Early Googler here. It's funny how often the story of the mass-firing is misreported. This article gets two basic facts wrong:
1) Larry was targeting engineering management, not project management.
2) Nobody was fired. The engineering managers shifted to pure engineering roles (an easy move, since they all had technical backgrounds).
On many teams, the managers continued managing, but they did it more discreetly, taking care to stay out of Larry's way. A year or so later, after the engineering staff had doubled in size, it became clear hat it wasn't practical for one VP (Wayne Rosing) to have 200 direct reports, and engineering management came back out of the shadows.
I was at Google during the Eric Schmidt years and thought the author captured it pretty well, including:
* A basically coherent, well-run, thriving place to work; except:
* Lots of executive infighting, especially certain execs; and:
* Larry's eccentric, seemingly bored behavior during high-level reviews.
Larry definitely seemed frustrated and out of touch with the rest of the management team. And Eric seemed to see it as his responsibility to try to manage that dynamic while keeping the ship pointed in a safe direction.
Possibly there is a lot more source material about this phase of Google history for the author to draw from.
#2 is actually in the story. Unless you're saying they got the particulars wrong?
"The project managers Page had intended to fire that day were instead brought into Google’s growing operations organization, under the leadership of Urs Hözle."
>In the end, the layoffs didn’t stick. The project managers Page had intended to fire that day were instead brought into Google’s growing operations organization, under the leadership of Urs Hözle.
Actually, few paragraphs later, he did say they are not fired.
"In the end, the layoffs didn’t stick. The project managers Page had intended to fire that day were instead brought into Google’s growing operations organization"
I realize that it's an aside in the article but I wanted to contradict something:
> What’s less well understood is that Apple’s board and investors were absolutely right to fire Jobs. Early in his career, he was petulant, mean, and destructive
This idea (Jobs needed to be away from Apple to improve himself) gets mentioned a lot but I think it's nonsense.
First: Jobs was petulant, mean and destructive to people he disagreed with – for his whole life. He never dropped this trait. It might have appeared that he mellowed but he really just left an Apple that he no longer controlled and started another company where he had full control (he owned Pixar as well as NeXT but never exerted full control there).
Second: Was Apple really right to fire Jobs? In his first 7 years at Apple, Jobs oversaw (not designed or engineered) the only successful product lines in Apple's first 20 years: the Apple 2, the Mac and the Laserwriter. The latter two happened against the best wishes of the board who only wanted to focus on the Apple 2. In the 12 years after Jobs left, Apple never launched another successful hardware product line, it merely upgrading the existing products (Mac II, PPC Mac or unsuccessful ideas like the Newton). The early 90's at Apple's R&D in particular was completely chaotic and directionless sinking billions into Pink, Taligent, OpenDoc, CHRP and other doomed initiatives.
Jobs didn't need to leave Apple to fix himself. He left Apple because he disagreed with everyone (in hindsight: probably rightfully so) and he couldn't fire them. When he returned, he had the authority to fire everyone he disliked (and he did).
As for the comparison to Larry Page – I don't think they were as similar as the article implies. Jobs – for better and worse – was his own special brand of crazy.
>"Second: Was Apple really right to fire Jobs? In his first 7 years at Apple, Jobs oversaw (not designed or engineered) the only successful product lines in Apple's first 20 years"
I would argue that Jobs had any influence in the Apple II whatsoever, in fact according to Wozniak in iWoz, Jobs attempts to influence the Apple II originated the only fights the two of them ever had.
On the other hand, Apple II was originating the vast majority of the revenue and in comparison the original mac had a very limited success.
This idea (Jobs needed to be away from Apple to improve himself) gets mentioned a lot but I think it's nonsense. First: Jobs was petulant, mean and destructive to people he disagreed with – for his whole life. He never dropped this trait.
You don't think age, experience and his spirituality made any difference at all to these tendencies and the ways he applied them?
Of course we'll never know what would've happened had he stayed at Apple.
