Comment by sumanthvepa
7 months ago
Full Disclosure: Prabhakar Raghavan was my skip-level manager at Yahoo! and I'd known of him well before that, from my days at IBM Research.
The author says very few people knew who Raghavan was. Clearly he isn't a computer scientist. It is more an indication of the ignorance of the writer than anything else.
Raghavan's contributions to Computer Science and, Search in particular, which were made long before he joined Yahoo!, were word-class. That is the reason he was so sought after by search engine companies. His text book on Randomised Algorithms is a classic.
Calling Raghavan a 'McKinsey' consultant is just a pure ad-hominem attack. The purpose seems to be to vilify him by association. Which is utterly ironic considering that he never worked for them or was ever a 'consultant'
As for his contributions at Yahoo!, I don't think he had any significant influence on the management direction that company took. In my opinion, absolutely no one at Yahoo!, CEO downwards, had much control over their destiny.
Yahoo! was a clusterfck all around, with the primary problem being its utterly dysfunctional board, and unfortunate share ownership structure that made it beholden to the demands of Wall St, resulting in a parade of CEOs. Personnel churn was at such a high volume, that I, an individual contributor usually seven levels below the board, calculated that the average tenure of my leadership chain to the board changed once every fifteen days.
So blaming Raghavan for what happened at Yahoo! is just stupid.
I have never worked for Google, but as an outsider, I don't disagree with the assessment, that Google Search was 'getting too close to money.' But to assign blame in this manner smells like a hit piece.
Managers, take their marching order from their bosses, ultimately this is the board of the company. If the board feels the need for revenue growth, no manager, CEO included has the power to resist too much. They advise against it, but in the end they will either need to to their biding or be fired.
Edited for typos and grammatical errors.
The author called Sundar a McKinsey consultant, not Raghavan.
>A quick note: I used “management consultant” there as a pejorative. While he exhibits all the same bean-counting, morally-unguided behaviors of a management consultant, from what I can tell Raghavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of the economy.
It also seems like a stretch to say that Yahoo's former "Chief Strategy Officer" had no influence on Yahoo's management direction.
He called Raghavan a "management consultant", whilst acknowledging that he never was a management consultant. It's slinging pejorative nonsense labels.
Yeah. The author lost me when I reached the section labeled “Heroes and Villains.” As if I was reading a comic book.
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So why needlessly call him a management consultant?
Yes it is a stretch to say he had much influence. There reason is very simple. Yahoo! was in its death throes. The core products were not bringing in revenue, and it was in the middle of multiple hostile takeover attacks by various private equity players. First it was a hostile offer from Microsoft, a hostile take over effort by Carl Icahn, and then a finally yet another, hostile take over (I forget the name of the last raider)
When there is so much uncertainty, and the fight is for mere survival, strategy has no meaning. You don't strategize, when someone is shooting you in the head.
Is it that bad to have been a mgmt consultant? My goodness
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This is a very long way of saying a very intelligent person was “just following orders”.
Gomes said no. Raghavan clearly didn’t.
If that’s not a clear cut case of “bearing responsibility” I don’t know what is.
> So blaming Raghavan for what happened at Yahoo! is just stupid.
He joined yahoo in 2005, if my memory serves correctly yahoo was already pretty much IBM-dead by then.
The downfall of yahoo was due to the hard push of popup ads in the late 90s and very early 2000s. Much like the google history of today though, maximising metrics at the cost of user experience. But it all happened in yahoo way before he joined.
I can't sign up to blaming 1 person for a company's failure.
But people need a reason however wrong and a symbol for it. Article is painting growth-hacking as "the" reason for Google's failure and a single person as a symbol. a spineless management puppet sheepskinned as a scientist. Classic expose material.
I don't agree with the article's emotion or conclusions but I can't deny that Google is in a bad, bad place. Founders don't care. User's being preyed on. No one to fight for the user's interests. Parasites eating it up feeding on whatever's left. employees and users expressing betrayal and abuse. In the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
And for the world, a loss. Almost like a good friend gone the way of drug addiction.
A lot of words to say 'I think it's ok to follow orders blindly and torch valuable technologies'. Gomes had principles, you and Raghavan do not.
I didn't really get the same message from this article.
What I got was: Raghavan is/was a world-class computer scientist in his field, but actively pursued the management track and business strategy.
And for that, well, who's the blame him? If your main goal is to make an established company make more money - making wildly unpopular decisions (as far as the customer experience goes) can be tempting and easy.
The main problem here is that Google at that point was, and still is, a monopolistic behemoth. And frankly, why would they give a shit about what the customer thinks? 99% of google users are casual users that will neve scroll past the first page of search results, and will click on whatever top links google returns.
As far as enshitifacation goes, google is one of the worst offenders - so clearly anti user-friendly strategy is being rewarded.
My favorite thing about McKinsey is that they are hated for 2 reasons:
1. Allegedly ruining companies with mismanagement.
2. Making companies people don't like too successful.
That's more an indictment of the business skills of the critics than McKinsey.
The general critique is: McKinsey over-optimizes on short term profitability over meaningful, longer term, harder-to-measure values. Your framing drops the most important aspect of the critique to make it sound contradictory.
That is not a contradiction. There are lots of ways to "ruin" a company, making all the people who interact with it more miserable, while still making that company "successful".
There are plenty more reasons than that - check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Controver... for more info.
Just a side note
The main criticisms of McKinsey (and strategy/management consulting firms in general) are:
1) They can (and have/will) consult both sides, even though there's a massive conflict of interest. It's like having the same law firm represent both plaintiff and defendant. This is the most egregious of the bunch.
2) They have deep ties with governments and the private sector, and leverage this bridge to reach their goals. Their alumni network is what keep propelling the firm.
3) They optimize for profits and recurring business (which any business does, so you can't really blame them for that...but:), and will not shy away from giving their clients morally or ethically questionable advices. This one ties back to (1).
Imagine if McKinsey is consulting Google on how to increase revenues related to customer data, while also consulting government regulators on how to deal with customer data privacy - with their own (McK) motives being maximum future revenue and extending their influence.
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