Edward Zitron has been reading all of google’s internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ’s antitrust case against google.
This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.
The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.
HackerNews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
MetaFilter thread: https://www.metafilter.com/203456/The-core-query-softness-continues-without-mitigation
Removed by mod
What it proves is being a greedy self serving prick that will do anything for a buck if given the chance is not the exclusive domain of white people. Anyone can be an incompetent executive.
Did you see my other comments?
Google under Brin and Page introduced many useful products, Microsoft became a household name under Gates, same with Photoshop.
What have these CEOs done after they took the reins? All I can think of is pushing for ‘cloud’.
Pichai in particular I dislike the most. He was heading the Android team. But last few years Android feels stagnant. He could’ve done much more for his supposedly passion project as the CEO of Alphabet.
That’s reasonable, but you’re forgetting the part where the CEOs don’t want to be the CEO anymore. They’ve got billions and want to spend it doing shit like wifi weather balloons or self driving cars. So they look for someone to replace them, and that replacement doesn’t have the tenure in the position to say “stop the bullshit, I want good products, not half baked ‘revenue generators’”.
But they do have an army of MBAs in the CFOs office telling them quarterly ad revenue is down 3% year over year, which means the world is ending, so they need to pump those numbers while everyone cashes out their stock before the rest of the stock holders realize the plan is to leave them now holding the bag for the now worthless-page-of-ads-before-search-results company.
It’s funny how people will find anything to blame except for the problem itself when the problem is capitalism.
And it’s not like we’ve seen anything odd happen when people systematically blame a particular race/religion/nationality in history… /S
It’s not funny. Our culture tells us to bow to authority. Be it old people in house and neighbourhood, or boss at work. We are not supposed to criticize them lest we get labelled troublemaker. Just keep your head down and walk down the beaten path.
These CEOs are just a shining example of these.
I’m still not sure you got it.
There is no issue in criticizing these CEOs. They are horrible indeed. But they are like this and they have been promoted to this spot because we’re in a system (capitalism) which values this behaviour. Not because they’re Indian…
And I’ll tell you what I told others.
Come here and try to live like how we live and you’ll understand first hand what I’m trying to say.
Don’t worry guys, it’s not racist because he said they’re “his people”.
It sure feels racist. :/
This reads like, “the Jews run the media and the banks. Trust me, I’m a Jew.”
Broadly applicable cultural norms aren’t a thing?
Please come here to Mumbai, try to live as a wagie, and see how far can you go it before the grind breaks you.
I think this is just because there are a good number of Indian people in tech. Usually it’s a white person doing this and we hardly notice their skin colour (because of racism).
India actually has a pretty healthy history of workers banding together in collective action, and coming together in mutual aid. I’d elaborate but my social media minutes are about to run out
Yes, as grunt workers (myself included).
I legit can’t recall many Indian innovators in tech. Even most tech companies here in India are copies of American companies.
Which again brings me back to my question. What have these CEOs done during their tenure other than rent seeking?
I’ve no idea why, but Amazon in particular has a huge number of Indian managers. It’s never particularly bothered me, but I do see this sentiment amongst other people of Indian origin - often the most critical of Indian managers.
Is there something specific about Indian leadership that pushes growth above anything else? The sentiment in Amazon is one of ruthlessness, and pushing growth and positive short-term metrics above everything else.
Trust me, Indian managers are considered ruthless by most fellow indians from what I heard. Our workspace culture is quite toxic compared to the west.
Look at this for a bit more insight
Yes. They’ll micromanage the shit out of everything and throw you under the bus to save their own skin.
And the mods have removed my comment for ‘Rule 3’. What the fuck.
Ah yes, Jerry Dischler, the Indian.
That was an ad guy doing ad guy things. Why the fuck the product guy do what he did? Cause he didn’t give a shit about his domain.
Edit: lmao reading it again looks like the ad guy cared more about the search than the actual search guy. Makes you look like a right dingus.
Have you spent any amount of time around software engineers who aren’t from India? You may be idealizing us - a lot.
I’ve worked extensively with devs from NY, SF and Toronto (where I’m located). The ideal “innovative” “passionate” devs are maybe 2 to a company. The rest just want to put food on the table, buy a house, buy a car, go on vacation and fuck off at the end of the day. How do you think fb and Google built their privacy nightmares? By exclusively hiring Indians? Or by dangling enough money at devs of all races who don’t give a shit?
Pretty much every single one of my colleagues will gladly write code to turn the product into complete dog shit if the “ad guy” shows up with a million dollar paycheck. What do I care? It’s not my baby. My actual real life baby’s future matters more to me than the future of whatever product my current company is working on.
Being an Indian yourself does not absolve you of your racist tirades against other Indians. Learn to be empathetic towards others. If I, a privileged dude-bro, can understand why people who grow up with extreme resource contention and competition behave the way they do, then you should get it too.
Bruh don’t be racist its not like americans or brits are not after money india sucks at a lot of things including what you just said but its not like they are the only one’s like that .
Sundar Pichai
Satya Nadella
Shantanu Narayen (CEO of Adobe since 2008)
Tech companies with Indian CEOs have defined and refined rent-seeking over innovations.
Unlike Brin, Page, Zuckerberg, Gates who had interest in technology and the product, these are just fucking yes men who exist to please the board by trying to keep the line going up, as long as they’re not required to take risks themselves.
They’ll buy competition, give shit pay to employees, and cut costs even if that harns the company in the long run.
Fuck them.
Satya Nadella turned MS around after the disaster years under Balmer. Your racism is blinding you if you think that he’s a problem - from a product perspective or from profit perspective.
