I hate hate hate this kind of politicking and conspiring to team up during meetings. Not to mention the fact that he presented an entirely dishonest slide deck.
This is poison for any organization, and keep in mind that it can (and does) happen in even the smallest of startups. As a leader you need to be vigilant and stamp it out, if you want your company to be healthy.
Edit: And the way you stamp it out is to simply not promote the people who practice it, and promote those who don't. Once it has risen to the higher ranks I agree it is difficult to remove (although it can be done when, for example, Steve Jobs returns to Apple and cleans house).
But hate it or not, this is reality in the corporate world. Knowing the correct technical answer is nowhere near as difficult as getting the powers-that-be to agree with you.
For small startups, perhaps you can stamp it out. At large corporations, it isn't quite that easy.
I agree with you but I'm not sure this type of conspiracies are possible to detect when so many senior managers and people close to the founder are in on it. Larry and Serge are completely dependent on the people who surround them and if they start questioning every single initiative, Google would risk becoming draconian and have a distrustful atmosphere.
Came here to post this. I'm really sad to see this kind of practice going on in Google now. Moreover, the fact that they cooperated with an article about it is slightly disturbing. How are all the other people involved with the deal going to feel when they find out they've been had?
I disagree. One guy became convinced, for honest and legitimate reasons, that the deal was no good, and he went to the right people and convinced them, using honest, legitimate reasons, that the deal was no good, and then the guy who was properly placed to make the decision scotched the deal while honestly presenting his reasons for opposing it.
Maybe I'm a little jaded, but that sounds pretty darned good to me. I would call it "politics" if the people involved did things for selfish reasons, hid their true motivations, spread misinformation to support their cause, or conspired to avoid oversight. When someone does things for the right reasons, is open about his reasons, and doesn't override other people using authority he doesn't have, it's hard to see him as underhanded. So the guy who made the decision stage-managed a meeting to dramatize his reasons for deciding as he did -- so what? The guy presenting the slide deck hid his opinion about the deal, but only for dramatic purposes, and only at a point where his opinion had ceased to matter because the exec in charge had already made up his mind.
If all this is true, I would have a problem with a co-worker who would stand up and lie. By starting the meeting by being "super supportive" while knowing along with co-conspirators that you were trying to kill it, a good deal of creditability has been destroyed.
Maybe I am naive, and this is how things really get done, but regardless of which side I might have been on during this meeting, he is no longer trusted.
I kind of agree here. I think it says more about Googles culture not being all that different from any other big company. This article insinuates to me that politics are more important than sound ideas that are good for the business. If the skype deal was bad because it would need a large overhaul, why not just lay out a convincing case to that effect?
If anyone ever wants to know why I don't work at Google any more and why I would decline their offer if they asked me to come back, I would point to this example.
If you thrive in that kind of environment where you "plant hand grenades so you can de-rail the deal" by all means go there. I don't. Every place in Google I looked at had this sort of culture.
So ... If "cloud computing" is the new paradigm that Google works in, and that's why they should avoid the old "peer to peer" paradigm that Skype is using, where does that leave "client/server"?
I had serious problems making sense of that. I guess they mean that since Skype is peer to peer, that leaves too few places for Google's server-oriented infrastructure to inject advertisements?
Actually, I had a major problem with that as well, especially this sentence: "He concluded that one of Skype's key assets -- its peer-to-peer technology -- was a mismatch for Google, which worked on the newer paradigm of cloud computing."
I think the underlying problem is voice-recognition technology. I read somewhere (sorry, no link right now) that Google is using Google voice to hone in on their voice recognition technology, which we are now starting to see in Android. P2P kind of side-steps the Google servers (or, to phrase it more appropriately, avoids the MITM), thereby not providing any real use to them.
Remember, Google's business model is data. Control, collection, mining of lots and lots of data. P2P just doesn't facilitate that, so that's why Google chose to reject it.
"Cloud" is the new "client/server." The "cloud" is the server and an app (browser, specialized app, w/e) on your computer (desktop, smartphone, w/e) is the client.
It's just that the server part is now [theoretically] a bunch of servers in different locations [theoretically] to allow failover. Theoretically.
And yes, I'm almost certain that's Google's problem with the Skype model: no convenient place to stick ads. (OK, sure, the client app could just get ads from Google, but if the p2p voice protocol works w/o Google servers, you can write a client that avoids the ads.)
