<story><title>Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors</title><url>https://twitter.com/ericschmidt/status/1123324575436214272</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dekhn</author><text>None of G+ was Page&amp;#x27;s idea.  There was a product manager (who left for facebook!) who did the big pitch deck that got it rolling.  Then they put Vic Gundotra in charge and gave him carte blanche to modify multiple products.  I agree that was the wrong person for the job.  But you can&amp;#x27;t even imagine the amount of groupthink and ego that Vic surrounded himself with.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think it was super-obvious 10 years ago, but social has turned out to be a growth product that led to a minefield for the successful companies (look at Twitter and Facebook now) because the growth strategies were so sketchy that people and the government ultimately had to reject them.&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, it&amp;#x27;s on Page, though.  He stood up at TGIF and told all the player to &amp;quot;get along&amp;quot; when Search had made a coherent argument that coupling the Social brand with search was brand suicide.  I think Google could have made a much less obnoxious social network, maybe it would have been good, but without aggressive growth strategies, it wouldn&amp;#x27;t have been popular (a lot changed since the Orkut days, most people forget Google had a social network with half a billion users at one point!)</text></item><item><author>paganel</author><text>I think Page had the right idea, because if you look nowadays at people under 30 for them the Internet is represented by social networks, be it Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or even Snapchat, the internet&amp;#x2F;web represented by the browser and by visiting different websites via Google is no longer that important. I think Page realized that if Google doesn&amp;#x27;t hop on the social train they&amp;#x27;ll end up looking from the outside at a flowering walled garden in which they will have almost no relevance.&lt;p&gt;I think they had a similar idea after Apple&amp;#x27;s iPhone started gaining traction, it&amp;#x27;s only that in the case of Android Google&amp;#x27;s execution was an order of magnitude better compared to what they did with Google+. I wouldn&amp;#x27;t put the blame for the failure of Google+ on Page only, I&amp;#x27;d also assign it to Gundotra, after all he was the man directly in charge of it all, Page&amp;#x27;s fault is that he chose and supported the wrong man for the job.</text></item><item><author>dekhn</author><text>The other big thing was Larry pushed social on the company without really understanding social as a product, and was absolutely unable to handle the huge negative response both internally and externally to that push.  This all happened at the same time Microsoft and Amazon committed to Cloud (which Google has only tepidly adopted).&lt;p&gt;The one time I met with Schmidt to explain my cloud project, he was delighted and encouraging and helped shape the design in a way that made it much more effective.  He was a very effective leader (although not everybody agrees- some people think he&amp;#x27;s an arrogant asshole).</text></item><item><author>anyfoo</author><text>This is of course extremely subjective, and I have no knowledge of what Google was and is on the inside except for a short internship almost 10 years ago: I somehow always felt that Google with Eric Schmidt as a CEO was a much different Google than later on. Under Eric Schmidt, Google seemed like this extremely innovative company with the brightest minds in the industry. Afterwards, it seemed to instead grow into just another corporation.&lt;p&gt;Though maybe that&amp;#x27;s just what growth does in general.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I singled out Larry Page before, but that&amp;#x27;s a bit skewed, given that he founded Google and was its CEO for the first few years.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paganel</author><text>&amp;gt; None of G+ was Page&amp;#x27;s idea. There was a product manager (who left for facebook!)&lt;p&gt;Didn&amp;#x27;t know that, it&amp;#x27;s cool to learn about it.&lt;p&gt;About Twitter and FB being on a minefield I agree, but I don&amp;#x27;t think that will lead to any serious consequences for them, because there&amp;#x27;s almost no political will to make things right and that happens because the voters themselves (those FB and Twitter users) have almost no interest in how those companies reached their present size. In the end any skilled politician can smell that there&amp;#x27;s no sense in going to war against a company (or against a communication medium) that consumes at least 3 or 4 hours per day, on average, of their voters&amp;#x27; time, it&amp;#x27;s like a US politician going to war against television in the 1960s, backed when TV had just emerged, it would be public opinion suicide.&lt;p&gt;Retrospectively I still do think that Page had the right idea to try and force Social (back at that time I also thought it as a crazy idea), like I said, I think that he had sensed that Search will be of almost no use in a world where the internet&amp;#x2F;web is not represented by websites anymore. I do agree though that even as seen from the outside Page could have done a much better job of getting the Google employees behind him and behind his idea, I think that that wood and arrows metaphor he used was really, really poor and, frankly speaking, quite condescending.</text></comment>