Not to take up for his point, but windows 10 was in development years before Nadella. The only version of windows totally under his governance has been the disastrous windows 11. So I guess I have him to thank for finally giving me the kick in the pants to fully switch to Linux.
I guess the point I need to make is that Microsoft was not good before or during Nadella. There have been bright spots, but not enough for me to have then outweigh all the other crap pulled both during and before Nadella.
Windows is only a small part of MS.
Nadella gets a lot of/all the credit for Azure which is the only legit competition to AWS.
O365 has been great for their adoption too.
And then there’s all the “free” dev tools like GitHub (acquisition), typescript, vs code etc. which bolsters their image.
I can’t even imagine ms under Balmer giving away that much shit. Hell, I wanted to build apps for lumia and they wanted to charge me an arm and a leg just to get started. This was at a time when their store didn’t have anything going for itself.
They also fired entire QA department and crowdsourced it to paying customers.
And it’s not my racism. I’m a born and raised Indian who everyday meets people like these. Our culture is fucked up.
You talk as though every other company in the west hasn’t been enshittified too.
Idk didn’t zuck suppress a lot of war shit to please others ? Sell bad ads ? Bloat his platforms with trackers and ads ? All for profit also there is a really REALLY big reddit thread with all the bad things zuck did .
I’m not talking about Zuckerberg after 10 years of being a CEO.
I’m talking about Zuckerberg when he dropped out of college, started Facebook, and actually developed features for his new venture.
We can hate him for being a piece of shit ghoul that he is, but we can’t deny his technical skills.
Ajit Pai comes to mind.
Not really. Unlike other three, he was not born and brought up in India.
Are we playing a game where we list the names of greedy fucks who have ruined society? Because I assure you that we’re looking at a ration of 10:1, at least, of white names vs. any other ethnicity. And that’s being extremely generous. It’s all old white dudes.
Stop fooling yourself. Power is defined by “whiteness,” it’s literally a synonym for systemic power and control. If you’re in a position to negatively affect society in such a way, then you’re white.
Naming a handful of outliers means nothing. Not to mention that those people have all been furthering the goals of that systemic “white” control structure, regardless of their skin color.
Ah another racist . Why can’t you people just graso the simple that some people are just assholes and its just a person and not a race thing ?
I’m the racist? The fuck lol
Calling out the person claiming Indian CEOs are greedy because they’re Indian, for being racist is the actual racist.
Go fuck yourself.
Have the few brain cells of yours ever banded together and maybe considered that if you’re conflating “white” with “negative effects for society”, then maybe you are indeed a racist?
Bold of you to assume they have braincells
I didn’t do that, you just did. Try to grasp a little nuance.
On a systemic level, “white,” is power. Power often means negative, yes.
In the US, are Italian Americans considered white? Yes. How about Irish? Hard to think of many people whiter than the Irish. I say this as an American of Irish descent.
And yet, their inclusion in this definition is relatively recent. Up until recently, Irish and Italian people were decidedly not white. And yet, the color of their pale skin…? I don’t understand?
So clearly, the term (at the systemic level, obviously, I’m not talking about individual racism) is elastic. It is culturally defined in the context of the times.
At a systemic level, “racism” implies oppression by that power. Oppression against “whiteness” at a systemic level is not possible because there is no power in a position to oppress whites. By definition, they’re at the top.
I fully expect you to just gloss over everything I said and call me racist again. Maybe someone will read this and think twice about how they view these things.
I don’t think they claimed they were greedy because they were Indian. I think it is more of a question on why the Indian people who have been successful in tech are implementing the profit motive policies and what overlapping culture we share with India that would lead people to that capitalistic goal of profits over product. Isn’t that something worth exploring? I think it already has led to an educational discussion where one commentor mentioned the history of worker actions in India.
Oh shit guys he named three people!
Three people who are steering highly influential mega corporations.
Piss off.
You know what, I just had a great idea… Why don’t we try to actually make this at least somewhat scientific.
Let’s compile a list of the worst “most evil” corporations on the planet. Your Nestles, your Amazons, your Down Chemicals, your Union Carbides, your Godman Sachs, your Blackwaters, etc. etc. and break down their C-Suite employees by ethnicity.
Let’s see how unique this concept of greed is to Indians. I would bet my next paycheck that at the very least it would be a white plurality.
Do you have any concept of how statistics works? It’s interesting (I mean, maybe but probably not really) that you can name a few greedy Indian tech execs, and act like this is some sort of nationwide or worldwide trend. As if your ability to name three people somehow negates centuries of history of the planet (including India, “your land”) being ravaged by white people for profit at the expense of native populations.
If you think your ability to name three people is somehow meaningful, why don’t we just take a few minutes on LinkedIn to see who’s running these massive US corporations. If you want to make this a racial thing, let’s see how many of them are old white dudes. Let’s see how many of them ARE LITERALLY RUNNING THE SAME CORPORATIONS YOU REFER TO. But they’ve got one Indian dude in their C-Suite, and for you that’s a smoking gun that this is a problem with their race right?
Brain broken. Taking you at your word that you’re actually Indian (and that this isn’t some overflow from some ethno-religious, Hindu vs. Muslim bullshit), it’s pretty fucking sad that your mind seems to work this way. Talk about self-loathing.
I don’t see anything in the comment that would insinuate that.
Are you by any chance blind ?
No. Where did it say anything about anyone else? You are the one implying that this only applies to one group. The OP is just saying they are disappointed by a certain group.
🤦
Legit query. and it’s true as a stereotype of many cultures.
And this particular aspect is also at the heart of global capitalism that is wreaking havoc on the world.