Re:Google is shutting down Stadia
by danielmarkbruce on Friday September 30, 2022 @01:07AM
(#33031214)
I guess this could explain it. I struggle a little with this explanation though, Larry appeared engaged in 2014. The problem is big and obvious. I guess there isn't an obvious solution though, so maybe they just kept kicking the can down the road?
Anyway, good insight, appreciate it. They both always seemed like smart dudes with a blindspot. Maybe it wasn't such after all.
Re:Google is shutting down Stadia
by nostrademons on Friday September 30, 2022 @01:57AM
(#33031470)
Larry's blindspot IMHO is that when he isn't connected to the same experiences that normal people have, his intuition is terrible (and conversely, when he is connected to the same experiences that normal people have, his intuition is awesome, which is why he was able to spot so many of the product cycles of the 00s). He was a terrible CEO, probably for this reason: he made company-wide decisions based on the experiences of the L-team. I remember mocking how the very first dictum when he became CEO was "Meetings should have a single decider and end 5 minutes early", which was probably important at the exec level but was so far removed from the problems that actually faced software engineers at Google in 2011. When you're CEO the information you get is very carefully curated by your lieutenants to produce outcomes desirable to them. Larry was either oblivious to this dynamic or powerless to change it
It wasn't just Larry & Sergey either - early Google was filled with people like Craig Silverstein, Amit Patel, Paul Buchheit, Eric Veach, Matt Cutts, Peter Norvig, Hal Varian, et al who all thought deeply about just what the human consequences of a given social policy would be. Things like Google's promo & interview system were very well-designed for a company of 2000 people.
IMHO, the problem is that all of those folks ended up richer than you could imagine, which gave them the option of not putting up with the people that came after them. When the company grows from 2000 to 20,000 (which is what it was when I joined in 2009), 90+% of the people were not when it was 2000, i.e. you are outvoted 9 to 1 by ordinary people who don't think very much about incentives. If you're filthy rich, it's much easier to just jet off to some private island and let the tricky problem of incentives become somebody else's problem than it is to stick around and explain to tens of thousands of people why systems are the way they and modify them to fit the company's new reality.