But I find it very plausible that had he stayed, the company could have ended up in even worse trouble, and that the maturity, experience and outsider's perspective he developed in his time away were critical in enabling him to attain the level of success he achieved on his return.
"This idea (Jobs needed to be away from Apple to improve himself) gets mentioned a lot but I think it's nonsense."
That's a very sweeping statement. I take it you have first hand experience (worked for Apple in the early days) or have extensive apple reporting experience. I don't think the point being made is that he "needed" to be away from Apple to improve himself. The point is that he was a very bad manager at Apple and had considerably improved when he came back. I think I read somewhere Woz saying he had to learn a lot about being a good manager from Mike Markula and others in the early days and I think in part John Sculley was brought in to correct these deficiencies. In that sense Larry Page and Jobs are similar - they were both green managers who made some awful decisions and had to learn a lot, if grudgingly from professional managers before becoming the great business leaders we see them to be.
A major thing Jobs learned in between his tenures at Apple is that it's not enough to design great products, you also have to design a great business model that can deliver them to market. Business model design is just as difficult IMO. (He learned this at Pixar positively, and at NeXT negatively. Pixar's campus is a great example of business design, along with their deal with Disney. This skill also sheds light on why he hired Tim Cook so early after his return to Apple.)
Whether Jobs would have learned the same without NeXT/Pixar is anyone's guess. I suspect he would have.
Dear god, those are words that still chill me with the memory of hype and shattered expectations.
The rest of your analysis is fairly spot on. Although I do think that Steve grew some outside of Apple. The reality is that Apple needed its years of failures without Jobs to realize how much he was needed. Really, even when they brought him back, they didn't understand how huge his impact would be. They just thought that they were buying NeXT with a bonus.
I was under the impression that Jobs wasn't fired, but that it was his choice to leave Apple. I'm aware almost every source out there (including quotes from Jobs himself) will say that he was fired, but from what I recall from reading iWoz, this isn't true.
There are some truly strange and incongruous turns of phrase in this article - "Google's human resources boss, a serious woman with bangs named Stacey Sullivan", "Finally Rosing, a bald man in glasses, began to speak", "Though he was an appealing presence with above-average height and nearly black hair", etc.
It strikes me the author would far rather be writing Mills & Boon novels than articles for Business Insider.
"Woman with bangs." I cringe any time I see a writeup of a female engineer or executive where attention is drawn to her hairstyle, clothes, or shoes. It's unnecessary and undignified.
Are there any articles about Sergey's role in the company ? There have been a few since Larry took over as CEO, and I feel this article greatly downplays Sergey's role.
I agree. The article makes it seem like Larry is the driving force behind Google and Sergey is just along for the ride (aside from the meetings they take together and the ability to argue out points). Maybe that wasn't what the author intended but it seems like a side-effect.
It's not just journalists. Both Amazon's Betas and HBO's Silicon Valley could not resist the temptation to make Asperger's jokes in their first episodes. HBO's Silicon Valley's usage even made it into the trailer. To be fair, I suppose an argument can be made that the shows are reflecting the common view of people in technology.
It's weird to me, because I don't think being nervous around people you're not familiar with is at all odd. Plenty of people I have worked with are very shy around new people, but absolutely open up as you get to know them. I don't think many of them at all are with any significance "on the spectrum", ignoring the trivial argument you can make for everyone being on it to unnoticeable degrees.
Just to clarify what you mean by "on the spectrum", do you mean the mental illness one? It's a new expression for me and searching only came up with things related to autism, etc.
"he expected he’d have to make a choice between becoming an academic and building a company. Choosing the former would mean giving up the opportunity to become the inventor of widely used applications. But building a company would force him to deal with people in a way he didn’t enjoy."
How overly simplistic and descriptive that is. Going academic, would, in it's most 2014'ish, pop-cultaral-way, mean that you probably wouldn't go on to make any cool apps.
I mean, yeah, obviously? And how weird it is to have such a big life choice distilled down to the possibility of creating popular apps or not. Such black and white-ification with the intention of creating a conflict heavy narrative, with a healthy dose of current tech mindset splashed onto it.
