won't stay broken since I'm sure there are a number of experiments in place to provide feedback on its effectiveness.

The only danger to Google at that point is whether or not they can understand and internalize the feedback effectively. That was a skill I didn't see a lot of when I was there.

gcheong• 15 years ago

A bit of an aside from the assertions of the article, but there is some research to suggest tying anything that involves creative solutions to a bonus is actually a disincentive: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/opinion/20ariely.html

Apocryphon• 15 years ago

It really seems to me that Google is failing to understand social media the same way Microsoft failed to understand the internet back in the '90s. So the question always is: what will Facebook fail to understand?

marshray• 15 years ago

"The Internet is hot. Let's wire a web browser deeply into our operating system and office suite people won't know if they're accessing trusted local data or untrusted internet data. What could possibly go wrong?"

"Social media is hot. Let's wire social deeply into our successful search engine, web apps, and operating system. What could possibly go wrong?"

It reminds me of the first part of the 20th century (well I'm not really that old :-) where every kind of business reacted to the disruptive change of the automobile by simply bolting on drive-through windows. It fundamentally misses the point and will seem silly in the long run.

pedalpete• 15 years ago

I think the author has seriously missed the mark in the comparison of Google vs. Facebook mission statements. Google's mission statement is to organize the worlds information. Facebook is organizing your personal/social information. That is all facebook really is, a good organization of your relationships, photos, things you like, etc. etc. This is directly inline with Google's mission.

philfreo• 15 years ago

I love this quote:

It focuses Google on Facebook's mission. Google's mission is to "organize the world's information." Facebook's mission is to "give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." In a way, Page's edict tells employees: "Stop working on Google's mission and start working on Facebook's.

SergeyHack• 15 years ago

> Google has a blind spot about the "human element" in usability

I agree with that. I reported a problem with search localization 3 times for the last 2 years to my friend who is working at Google. And monthes after the last time I saw the bad localization behaviour in the search.

I also had to involve my friend for this bug and a few gmail ones because I just could not find the feedback form.

1. That was a one-three years ago. 2. The bad behavior is that Google search invited a new user (without its cookie) with a locale based on geolocation instead of much better indicator - browser accepted languages. 3. This behavior is extremely annoying when you search from the Linux console in Links (or Lynx) that has no yet native language installed.

djcapelis• 15 years ago

I hate the writing of the article, but the point of having a 25% bonus tied to social being a dumb move I actually find myself agreeing with based on the information presented. (I'd love to read the full memo...)

People should share social features because they want to, not because they're getting a bonus. Google is ignoring an intensely valuable internal feedback mechanism by re-aligning their employees to adopt new social features without skepticism.

The other big problem I see is tying bonus compensation to an area where you are looking for passion and innovation is the easiest way to replace intrinsic motivation with external motivation, the latter having been proven ineffective in research over and over and over again. You can't incentivize passion, you can only create the environment for it. They will likely end up with products built for bonuses instead of products built out of passion as a result.

jeffreyrusso• 15 years ago

Why does Google need to have some centralized social product? I think that the strongest thing about +1 is that it's totally built on top of their wildly successful core product. Its social, but it's more passive, and relevance remains at the core. I don't need another timeline of stuff that is relevant to people I know, but not necessarily me.

chrischen• 15 years ago

I'd say Facebook's party ended when peoples' moms and dads joined.

Metapony2• 15 years ago

I agree that tying these bonuses for everyone's participation is Larry Page's first big blunder.

I think there's two things that google can do to be a leader in the social space. Maybe you won't agree.

First. Buy Reddit. Buy all of Conde Nast if you have to, Larry.

Second. Given that search is an instant gratification thing (which google does so well) what would happen if, like in a subreddit, I wanted to be aware of goings on in a certain subject? Facebook is great for checking up on what a bunch of my friends are doing all over the world. But if I want a good daily overview of what's going on in a subject I'm interested in, with generally good coments, I go over to Reddit. Google could rule in this "automated newsgroup" space quite well. You would turn to this space to get commentary on articles all over the web. Google could keep it free from bots and not easily gamed. But Reddit's doing it right, and has the biggest userbase. (And yes, I find it pretty annoying most days, but now I filter out a lot of the subreddits I don't like.)

My point here is that Google should look at and learn from Reddit's model so much that it'd be better if they just bought it outright.

Larry Page's first blunder

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