Is this a classic middle management malaise where everyone gets paid so well they don’t want to stir the pot? The bureaucracy and protection of today’s money cows which only clouds them from seeing tomorrow’s cows that will rescue them from certain obscurity?
The Clayton M Christensen solution to big companies ignoring obvious problems is to have isolated small teams “infrapreneurship” who aren’t under the pressures of the larger org. With Meta’s push towards VR it’s obvious Oculus’s purpose is now Meta’s purpose. And all the downside that comes with such a thing.
Google ended up with a bunch of chat apps because the culture promotes building new over keeping things running.
The first chat was basically an XMPP service. It was decent, it federated outside of Google, it was fully functional. It even supported group channels (XMPP conferences) internally. But I don't think that was ever exposed to the public.
Then Hangouts was created. It was, per usual at Gooogle, a ground-up rewrite. IIRC not the same team. So they spent at least a couple years playing catch up to get feature parity with the XMPP chat. Worse, Hangouts was one of the first services to suffer from strict team-created "Personas" design philosophy. Any time anyone would complain about a feature, or miss-feature, it was flatly ignored because "You're not one of our Personas". It took years of complaints to get them to change their minds.
By the time Hangouts was good enough to fully replace the previous service it was now boring and people left the team for other new projects. Because maintenance won't get you promoted.
The other random chat services were basically experiential toys.
Now we have Meet, which is is likely another case of "Hangouts is unmaintainable tech, we need to re-write it". Years of getting up to feature parity. And miss-features that won't get fixed.
Yea, it was great. But it was more lack of maintenance than anything. The original chat devs were passionate about open federation. The new devs were not.
Add to that it was a big source of spam that nobody wanted to deal with.
Apparently the team tried really hard to get more companies on board with opening up federation. But I think the only "major" service that did was what was left of AOL.
> Is that how Google ended up with eight chat apps
Its more because they killed their already working, well-accepted Google Chat app, not seeing gigantic profit or any market control benefit from it. Somehow they thought it was a better idea to have some 'chat' through the browser - which resulted in whatever 'Hangouts' was. Prioritized 'engineering' and profits over users as its so normal for large public corporations.
Then Slack and Discord came and wiped the floor with all of them.
Monopolies tend to stick around much longer than other industries despite their lack of competence. Clayton’s book was mostly about Intel which operated in a competitive market with AMD and others.
DuckDuckGo is great but it’s not nipping at their heels meaningfully.
I kinda wonder if there is a type of employee who likes working at dying firms. Every year their job gets easier with fewer demands. Failure becomes kinda expected.
I’m reminded of someone I met at a party who actually worked for Sears. They’d spent many years at Amazon on the retail side of the business, in the earlier days of Amazon. Sears hired several people with this background in Seattle to turn their business around.
Pretty quickly, they figured out upper management had no interest in their ideas to make Sears into a viable online retailer. Everybody left or started coasting. They all knew the company was doomed but cashed their paychecks. After all, that’s literally what they were being paid to do.
WeWork is living dead, taking down and feasting on the flesh of the living. Their financials are so bad that there is no possibility of rescue, only the matter of the timing and details of end. Meanwhile the coworking space continues to be critical for an increasing fraction of the workforce. Those companies that actually live in this space by charging members fees that pay for the property and services required have a huge challenge competing with WeWork. It is a textbook case of venture capital doing terrible damage to an entire sector without actually contributing anything. The capital will be burned through and WeWork and other companies will die and then maybe we can start again for real. It is so frustrating.
Yeah, but I’m sure most of those businesses would have done their due diligence on WeWorks financials before moving in.
Changing offices is an expensive exercise so they wouldn’t want to risk renting space from somewhere that is likely to go under in the next year or two.
The whole point of wework from a customer perspective is that you don’t have to commit to long 10-year leases. So wework leases long-term and the customers short-term. If the customers dry up wework still needs to pay their commitments.
