"I’m a computer scientist, so I think computer sciences can solve a lot of problems – I may be a little biased." A little? Look, I'm a EE and sometimes I get carried away (OK, most of the time), e.g. one of my pet theories is applying control theory to societies, to change them from one state to another (how would you write the state transition matrix?)
But this gung-ho, "have hammer, will pound on any problem" approach has its limits. When Schmidt says "How many wars have started because of miscommunication? Now we can try and solve that." about the future of voice translation technology, that's not only laughable (for the foreseeable future) but it comes off as horribly arrogant to people working in other disciplines and has a bad effect on collaboration.
I have seen people on HN pragmatically applying their technical knowledge to fields ranging from healthcare to economy to the stock market. Using your non-domain expertise to get a fresh look at a hard problem is a great thing to do. As long as you know your limits.
I agree completely. I think the thing that's going to "kill google" [1] is that they tend to look at everything as a. A,gorithmic problem. This approach works great for web search, and pretty well for email (gmail really beats everyone else with their thread view of email, which can only be achieved with really smart algorithms), but groupon has showed that there is still value in traditional sales, apple that there is still value in good design, and facebook that there is still value in being cool.
[1] And by kill I mean potentially slightly slow profit growth. Google will keep being google for a long time.
9,000 interviews, at €30.00 an hour, times two interviewers, is €270,000 x 2 = €540,000.
If through recruitment agencies, assuming a 10%-of-first-year's-salary fee and average salary of €40,000,
€40,000 x 10% x 1000 = €4,000,000
I hear that you should multiply x two the gross salary to get the annual cost of an employee.
€40,000 x 2 x 1000 = €80 million.
Assuming they are permanent staff, and the risk free rate is 3%, then an additional liability of €80,000,000/.03 = €2.7 Billion Euro is created for Google. This figure makes the previous two immaterial so I am going to forget about them.
Current market capital of Google is 144.079573 billion Euro. (and somebody should tell Google's search calculator folks that it's Euro, not Euros, as 's' does not pluralise in all languages)
2.7 divided by 144 = 1.8% of market capital (or overall current share value based on most recent market price) that this should cost them. Says nothing about what this could or could not earn them.
Just thinking out loud. I probably made a mistake somewhere.
Zurich, Dublin and Paris (OR nerds, Chromium, and others) come to mind. We're always looking for solid people for our Datacenters, but they're Sekrit. Ssh!
[+] [-] Jun8|15 years ago|reply
But this gung-ho, "have hammer, will pound on any problem" approach has its limits. When Schmidt says "How many wars have started because of miscommunication? Now we can try and solve that." about the future of voice translation technology, that's not only laughable (for the foreseeable future) but it comes off as horribly arrogant to people working in other disciplines and has a bad effect on collaboration.
I have seen people on HN pragmatically applying their technical knowledge to fields ranging from healthcare to economy to the stock market. Using your non-domain expertise to get a fresh look at a hard problem is a great thing to do. As long as you know your limits.
[+] [-] alexgartrell|15 years ago|reply
[1] And by kill I mean potentially slightly slow profit growth. Google will keep being google for a long time.
[+] [-] dantheman|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hessenwolf|15 years ago|reply
If through recruitment agencies, assuming a 10%-of-first-year's-salary fee and average salary of €40,000, €40,000 x 10% x 1000 = €4,000,000
I hear that you should multiply x two the gross salary to get the annual cost of an employee. €40,000 x 2 x 1000 = €80 million.
Assuming they are permanent staff, and the risk free rate is 3%, then an additional liability of €80,000,000/.03 = €2.7 Billion Euro is created for Google. This figure makes the previous two immaterial so I am going to forget about them.
Current market capital of Google is 144.079573 billion Euro. (and somebody should tell Google's search calculator folks that it's Euro, not Euros, as 's' does not pluralise in all languages)
2.7 divided by 144 = 1.8% of market capital (or overall current share value based on most recent market price) that this should cost them. Says nothing about what this could or could not earn them.
Just thinking out loud. I probably made a mistake somewhere.
[+] [-] pygy_|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cdibona|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silvajoao|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haasted|15 years ago|reply
Apart from that, I would assume that Zurich will expand heavily. IIRC, it is the largest development center outside of Mountain View.
[+] [-] smiler|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hammock|15 years ago|reply