This article makes me a bit worried about Google. It reminds me of emperors and sultans (e.g. Sergei and Page) manipulated by their courtiers (e.g. Chan).
That's just spin to make the architecture sound like a bad idea. Yes, p2p anything uses more of your upload bandwidth than any other means of communicating on the 'net. IMO, that's not "bad" because it keeps the tubes all decentralized and more capable of routing around damage. Like it's supposed to do.
Yes it does, because in addition to your own traffic, your line also has to support the traffic made by other people - with torrents, this means uploading to other people what you've been downloading.
I don't know exactly how much bandwidth Skype uses, but it has been the most reliable way of doing video-chats for me, even on the slow Internet connection I'm using.
Likely, it doesn't have anything to do with what's said, but what's unsaid... how would Google monetize that traffic/data and use it to augment their existing services?
If it's all encrypted P2P and supernodes aren't centrally located but randomly distributed throughout the Skype-net.
They couldn't place ads without rewriting the P2P to have more intercept points.
If it is about money, then I think Chan's point does hold. Google would be buying a money losing venture that doesn't fit with their own monetization model and would take years to integrate if at all.
I think a side-lesson from this article is how difficult acquisitions/enterprise sales are in general. When you are working with a huge organization like Google you really need to identify the few key people in favor of your deal and who are trying to scuttle it. I think Chan was perhaps right for Google to not buy Skype, but it's a good lesson when you are trying to get Google to buy your startup. Or even if you are trying to get a big company to license your technology or be a customer. Find your benefactors and detractors and manage both to win deals you want.
When you are working with a huge organization like Google you really need to identify the few key people in favor of your deal and who are trying to scuttle it.
More generally, this is known in economics as the agency problem of the firm. (I Googled for some handy references, but I'll let readers who are interested seek out the references that best fit their own background, as I wasn't completely satisfied with any of the links I found.) Employees of companies are naturally looking out for their own individual interests, as well as (the company's shareholders hope) the higher good of the company. Setting up company policies to provide incentives for shareholder-value-maximizing decisions is not easy, especially when many of those decisions involve predictions of an uncertain future, in which outcomes for individuals may differ from the outcome for the company.
Holy shit, Google may not Be Evil, but Wesley Chan surely is:
"As Chan helped with due diligence, even going to Europe to see Skype firsthand, he became convinced that the purchase was a bad idea for Google. He concluded that one of Skype's key assets -- its peer-to-peer technology -- was a mismatch for Google, which worked on the newer paradigm of cloud computing.
"'The worst thing about peer-to-peer is that it doesn't work well with Google,' Chan told me during an amazing interview for 'In the Plex' in February 2010. 'Peer-to-peer just eats up your bandwidth, right, it's like the old technology.'"
See, I don't get that. Perhaps his tactics were rather quiet, but he's just an employee who sees a possible acquisition as a dangerously expensive mismatch. All this shows is that he did his homework and worked hard to make sure it wouldn't happen. What's evil about that?
I absolutely do not understand what he means by p2p using more bandwidth. I think he is lying. Google will not get the thing it most covets - data. So it cannot sell ads on skype as all data will be shuttled through peer systems instead of Google servers.
I believe that very little of the MS/Skype deal is about the technology behind Skype. With 8.5 billions Microsoft could have developed the same technology or even a better technology, and it's very likely that they will completely change it in the future to better integrate Skype with their other products. The real value of Skype is in its user base and the significant number of companies that use Skype as a valuable business resource. That is potentially a much more profitable user base than that of Live Messenger and the two products together now represent a large majority in the entire instant messaging marketplace.
I wish Google bought Skype just so I could find and search archives of my conversations in my gmail. It is incredibly hard to believe how skype survives without online chat log archiving. I find it almost essential for business-related work.
I'm not convinced ... I still think Skype would have been the missing piece of the puzzle for google voice, that would have taken it from where it is now (nice-to-have) to a must-have/must-use like youtube is today.
That's a good read. The best way to prevent a wrong purchase is not to purchase it. I admire Chan's courage and slyness to sabotage that deal, he must have saved Google a few billions of dollars: Google has enormous data centers, and capable teams, lots of loyal Gmail users, there's nothing that would benefit Google by buying Skype. Those reasons also hold for Microsoft. I feel sorry for Microsoft as they just burnt a few billions for no gains --- that enormous amount of money should have been spent to hire talents and put into R&D.