My point is the dynamic I mention explains the problems of wework, and is not proved wrong by the argument you put forward, paraphrased, that "businesses have evaluated long-term risk of renting at wework so wework is not at risk"
Your second attempt at paraphrasing my comment is still way off the mark.
You keep discussing a long term context yet my comment was just as much about short term risk too.
You don’t have to agree with me, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t “paraphrase” my comment in a way that’s disingenuous to the original point it was making.
I paraphrased to try to reach a common ground, not as a kind of trick, but I understand you don't agree with the gist of the argument. We will have to agree to disagree, and that is ok.
I’m willing to bet that that’s also how Google will be completely disrupted by an AI-first competitor. The execs will be too chicken to kill their current golden goose.
Search is already heavily ML-powered. Right now it’s impossible to provide ad-sponsored fully-AI-powered search and make it profitable. Remember, you are actually not paying for it at the cost, and users that actually click ads are subsidizing you.
But when it will be possible, Google is going to be in perfect position to capitalize on it.
It might be ML powered but has that power made it better? Can it actually provide you with useful relevant info without adding “site:reddit.com” to the query?
Google simply can’t monetize chatGPT-like search to the tune of $150B/year.
The current model doesn’t work for this new reality. They’ll have to find a new model. And if history is any clue, the suits will be unwilling to change
ChatGPT already far outperforms google for heavily-SEO’d topics like recipe searches.
Try asking “what herbs and spices go well in a chilli?” in both. I get a sensible, rough answer from ChatGPT within seconds. From Google I get page after page of content farms hiding information in amongst ads and life-story filler.
I wanted to demo it for my wife who was writing a paper on digital media consumption during the pandemic.
She was trying to find poems that went viral during the pandemic. Googling it showed a bunch of mediocre articles or irrelevant news stories
I asked chatGPT and it gave me a list of 10 poems by relatively well known poets. A brief review showed that these poems were, indeed, viral during the pandemic. Saved at least 15 minutes of Googling.
This is going to take a long time. Longer than one would think if one is using the progression of the language model as a basis for this prediction.
There are a lot of pitfalls and erroneous assumptions built into both Google's current search and the information used to train AI/ML models. Two big ones are "assuming that a person searching for something and accepting the answer means it's a successful search" and "assuming a person searching/asking for something actually wants what they're asking for".
I'm a librarian with several years of reference experience under my belt and neither of those things are true. They're both good tools for a well considered and well informed information search, but that 'well considered and well informed' is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Since you have domain expertise, I'd love to know your opinion on searching through "personal libraries" like Zettelkasten (or similar repositories), and perhaps linking that with Internet-scale indexes.
Are there tools that do that well right now? Do you know of (maybe niche) projects exploring such ideas?
This sounds like “Success Theater,” where everyone always reports green lights up the chain of command, until it’s too late and the show ends abruptly and poorly.
It’s a poison that seems to seep into organizations as they get larger.
I once gave a talk about “Enterprise Entrepreneurs” after being labeled as one. It can be a good approach to prevent stagnation as grass-roots initiatives often generate great ideas in large companies.
Unfortunately the practice requires executive sponsorship, which can be hard to attain if executives feel *their position and stature is being undermined by subordinates.
I’ve never understood “enterprise entrepreneurs” or “intrapreneurship” from the perspective of the employee. The massive potential upside for a success just isn’t there compared to founding your own start-up, so why do it?
The best answer I could come up with: it's not your typical employees who are going to be doing that. Employees are employees. Typically you want someone who is about to leave the company because they are bored and want to do something interesting...and they have an idea (or you give them an idea) that excites them.
So instead of VCs you invest company capital into them.
Obviously 99% of the time employees just leave and startups win the day. Which is fine. But that's basically just how it is. So you either adapt or die until the monopoly/cash cow runs its course.
Facebook turning into Meta making the 'startup' be the whole companies mission is a bold new idea, which I'm skeptical can work. But it's interesting.