And that whole "Page is the Jobs of Google" section was entirely grasping at reader-revelations, without actually creating any. It's lazy thinking to compare two iconic tech heads, especially if one of them is Jobs. Another one in the long row of heirs (cook, ive, musk etc etc).
"Forty-one years after those words were published, in 1985, a 12-year-old in Michigan finished reading Tesla's biography and cried.
This was Larry Page."
If you manage to get through the introductory number slalom, it reads like the script for a trailer to a new action flick!
I appreciated the info in the article, but the writing was so sloppy.
What's interesting is the style of writing - very short sentences, words of few syllables. https://readability-score.com/ indicates it has a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 7.9 - it read fast, and I thoroughly enjoyed the journey it took us on.
Larry is truly amazing and no question about that. To me though, this comes as less surprise. His contributions can certainly be attributed to few not so well known facts.
1. Highly educated parents. His father has Ph.D. and is considered pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence ( source : wikipedia)
2. Mother : Comp. Science professor
3. His brother Carl Page Jr. sold company called eGroups to Yahoo!.
So when you consider all this facts together, with kind of upbringing he had it less surprise that he followed the suit and created search engine. I bet this sort of environment must have played crucial role when he went for VC capital.
If you have read crossing the chasm it talks about how a company with few hundered people can go mainstream. Larry leveraged all his background, upbringing and knowledge he had to create one of great software product.
I find it funny that Page complained about Gmail taking 600 milliseconds to load back when it was created. It probably takes longer than that these days unless you have a really fast connection.
If they had to check the server logs wouldn't they be referring to something more related to generating the html? This would remain the lowest response even on the fastest possible connection.
The one interaction I had with Larry that I remember was when we were moving from the old Google building (the "googleplex") to a much larger building in the old Silicon Graphics campus. I went there on a Sunday night to check out my desk and where I would be sitting and I ran into Larry (there was no one else around). He gave me a tour of the building and we walked up to a window where we could see the whole campus, with several other huge buildings. I asked him "how on earth are we going to fill this building?", which could have held several times the size of the company at the time, and he pointed at the other buildings and said we're going to fill all of them. Holy f*ck, I thought.
This article kind of oddly goes out of its way to erase Sergey from Google's history (and present and future). It's always seemed to me that they have a very beneficial symbiosis.
The idea of investors bringing in a "professional" CEO has largely died, thankfully. It must have been incredibly frustrating for Sergey/Larry to see a younger Mark Zuckerberg go from strength to strength as Founder/CEO while they had to pretend Schmidt was in charge for "adult supervision".
This is a great biography of Larry Page. Though there are some misreport facts and one-sided opinjon, the article captures my pulse. Only a few lengthy articles could ever retain my full attention till the end.
In particular the whole "Larry as a visionary", "Larry is socially awkward", "Larry is not traditional" makes me feel more welcome in this world. I too am that kind of person (it is up for future to judge whether I am visionary :)). But this is the exact article I need to pursue my dream of making things "happening". If you want to carry out your vision, you need to delegate. You need to set the tone "this is what we do, and we do this this way."
Ideas just happen to come to us every minute but we are too caught up in fighting the current. That's the big Google problem: it is too huge too slow too bureaucratic to get things done, even after Larry is back as CEO. This is why I am more leading toward startup environment (I am about to graduate soon), this is why people leave big corporations. I wasn't appreicating why Google was moving in so many directions. But it is true. I long know Google is outside my tech tweets. Not enough hype for me to notice until special events. Nothing exciting. I hope one day they realize simplicity is the key (please fix your UX). Outside of privacy and security worries, I believe Google does have the collective power and sum to make a life-dependent integrated platform. It is up to Google executives to decide whether they will make such platform as open as possible, as friendly as possible, to both end users, sales and engineers.
I truly envy him being a genius and intelligent at making things. I hope one day I too will be recognized. Enough said, there is always an opportunity for everything. Only I can make that happen.
"Page once told a room full of Google’s first marketing employees that their profession was built on an ability to lie."
