Google to crack down on office attendance
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Most Googlers are not consciously aware how accessible this information is; go/creepy from your Corp machine.
> The crackdown comes as the company is in the middle of an artificial intelligence arms race by which it has at times called all hands on deck to rapidly position itself against rivals like Microsoft and OpenAI, whose success has grown in recent months.
Like anything else, Google is it's own worst enemy. It morphed from a startup to a hedge fund plus some real estate investments (Data Centers). The company's sliding position in the industry today is a direct result of decisions made years ago around taming the "wild west" culture, as Ruth Porat described it--the culture that gave Google it's leadership position probably looked like a threat to a technocrat like Ruth. This translated into the implementation of bureaucratic, high friction procedures to do simple things like research and product development. Bureaucracy brought bureaucrats to enforce the processes. Everything became hard, so enough ridiculously smart, creative, and competent people left.
The relative proportion of those people to meh people changed just enough to point the company's nose toward the ground. Add to that changing hiring practices from focusing on raw competence to hiring for other "visible" characteristics, and you have the perfect storm. I'm unaware of enough people left in Research or in the Product teams that has a clue what they're doing.
From my perspective, the pairing of Ruth and Sundar was a principal factor in killing the company's competitiveness. If Google corrected today, we wouldn't see the impact for another 5-10 years; they're not far enough through the tunnel to see light yet.
That said, there are other valid and non-exclusive ways to explain all of this too.