The company takes the risk rather than you personally. If it fails but you maintain good relations with the rest of the company you lose nothing and just transfer elsewhere (I guess, I’ve never worked at a big company preferring to go it alone)
Less risk yes, but more importantly, for me, more stability. I can still hustle and innovate, but within the context of a full-time job where I can collect a (usually) steady paycheck.
I’m far more motivated by working on cool projects, so the reward for me is just as salient if I build something cool within someone else’s company or my own… I guess, having never done the latter.
Part of the problem is that Oculus has all the overhead from Meta’s regulatory compliance burden, so they can’t escape some of the most frustrating pressures.
Meta could have a subsidiary that does nothing but stamp out manhole covers.
That subsidiary would have a far higher compliance burden than any other manhole cover manufacturer.
Their past choices have consequences. It’s too late for them to “just not” do anything to reduce that burden.
How does this solution work? Does every team work this way? Is there no HR but only local administration? Or is it only a few teams who get this privilege? How do you avoid us vs. Them mentality in that situation?
Well most of the company still needs to keep the cash cow running. So it’s only 10% of the company at most typically. You just have to have your future bets simultaneously be taken serious and isolated from the middle management and cyclical swings of the parent company.
Often companies get excited about a new idea, staff and finance them well… then after a year or two they get thrown into the wider system and expected to survive.
Eventually they are absorbed and managed as if they are the old cash cow, needing layers of management, risk adversion, accelerated timelines, and new ‘processes’ to fix every small problem instead of focusing on the bigger picture.
> Spin "the other bets" out as a separate company.
Aha, glad somebody is seeing the same thing I'm seeing.
The problem with Google is that it is too large, and too successful. Their idea of having experimental projects is a good one, the problem is that Google makes so much money that they don't commit to them. They become too dilettante about them.
The fix is to do spin-offs, say keeping a minority stake at less than 20%. This generates capital for Google, gives them a share of the upside, but they don't have too much influence on the spin-off. So it's Death or Glory for the spin-off. They are forced to make whatever it is they invented work, or face extinction. There is a smaller management team, focussed on success.
This strikes me as a much better proposition than what we see at the moment, with Google just dabbling around pouring money into something they'll eventually get bored with.
You'd think that what with all the big brains at Google, someone would have thought of this. Maybe someone at Goldmans should make a pitch.
The issue is if they did this, what would happen is:
1) An enormous pile of cash would accumulate on Google's balance sheet.
2) The spinoffs would be subject to normal commercial rules about risk, rate of return and such.
3) The spinoffs couldn't be "brand Google." Which is a not-inconsiderable thing.
Couldn't they just be in the Google family? Like there's a startup I work adjacent to called aker BP. BP owns a 30% stake. But aker BP is a separate company that's publicly traded.
Right. Spin off a company and the spin-off now needs all those corporate functions that cause many developers to ask "What do all those people do?" It's not purely duplicative as such things scale with size to a certain degree. And it depends to some degree on how the spin off is structured but there's almost certainly a lot of incremental headcount and other expense.
I hadn't heard this this term before but I think it is pretty accurate in many organizations. Nothing is worth doing as its impossible to prove ROI conclusively - just do what the boss says instead.
There are lots of companies that entertain this solution. There are just very few examples of it working for the simple reason that this advice generally doesn't work. We look at the one company that succeeds and "say why didn't we just do that?" without remembering that there were 10 other startups that failed. The more reliable solution is to use the same wisdom of hindsight to pick winners and just buy out the one that succeeds. Facebook bought instagram, but none of their internal efforts have produced anything so useful.
The only experiences I've seen of intrapreneurship didn't solve these problems, since funding was guaranteed and their leadership basically worked for the "parent" company.
The Clayton M Christensen solution to big companies ignoring obvious problems is to have isolated small teams “infrapreneurship” who aren’t under the pressures of the larger org. With Meta’s push towards VR it’s obvious Oculus’s purpose is now Meta’s purpose. And all the downside that comes with such a thing.