
This year’s Founders' Letter - gordon_freeman
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2016/04/this-years-founders-letter.html
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apsec112
This makes me nervous about Google's long-term prospects. There just aren't
any new ideas here. Pichai has been very focused on mobile, and that's not a
bad idea exactly, but it's just riding a wave created by Apple almost ten
years ago. He's now starting to talk about virtual assistants, but that was
kicked off by Siri's launch, almost five years ago. To have long-term success,
Google will need to develop genuinely new ideas, ones that not everybody has
already heard about. You can't be the biggest player in technology if you
never take any risks.

(disclaimer: former Google employee here)

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educar
What is pichai's claim to fame? It's very hard to figure out what exactly he
has done to suddenly rise up to the top. Just a very likable person? I am yet
to see anything visionary from him.

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btian
I think Google Toolbar was his idea.

~~~
apsec112
Per Wikipedia, Toolbar was launched in 2000 but Pichai joined in 2004.

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sievebrain
This continues the impression I have that Larry and Sergey have lost interest
in Google.

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ericjang
What are they interested in nowadays, then?

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ocdtrekkie
Larry seems to be of the megalomaniacal persuasion, his interviews focus on
wanting to run cities, airports, etc. Somewhere on the side of "it would be
making the world better if it wasn't a dystopian vision". There's the whole
curing death thing too somewhere in there.

Sergey seems more interested in the Google X toys, as he always has.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
There's this weird pattern that happens to geeky types when they become rich
and powerful. They suddenly buy into the whole command-economy top-down
philosophy when their success and wealth only exists because of the largely
decentralized nature of technological markets and tech's low regulatory
environment. All of sudden they think they can mastermind everything to
perfection. The 20th century had a horrific experiment with centrally planned
masterminding that cost humanity 94m lives. This should give every central
planner some pause.

Pie in the sky rich guy stuff like immortality (Page, Kurzweil) and central-
planning stuff like robot run cities, AI controlled airports, etc are just
mindless futurism that either will never happen or will be too impractical or
unethical to ever properly attempt. Heck, Page can't even deliver a thermostat
that doesn't regularly fuck up in spectacular ways. He wants this cowboy
engineering to run cities and fly planes? Meanwhile, Google has competely
missed the boat on some real futurist stuff that is actually panning out like
VR or private spaceflight.

The only person I can think of who didn't fall into this bizarre pattern is
Gates, who just funds a foundation that hands out grants to various
organizations, mostly non-profit and NGO, who might get things done. I think
this is by far the wiser approach and the one that has the potential for the
most change.

Live long enough to see yourself become the villain seems to be in effect
here. Most super successful people don't have a second act. They peak and
either disappear or just become weirdos who have spent too much time around
yes men and in echo chambers.

~~~
rdl
How does your theory account for Elon Musk? Is he not rich enough yet to be
"bad" in this way?

Everything I've read about the man makes me think if you gave him $100b he
would invest all $100b in doing some awesome project which would only be
successful through the superhuman efforts of himself and his team, but
wouldn't require a command economy otherwise. Vertical integration inside,
yes.

~~~
gordon_freeman
isn't it true that all of Musk's companies benefiting from the governments'
help in terms of federal subsidies and space contracts? Do you think without
it he would have been this successful?

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btian
How are space contracts governments' help and not SpaceX helping government
from the evil ULA?

~~~
greglindahl
The intent of the COTS contracts was to procure launches for much less than
the usual price by providing up-front payments in exchange for a block buy of
future launches. Seems to have worked great. Commercial companies sign
contracts like that on occasion, when they don't like the prices from their
current suppliers.

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TY
A pretty generic letter with nothing new that the HN crowd would not know.

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tdaltonc
Even after the birth of Alphabet, Google still has a lot of seeming unrelated
parts. Should it have been broken up further? Does it make sense to have
YouTube, Google Cloud Platform, and android (but not Fiber or Google Capital)
all in the same company? Is there anything other than "profitable" that
determines who is in the google-core?

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nostrademons
AFAICT, it really is "profitable". The Google/Alphabet split is really for
investors' benefit; the only folks who care about corporate structure are Wall
Street and the government, so the corporate structure is such that it pleases
Wall Street, which lets the people actually working at Alphabet focus on their
respective businesses.

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sunshiney
As a small business owner of private businesses, I care about corporate
structure! it affects financials and banking and employee organization, as
well as private capital infusions. Just saying... I do agree re
Alphabet/Google though.

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nxzero
While not directly stated, to me, the letter is a reminder that at some point
in the near future AI will not be the next big thing.

Any (reasonable) thoughts on what's next for Google after AI - and how you
believe Google will get there?

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kmnc
My guess is health and psychology, they get there by creating exceptionally
good personal "life coach" bots. Basically like the movie Her minus the FOOM.
I guess that is AI, but really it is more a UX problem, a truly engaging
positive thinking bot doesn't have to be too complex to change people's lives.
It simply needs to be so well designed that it becomes apart of people's
lives. Design may be far from googles strength now but results are and if
googles bot can improve my life that is all that maters.

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xigency
So, not much from the founders then.

