Sometimes you have to stand-up to your employees. Having a small group of activists driving your business decisions is unsustainable. Google is a multinational behemoth, and as much as it likes to think of itself as a small nimble progressive startup, those days are long gone.
>Google’s open systems also proved valuable for activists within the company, who have examined its systems for evidence of controversial product developments and then circulated their findings among colleagues. Such investigations have been integral to campaigns against the projects for the Pentagon and China.
Google had the benefit of obscene profits from their ad business that let the rest of the company do whatever, which also enabled internal activists to exert pressure for them to not do business with the American government.
Google had obscene profits _because_ of the rest of the company. Mano of us were working on weekends because we thought that it's a different company. And it was.
>we thought that it's a different company. And it was.
What do you mean a 'different company'. You mean different in that it wouldn't do business with the American government? Different in that it would bow to a small pool of activists to drive business decisions?
All engineers were driving business decisions in the past actually. The headcounts were centrally set, but the whole team usually had one or two main focuses that it could execute on.
When Larry became the CEO, the whole thing changed. He took an engineer driven organization and changed it into a PM driven organization, just what Microsoft had under Steve Ballmer. And if there are too many PMs, engineers become Go pieces that PMs try to steal from eachother all the time.
It never was, on August 19, 2004 they went public. That day they became the same as any pharma company/oil company/Nestle. The shareholders will always win
That's naive. Nobody goes to Google because they want to see ads. They go to search, or to read their mail or to get a map somewhere, or dozens of other things. All of those services are the things that users value, and ads are the tool for monetizing valuable services. You can't separate it that cleanly.
83% of Google ad revenue is from ads on Google sites, and only 17% is from ads on someone else’s properties. If you also consider traffic acquisition costs, ads on someone else’s properties are very small part of Google profit.
Actually after search I went to ads as well to learn the maths part of it. Both are very interesting as long as you don't get to a team led by politics and PMs.
After politics/PMs creep in you have to stop looking at the data to improve the product because you get so many ,,little'' tasks to implement from the outside.
Ah, cool, yeah, sorry, actually I wrote the same thing in a sibling comment after you, that Google's product could easily be monetized without ads as well (just not as well). :)
>Nobody goes to Google because they want to see ads.
Sure. But ads are the reason how Google can support and pamper their workforce. It's what allowed them to bow to internal activists to give up on multi-billion dollar contracts with the Pentagon and maybe even other federal agencies (like ICE and CBP - though I'm not sure they would be crazy enough to do that).
>Google’s open systems also proved valuable for activists within the company, who have examined its systems for evidence of controversial product developments and then circulated their findings among colleagues. Such investigations have been integral to campaigns against the projects for the Pentagon and China.
Google had the benefit of obscene profits from their ad business that let the rest of the company do whatever, which also enabled internal activists to exert pressure for them to not do business with the American government.