>"Google has enormous data centers, and capable teams, lots of loyal Gmail users, there's nothing that would benefit Google by buying Skype. Those reasons also hold for Microsoft."
Data centers and capable employees are not reasons one way or the other (unless the company suffers from NIH syndrome); they are simply facts. Loyal users are, on the other hand, a consideration - but there are fundamental differences between Google's customers and Microsoft's particularly in regards to Microsoft's B2B orientation versus Google's ad revenue based model.
While peer to peer is problematic for Google's core revenue stream which requires consumers to frequently access Google's servers, peer to peer is perfectly consistent with Microsoft's core business wherein customers' contact with Microsoft's data centers is relatively infrequent and intermittent - e.g. Microsoft's revenue model works if a customer only contact with Microsoft servers is once a month on patch Tuesday.
In the long run, Microsoft can certainly screw the pooch on the deal. However, the purchase leaves no doubt that Microsoft sees telephony as far more than mobile. One could argue that they have made Google Voice a distant second in the space, e.g. very limited geographic availability for user accounts.
It depends what immediate plans they have. If they want skype-like voice/video features for integration in some product(s) soon it may make more sense to buy in the already working tech and just add what is needed for the integration. Designing, building and testing their own code and infrastructure could be cheaper in the long run but would take far longer than just buying in the code, talent and infrastructure that Skype already has.
Also the MS brand does not command immediate trust in many, so convincing users to use an MS product over something else is not as easy as it once was. As well as the code, people and infrastructure they've got the brand, a name that a lot of the general public already "trust" as they already use a product carrying that brand.
"this is the dumbest piece of shit"... I've read in a long time!
All the p2p FUD is just that. In TV like Skype the data path is still p2p. only call setup is server based.
That's the case only when the clients are not NAT'ed. When they are, Skype uses supernodes (other clients who are not NAT'ed and have good connections). Other technologies have different names for this, but basically need a 3rd party with public interfaces (e.g. in SIP applications, you often have media relay servers).
Google has the Gizmo7 technology. If Microsoft starts making Skype really suck, Google is in a good position to jump in with the solution. The problem is, if Microsoft does things right.
[+] [-] mrshoe|15 years ago|reply
This is poison for any organization, and keep in mind that it can (and does) happen in even the smallest of startups. As a leader you need to be vigilant and stamp it out, if you want your company to be healthy.
Edit: And the way you stamp it out is to simply not promote the people who practice it, and promote those who don't. Once it has risen to the higher ranks I agree it is difficult to remove (although it can be done when, for example, Steve Jobs returns to Apple and cleans house).
[+] [-] synnik|15 years ago|reply
But hate it or not, this is reality in the corporate world. Knowing the correct technical answer is nowhere near as difficult as getting the powers-that-be to agree with you.
For small startups, perhaps you can stamp it out. At large corporations, it isn't quite that easy.
[+] [-] arkitaip|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slackerIII|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcredzero|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reso|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkarl|15 years ago|reply
Maybe I'm a little jaded, but that sounds pretty darned good to me. I would call it "politics" if the people involved did things for selfish reasons, hid their true motivations, spread misinformation to support their cause, or conspired to avoid oversight. When someone does things for the right reasons, is open about his reasons, and doesn't override other people using authority he doesn't have, it's hard to see him as underhanded. So the guy who made the decision stage-managed a meeting to dramatize his reasons for deciding as he did -- so what? The guy presenting the slide deck hid his opinion about the deal, but only for dramatic purposes, and only at a point where his opinion had ceased to matter because the exec in charge had already made up his mind.
[+] [-] kznewman|15 years ago|reply
Maybe I am naive, and this is how things really get done, but regardless of which side I might have been on during this meeting, he is no longer trusted.
[+] [-] S_A_P|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toddmorey|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulrademacher|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|15 years ago|reply
If anyone ever wants to know why I don't work at Google any more and why I would decline their offer if they asked me to come back, I would point to this example.
If you thrive in that kind of environment where you "plant hand grenades so you can de-rail the deal" by all means go there. I don't. Every place in Google I looked at had this sort of culture.
[+] [-] unwind|15 years ago|reply
I had serious problems making sense of that. I guess they mean that since Skype is peer to peer, that leaves too few places for Google's server-oriented infrastructure to inject advertisements?
