‘How Google Works,’ by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg | Hacker News Reader

‘How Google Works,’ by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg

nytimes.com

64 pointssonabinu7 comments

I bought this book, started to read it, then returned it because it was so bad. It reads like an advertisement and it seems to be aimed at old ladies who occasionally use "the googles". People in the industry will find it to be a lot of information that you already know.

If you want to read about the war between Google & Microsoft, I'd suggest this one:

http://www.amazon.ca/Digital-Wars-Google-Microsoft-Internet/...

I think the target audience is not the people who are in the industry, rather the ones that are still in the 20th century. I know several oldtimer business owner who just don't get how you could even possibly think of something like agile, non-planned work hours or similar stuff.

Honestly to me, this book is great because there are so many fucking clueless managers and executives out there and they make work miserable. Thinking 10X bigger is something that rarely happens in a typical company. The recruitment process is shit as well, we have at our company an inexperienced inhouse recruiter and tech interviewers who are basically looking for bare minimum skills, fresh out of university people who can't find jobs elsewhere. Pumping out projects as fast as possible with inexperienced people is great for short-term profit but horrible for any longevity. This book would turn around and give them evidence and proof that the new world is smart people who want to work on hard problems.

I don't like these kind of MBA driven business advice books because they all suffer from survivorship bias.

But I think the NYTimes review at the end imparts its own bias over the Gundotra story. I don't have any information but speculation, but I don't think either Gundotra or Marissa Mayer left because of 'failure', I think they simply had risen as far as they could and had no internal political opportunity for advancement. At one point, Gundotra was apparently in the running to be Microsoft's CEO (Gundotra was an ex-MS VP), and with Sundar taking over everything, Vic may have just decided to do other things.

Besides, Google Plus didn't fail, no matter how often this is repeated. It failed only if you assume the goal was to beat Facebook's news feed. However, if you consider the other things it does, it achieved a lot: Unified login, G+ now has 34% of logins across mobile and the web compared to Facebook connect at 46%. G+ photos became Google's photo hosting service. Even the G+ "stream" has hundreds of millions of active users posting. It's nothing compared to Facebook, but if it is not #2, it is #3, and who wouldn't want a business with a few hundred million people posting to it every day?

Google doesn't fire people for trying something bold and then failing, especially not execs. If Gundotra was "let go", it wasn't because G+ wasn't a roaring success.

I think it was worse than Google Plus just failing.

Yes I think people often mistake that the goal of G+ was to compete or replace FB in people's daily lives. I think it was to make sure that Google has enough data to provide socially relevant targeting that FB claimed only they could provide at that time. And another was to establish a beachhead in social space as a contender should FB make a privacy or any other faux pas as they grow.

I think Google has largely succeeded in doing that.

Pretty critical review - although I already discount "how to" books written by widely successful people as often their new-found business wisdom cannot be tied directly to their success.

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