
Larry Page, Google Founder, Is Still Innovator in Chief - samsgro
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/technology/larry-page-google-founder-is-still-innovator-in-chief.html
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rmason
I've got a tech friend who enrolled his young son in the local Montessori
school. He told me once about how the lobby was full of successful people who
had graduated like judges, congressmen, federal government officials and heads
of non-profits. I told him that Larry Page was a graduate of that school and
he was astounded.

A while later he met with the headmaster and asked him why Page's picture
wasn't featured in the lobby? He never got a direct answer but apparently they
didn't feel that merely making a lot of money was enough of an accomplishment
;<).

~~~
peter303
Doesnt sound like a very knowledgeable headmaster. Larry invented PageRank and
did a respectable implementation of it before he had other engineers take it
over. And only googlers know what he has done inside the company.

Bill Gates gets a bad tech rap too, even though he was coding successful
compilers himself for several years.

~~~
noblethrasher
Gates also made a significant mathematical discovery that wasn’t bested for 30
years[1], and he published a paper on it while he was a sophomore at Harvard.

[1]
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9223678...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92236781)

~~~
rtpg
I am constantly thinking of ways to apply pancake sorting in a real-life
environment that doesn't involve working at IHOP

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psbp
I have no problem with the guy, but has anyone noticed that there's a fluff
piece about Larry nearly every year around this time?

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MCRed
More than that I've noticed about 30 years of consistent and regular fluff
pieces to glamorize people such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. One of the
notable exceptions is Steve Jobs who stopped giving interviews to these kinds
of reporters in the 1980s, and also stopped getting covers around that time
(after that, if he's on a cover he's holding a new product.)

One observable consequence of this is that Steve Jobs who gave us so much is
widely reviled, while Bill Gates who destroyed the packaged software industry,
almost killed the internet and went so far as to have schools raided by SWAT
to make them buy windows licenses for their computers (computers that were
Macs, by the way, back when Macs ran PowerPC and couldn't run windows
anyway)... is widely regarded as a humanitarian[1]. Jeff Bezos (whom I've
known personally) is widely regarded as a Tech guy (despite being really just
a pointy haired boss.)

There's a reason these guys spend money on PR-- the PR becomes the public
perception.

[1] I've been in the room when both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos
lost their cool (three separate occasions, fortunately I was not the target.)
Steve was quietly upset "how are we going to fix this?" and "we're never going
to let this happen again, are we?" with all the weight those comments imply.
Bezos and Gates both lit into the person with a clear intention to make their
victims feel like nothing (both in different ways brought up the victims
family as well.) I worked at Amazon and Microsoft, but not Apple.

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Nullabillity
> One observable consequence of this is that Steve Jobs who gave us so much is
> widely reviled, while Bill Gates who destroyed the packaged software
> industry

Hahaha, what? iOS set a huge negative precedence and pretty much killed off
any hope for a mainstream phone that wasn't focused on consuming pre-approved
content.

~~~
eli
> iOS set a huge negative precedence

That's unfair. Before iOS you typically had to go to your carrier's app store
to download anything. Verizon's policies about who gets listed and how much it
costs were much worse than iOS.

~~~
enjo
PalmOS had a wide open app model and it was awesome.

~~~
jshevek
Yes. The iPhone was a huge step backwards in my opinion, but at the time the
only people who seemed to understand this were PalmOS users.

~~~
robotresearcher
And Blackberry users. Blackberry was pretty damn good.

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surds
IMO, it is the attitude to take a leap at difficult and off-the-beaten-path
projects ("MoonShots") that sets Google apart from many other large companies.

Are they looking to profit? Sure. Does that mean that profit is the only
motive? I don't think so. It takes guts to jump into a totally different area
from what a company primarily does.

It is probably an attitude that needs to be powered by the founders
themselves. That way, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are appreciable too.

Apple has its strengths, but they don't score well when you look at it from
this perspective.

~~~
millstone
Google doesn't leap, which implies commitment. Instead they dally. And it's
not yet clear that this sort of dallying can actually produce results. It may
even have the opposite effect, e.g. the way Glass ruined the wearables market.

~~~
adventured
Five years from now the average consumer won't remember anything about the
Glass fiasco and wearables will be everywhere. Glass didn't do anything to the
wearables market of any consequence, at all. It couldn't have been more
irrelevant. The only place it was relevant, for 15 minutes, was in a tiny
little echo chamber in California.

In what way has Google not been committed to eg autonomous vehicles or Google
Fiber? They've produced amazing results already in both examples. The Google
Fiber result alone is astounding and almost single-handedly responsible for
the broadband speed boom going on in the US right now.

~~~
millstone
Is Google committed to either of these? These are basically hobbies: there's
no evidence that Google is pushing hard on them. Six years after starting, and
they're still pilot programs at best.

These are certainly cool technologies and producing amazing preliminary
results. What I am questioning is whether this strategy of dipping their toes
in a bunch of different ideas actually works. Google's hope seems to be to
throw a bunch of stuff and see what sticks, whereas Apple's approach is to
pick a few ideas, and then devote tremendous resources at it until they get it
right.

Google thinks that their autonomous vehicles will be ready for broad scale use
by 2020, the same year that Elon Musk thinks Tesla will have their autonomous
car ready, and the rumored date of the Apple car. So it doesn't seem that
their head start allowed them to bring things to market any faster. Maybe
Google's offering (in whatever form) will work way way better than its
competition, but my guess is they'll be roughly comparable.

And six years on, Google Fiber is only available in a tiny number of
municipalities, and has a small fraction of the subscriber base of, say,
Verizon Fios. Six years!

I'm an outsider, but I speculate that these types of projects are low
pressure. There's no revenues at stake, no expectation of profit, no hard
deadlines, and probably no serious threat of cancellation. So it is not
surprising that progress is slow. Recall that the literal moon shot - the
Apollo program - was a national goal, set by the President, with an explicit
deadline.

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petke
Sounds like he is getting sidelined. He gets a pie in the sky job where he can
do less harm to profits ... And the running of the core advertisement business
is left to harder men.

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sangnoir
Sidelined by whom, exactly? Page & Sergey still own controlling shares in
Alphabet

~~~
petke
Yeah, you are right. It doesn't make sense.

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dataker
Is this supposed to be a good thing? Something to be admired?

With over 60000 employees, only one decides what technology will receive
billions of dollars. See the problem?

~~~
raldi
Yes. A much better approach would be for all the shareholders of the company
to elect a group of experts to periodically review Larry's ideas and sign off
on his major capital outlays. We could refer to these people as the "Board of
Directors".

~~~
tamana
That's not substantially different. How about some of those 60000 geniuses
make some choices about what to pursue?

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raldi
They do, in fact, have quite a bit of leeway. Eventually, though, when they
need significant funding, or headcount, they ask their managers. As the
project grows, it continues escalating, and if it's a major strategic
commitment, it goes all the way up to the CEO and Board of Directors.

It's worked really, really well for Google thus far; have you seen the long-
term trend of their stock price? Nonetheless, if you'd like to change it,
you're welcome to acquire a controlling share of the company, and then you can
run it however you please.

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eva1984
Aditorial

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meeper16
This why I love Google. They are leaps and bounds by orders of magnitude above
other companies like twitter, facebook, snapchat, linkedin etc. in terms of
revenue, value and real innovation.