[+] [-] mirkules|15 years ago|reply
I think the underlying problem is voice-recognition technology. I read somewhere (sorry, no link right now) that Google is using Google voice to hone in on their voice recognition technology, which we are now starting to see in Android. P2P kind of side-steps the Google servers (or, to phrase it more appropriately, avoids the MITM), thereby not providing any real use to them.
Remember, Google's business model is data. Control, collection, mining of lots and lots of data. P2P just doesn't facilitate that, so that's why Google chose to reject it.
[+] [-] delinka|15 years ago|reply
It's just that the server part is now [theoretically] a bunch of servers in different locations [theoretically] to allow failover. Theoretically.
And yes, I'm almost certain that's Google's problem with the Skype model: no convenient place to stick ads. (OK, sure, the client app could just get ads from Google, but if the p2p voice protocol works w/o Google servers, you can write a client that avoids the ads.)
[+] [-] prewett|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dstein|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulrademacher|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshaidan|15 years ago|reply
This quote intrigues me the most. Is peer-to-peer really bad, and uses a lot of bandwidth, or is it just bad for Google?
[+] [-] delinka|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bad_user|15 years ago|reply
I don't know exactly how much bandwidth Skype uses, but it has been the most reliable way of doing video-chats for me, even on the slow Internet connection I'm using.
[+] [-] r00fus|15 years ago|reply
If it's all encrypted P2P and supernodes aren't centrally located but randomly distributed throughout the Skype-net.
They couldn't place ads without rewriting the P2P to have more intercept points.
If it is about money, then I think Chan's point does hold. Google would be buying a money losing venture that doesn't fit with their own monetization model and would take years to integrate if at all.
[+] [-] meterplech|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokenadult|15 years ago|reply
More generally, this is known in economics as the agency problem of the firm. (I Googled for some handy references, but I'll let readers who are interested seek out the references that best fit their own background, as I wasn't completely satisfied with any of the links I found.) Employees of companies are naturally looking out for their own individual interests, as well as (the company's shareholders hope) the higher good of the company. Setting up company policies to provide incentives for shareholder-value-maximizing decisions is not easy, especially when many of those decisions involve predictions of an uncertain future, in which outcomes for individuals may differ from the outcome for the company.
[+] [-] kragen|15 years ago|reply
"As Chan helped with due diligence, even going to Europe to see Skype firsthand, he became convinced that the purchase was a bad idea for Google. He concluded that one of Skype's key assets -- its peer-to-peer technology -- was a mismatch for Google, which worked on the newer paradigm of cloud computing.
"'The worst thing about peer-to-peer is that it doesn't work well with Google,' Chan told me during an amazing interview for 'In the Plex' in February 2010. 'Peer-to-peer just eats up your bandwidth, right, it's like the old technology.'"
[+] [-] Apocryphon|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yalogin|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Hipchan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benologist|15 years ago|reply
What an odd article.
[+] [-] jellicle|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gabriele|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaidf|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trustfundbaby|15 years ago|reply
But that's just me.
[+] [-] cygwin98|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|15 years ago|reply
Data centers and capable employees are not reasons one way or the other (unless the company suffers from NIH syndrome); they are simply facts. Loyal users are, on the other hand, a consideration - but there are fundamental differences between Google's customers and Microsoft's particularly in regards to Microsoft's B2B orientation versus Google's ad revenue based model.
While peer to peer is problematic for Google's core revenue stream which requires consumers to frequently access Google's servers, peer to peer is perfectly consistent with Microsoft's core business wherein customers' contact with Microsoft's data centers is relatively infrequent and intermittent - e.g. Microsoft's revenue model works if a customer only contact with Microsoft servers is once a month on patch Tuesday.
In the long run, Microsoft can certainly screw the pooch on the deal. However, the purchase leaves no doubt that Microsoft sees telephony as far more than mobile. One could argue that they have made Google Voice a distant second in the space, e.g. very limited geographic availability for user accounts.
[+] [-] dspillett|15 years ago|reply
Also the MS brand does not command immediate trust in many, so convincing users to use an MS product over something else is not as easy as it once was. As well as the code, people and infrastructure they've got the brand, a name that a lot of the general public already "trust" as they already use a product carrying that brand.
[+] [-] cybernytrix|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] netpenthe|15 years ago|reply