<story><title>Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors</title><url>https://twitter.com/ericschmidt/status/1123324575436214272</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dekhn</author><text>None of G+ was Page&amp;#x27;s idea.  There was a product manager (who left for facebook!) who did the big pitch deck that got it rolling.  Then they put Vic Gundotra in charge and gave him carte blanche to modify multiple products.  I agree that was the wrong person for the job.  But you can&amp;#x27;t even imagine the amount of groupthink and ego that Vic surrounded himself with.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think it was super-obvious 10 years ago, but social has turned out to be a growth product that led to a minefield for the successful companies (look at Twitter and Facebook now) because the growth strategies were so sketchy that people and the government ultimately had to reject them.&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, it&amp;#x27;s on Page, though.  He stood up at TGIF and told all the player to &amp;quot;get along&amp;quot; when Search had made a coherent argument that coupling the Social brand with search was brand suicide.  I think Google could have made a much less obnoxious social network, maybe it would have been good, but without aggressive growth strategies, it wouldn&amp;#x27;t have been popular (a lot changed since the Orkut days, most people forget Google had a social network with half a billion users at one point!)</text></item><item><author>paganel</author><text>I think Page had the right idea, because if you look nowadays at people under 30 for them the Internet is represented by social networks, be it Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or even Snapchat, the internet&amp;#x2F;web represented by the browser and by visiting different websites via Google is no longer that important. I think Page realized that if Google doesn&amp;#x27;t hop on the social train they&amp;#x27;ll end up looking from the outside at a flowering walled garden in which they will have almost no relevance.&lt;p&gt;I think they had a similar idea after Apple&amp;#x27;s iPhone started gaining traction, it&amp;#x27;s only that in the case of Android Google&amp;#x27;s execution was an order of magnitude better compared to what they did with Google+. I wouldn&amp;#x27;t put the blame for the failure of Google+ on Page only, I&amp;#x27;d also assign it to Gundotra, after all he was the man directly in charge of it all, Page&amp;#x27;s fault is that he chose and supported the wrong man for the job.</text></item><item><author>dekhn</author><text>The other big thing was Larry pushed social on the company without really understanding social as a product, and was absolutely unable to handle the huge negative response both internally and externally to that push.  This all happened at the same time Microsoft and Amazon committed to Cloud (which Google has only tepidly adopted).&lt;p&gt;The one time I met with Schmidt to explain my cloud project, he was delighted and encouraging and helped shape the design in a way that made it much more effective.  He was a very effective leader (although not everybody agrees- some people think he&amp;#x27;s an arrogant asshole).</text></item><item><author>anyfoo</author><text>This is of course extremely subjective, and I have no knowledge of what Google was and is on the inside except for a short internship almost 10 years ago: I somehow always felt that Google with Eric Schmidt as a CEO was a much different Google than later on. Under Eric Schmidt, Google seemed like this extremely innovative company with the brightest minds in the industry. Afterwards, it seemed to instead grow into just another corporation.&lt;p&gt;Though maybe that&amp;#x27;s just what growth does in general.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I singled out Larry Page before, but that&amp;#x27;s a bit skewed, given that he founded Google and was its CEO for the first few years.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>philsnow</author><text>The &amp;quot;trouble&amp;quot; with Orkut was the large majority of those users were outside the United States.  Brazil and later India made up the majority.&lt;p&gt;Those eyeballs weren&amp;#x27;t worth as much to advertisers, and I don&amp;#x27;t think Google valued the product highly because of it.</text></comment>