Comment by oblio
4 months ago
Xerox and Kodak, at least, stumbled into the future and then refused it.
The same thing will happen to Google & co.
And DuPont is very much alive doing DuPont things.
4 months ago
Xerox and Kodak, at least, stumbled into the future and then refused it.
The same thing will happen to Google & co.
And DuPont is very much alive doing DuPont things.
My mental model as an outsider, is the vibe out of Google is that they push the most talented folks out via process / politics. Not intentionally, just the reality of squeezing the creative type employee / work. Replacing creative smarts which is difficult or impossible to measure, with operational smarts, more easily measured. Those creative smart people mostly go on to start up other companies.
Its worked out ok for Google and others, because there's little teeth to anti monopoly, so all the big tech players can just buy the successes, which is safer than trying to grow them (esp. once the talent left). I really have no idea if this is an accurate take as its mostly vibes, sans for a few of said smart Google folks I've met in startup land(s). Yet Google is so big, they could bleed all kinds of employees telling all kinds of stories and it could all be simply random. Yet at the same time I can't help but think about every aging tech companies biggest / best products being via acquisition.
While I think monopoly is bad, I don't know if ^ otherwise is so bad. Maybe its just creative type folks _should_ avoid big tech, and build their own labs. Capital and compute are readily available to people who can demonstrate success, and its easier than ever to build and experiment in some fields. i.e. if we had stricter capital accumulation associated taxes, maybe the ills of this process wouldn't be so bad.
Bureaucrat-ification isn't a phenomenon unique to Google - it happens at every company eventually.
It's really hard to describe why it's inevitable (there are a lot of factors).
But it's self-evident really. All of the major tech players started with a single innovation that afforded them enough revenue to acquire almost everything else in their portfolio.
Aside from search, the only major product Alphabet built-in house that meaningfully moves the needle revenue-wise is their cloud segment. Youtube was acquired - and it's effectively an extension of search.
Meta had to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. Without those acquisitions, I have strong doubts they'd still be a major player today.
You can run through this exercise with Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, NVDA etc.
The common theme is they did 1 or 2 things really well, and got big enough to acquire/copy/bully smaller players out of the market.
What's crazy is most of them still rely on that one original thing they did well for >50% of revenue.
> It's really hard to describe why it's inevitable (there are a lot of factors).
I think there's a lot of small factors, but of those the biggest on (IMO) is the fallacy that throwing people at a problem gets it done faster. For some situations: yes, for all situations: no. And you need experience or some kind of sharp intuition to know when to expand and when not to expand.
Add more and more people to a job and they'll find ways to justify their value at the expense of efficiency. And there's a snowball effect from there as an org adds people who believe adding people is always good.
Then the corpo runs into layoffs and everyone throws their hands up and says "How could we have avoided this?" By not overhiring in the first place.
(All IMO naturally.)
...and there's 3M and Würth.
The story with 3M and PostIt Notes is that the idea was originally rejected my management. The inventors created a batch and distributed them to all the executive admin assistants. When they went back a second time, they had the assistants speak up otherwise there would not be any more.
I didn't bring up 3M because of the Post-it story, but because they're being a "general research" company. From open reel tapes to sticky tapes and everything in between.
Würth is also similar. They make seemingly everything in a segment (lubrication, fuel additives, cleaning, restoration, protection, etc. etc.).