Oh come on. As owner of history's largest ad platform and someone who's made ungodly amounts of money from it, this seems like a massively hypocritical and un-self-aware thing to say.
Marketing isn't about lying. It's about telling the truth* that gets you to buy the product, not the whole truth. Who has time to tell the whole truth?
I feel like there are so many stories of tech leaders being assholes that perhaps maybe its just a way for the author to sex up a story. That's not to suggest Page didn't act like a dick. But given that its a thread in just about every story about tech founders I have to question the severity of many of the reported actions.
I'm curious : anyone here remembers google defining its strategy as an "hypercube" ? I'm pretty sure i read about that a looong time ago, but i can't find any article about it now.
I had the privilege/fun of consulting at Google for four months last year and getting a glimpse inside the company was more than interesting.
I think the filter that projects should offer 10x improvements sets high expectations. If Google is the first to develop a general purpose AI then their valuation will approach infinity.
[+] [-] pk2200|12 years ago|reply
1) Larry was targeting engineering management, not project management.
2) Nobody was fired. The engineering managers shifted to pure engineering roles (an easy move, since they all had technical backgrounds).
On many teams, the managers continued managing, but they did it more discreetly, taking care to stay out of Larry's way. A year or so later, after the engineering staff had doubled in size, it became clear hat it wasn't practical for one VP (Wayne Rosing) to have 200 direct reports, and engineering management came back out of the shadows.
[+] [-] hglaser|12 years ago|reply
* A basically coherent, well-run, thriving place to work; except:
* Lots of executive infighting, especially certain execs; and:
* Larry's eccentric, seemingly bored behavior during high-level reviews.
Larry definitely seemed frustrated and out of touch with the rest of the management team. And Eric seemed to see it as his responsibility to try to manage that dynamic while keeping the ship pointed in a safe direction.
Possibly there is a lot more source material about this phase of Google history for the author to draw from.
[+] [-] mapgrep|12 years ago|reply
"The project managers Page had intended to fire that day were instead brought into Google’s growing operations organization, under the leadership of Urs Hözle."
[+] [-] moonka|12 years ago|reply
>In the end, the layoffs didn’t stick. The project managers Page had intended to fire that day were instead brought into Google’s growing operations organization, under the leadership of Urs Hözle.
[+] [-] fuzzythinker|12 years ago|reply
"In the end, the layoffs didn’t stick. The project managers Page had intended to fire that day were instead brought into Google’s growing operations organization"
[+] [-] brown9-2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnx123-up|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magicalist|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gilgoomesh|12 years ago|reply
> What’s less well understood is that Apple’s board and investors were absolutely right to fire Jobs. Early in his career, he was petulant, mean, and destructive
This idea (Jobs needed to be away from Apple to improve himself) gets mentioned a lot but I think it's nonsense.
First: Jobs was petulant, mean and destructive to people he disagreed with – for his whole life. He never dropped this trait. It might have appeared that he mellowed but he really just left an Apple that he no longer controlled and started another company where he had full control (he owned Pixar as well as NeXT but never exerted full control there).
Second: Was Apple really right to fire Jobs? In his first 7 years at Apple, Jobs oversaw (not designed or engineered) the only successful product lines in Apple's first 20 years: the Apple 2, the Mac and the Laserwriter. The latter two happened against the best wishes of the board who only wanted to focus on the Apple 2. In the 12 years after Jobs left, Apple never launched another successful hardware product line, it merely upgrading the existing products (Mac II, PPC Mac or unsuccessful ideas like the Newton). The early 90's at Apple's R&D in particular was completely chaotic and directionless sinking billions into Pink, Taligent, OpenDoc, CHRP and other doomed initiatives.
Jobs didn't need to leave Apple to fix himself. He left Apple because he disagreed with everyone (in hindsight: probably rightfully so) and he couldn't fire them. When he returned, he had the authority to fire everyone he disliked (and he did).
As for the comparison to Larry Page – I don't think they were as similar as the article implies. Jobs – for better and worse – was his own special brand of crazy.
