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Comment by beaned | Hacker News Reader

One thing I really like about Larry Page is that it's obvious he never really wanted to be a manager. He's a real nerd at heart who likes technology. But he also realized the value of what he created and acted as a good steward for 20 years. He took the reigns when he needed to, and let others take over when the time was right. He's still one of the people I look up to most.

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> He took the reigns when he needed to

I strongly disagree. Alphabet is an unfocused company which seems to treat product releases as experiments that can be killed at any time without warning. There's a culture that incentivizes more experiments rather than better products.

The aimlessness is obvious in the frequent and baffling product renaming, reorganizations (like Nest joining Google), duplicated/overlapping products, and killing of acquired products.

A smart CEO knows how to focus, build on early success (rather than abandon), and tell a coherent brand story.

One of the first initiatives Larry undertook when he became a CEO is to "put more wood behind fewer arrows" by canceling a ton of bullshit projects that _haven't_ yet been released to the public, and some that have, as well. So if you're going to blame Larry for anything, this is not it.

I'm sure his intentions were good. It doesn't mean he followed through or succeeded.

If they canceled a "ton of bullshit projects" and still ended up with a time when Hangouts, Hangouts Chat, Hangouts Meet, Allo, Duo, Messages, and Voice are all actively used but somehow still missing important fixes/features, then he utterly failed.

No one gets credit for the things they didn't release when the things they did release are still baffling and often result in a betrayal of their loyal users.

Plus ChromeOS, chrome browser, Android, Android TV, Google TV, fuscia. They just can't seem to figure out how to own the set top box (which is obviously hard, it took Microsoft forever too and it's still too expensive, where is the $30 Xbox).

Chrome OS and Android are a worse version of ios and macos.

Yeah from my limited view when I was there as an L4, Google felt very much run by a weird network of politics and some bureaucracy. Mid-high level VPs seemed like they controlled things a lot more than real higher-ups.

I think this can be... interesting? Trying to give more power and autonomy to individual teams is nice (there were some efforts that tried explicitly to map things to some kind of free market model). Sometimes higher-ups would be like "hey we're all gonna migrate to technology X" but individual teams were like "lol nah the new thing sucks" and keep using it and nothing really ever happened. But I think that attitude also kinda opened the door for a large political/influence market. And there's not _real_ market pressures on individual teams that I think tend to keep the actual free market a little closer to ground truth.

This all reminds me of a critique I'd heard of flat organizations, which is that all groups of people are going to have power structures, and by not formalizing them, all you're doing is allowing them to opaquely evolve in strange ways on their own.

I really wish that someone could study internal Google politics and actually understand it and map it all out.

> He's still one of the people I look up to most.

I don't. He's allowed Google to become many of the things he's long stated he was opposed to. Either he never had his stated values in the first place, or he's turned his back on them in later years.

> he took the reigns

Friendly amendment: reins

I always thought of that as a pun between “reins” (a thing you use to control a horse) and reigns (what a monarch does).

Perhaps it was a pun?

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