[+] [-] pmelendez|12 years ago|reply
I would argue that Jobs had any influence in the Apple II whatsoever, in fact according to Wozniak in iWoz, Jobs attempts to influence the Apple II originated the only fights the two of them ever had.
On the other hand, Apple II was originating the vast majority of the revenue and in comparison the original mac had a very limited success.
[+] [-] tomhoward|12 years ago|reply
You don't think age, experience and his spirituality made any difference at all to these tendencies and the ways he applied them?
Of course we'll never know what would've happened had he stayed at Apple.
But I find it very plausible that had he stayed, the company could have ended up in even worse trouble, and that the maturity, experience and outsider's perspective he developed in his time away were critical in enabling him to attain the level of success he achieved on his return.
[+] [-] mishimin|12 years ago|reply
That's a very sweeping statement. I take it you have first hand experience (worked for Apple in the early days) or have extensive apple reporting experience. I don't think the point being made is that he "needed" to be away from Apple to improve himself. The point is that he was a very bad manager at Apple and had considerably improved when he came back. I think I read somewhere Woz saying he had to learn a lot about being a good manager from Mike Markula and others in the early days and I think in part John Sculley was brought in to correct these deficiencies. In that sense Larry Page and Jobs are similar - they were both green managers who made some awful decisions and had to learn a lot, if grudgingly from professional managers before becoming the great business leaders we see them to be.
[+] [-] erichocean|12 years ago|reply
Whether Jobs would have learned the same without NeXT/Pixar is anyone's guess. I suspect he would have.
[+] [-] crusso|12 years ago|reply
Dear god, those are words that still chill me with the memory of hype and shattered expectations.
The rest of your analysis is fairly spot on. Although I do think that Steve grew some outside of Apple. The reality is that Apple needed its years of failures without Jobs to realize how much he was needed. Really, even when they brought him back, they didn't understand how huge his impact would be. They just thought that they were buying NeXT with a bonus.
[+] [-] marbletiles|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marknutter|12 years ago|reply
I assume you know this from first hand interactions with him.
[+] [-] meylingtaing|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bshimmin|12 years ago|reply
It strikes me the author would far rather be writing Mills & Boon novels than articles for Business Insider.
[+] [-] nicholascarlson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulrademacher|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavanky|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ckenst|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cliveowen|12 years ago|reply
Journalists have a tendency of portraying figures in tech circles as being on the spectrum, while very often that isn't the case.
[+] [-] dmunoz|12 years ago|reply
It's weird to me, because I don't think being nervous around people you're not familiar with is at all odd. Plenty of people I have worked with are very shy around new people, but absolutely open up as you get to know them. I don't think many of them at all are with any significance "on the spectrum", ignoring the trivial argument you can make for everyone being on it to unnoticeable degrees.
[+] [-] nicholascarlson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_sigh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gtirloni|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2012|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrJagil|12 years ago|reply
"he expected he’d have to make a choice between becoming an academic and building a company. Choosing the former would mean giving up the opportunity to become the inventor of widely used applications. But building a company would force him to deal with people in a way he didn’t enjoy."
How overly simplistic and descriptive that is. Going academic, would, in it's most 2014'ish, pop-cultaral-way, mean that you probably wouldn't go on to make any cool apps. I mean, yeah, obviously? And how weird it is to have such a big life choice distilled down to the possibility of creating popular apps or not. Such black and white-ification with the intention of creating a conflict heavy narrative, with a healthy dose of current tech mindset splashed onto it.
And that whole "Page is the Jobs of Google" section was entirely grasping at reader-revelations, without actually creating any. It's lazy thinking to compare two iconic tech heads, especially if one of them is Jobs. Another one in the long row of heirs (cook, ive, musk etc etc).
"Forty-one years after those words were published, in 1985, a 12-year-old in Michigan finished reading Tesla's biography and cried.
This was Larry Page."
If you manage to get through the introductory number slalom, it reads like the script for a trailer to a new action flick!
I appreciated the info in the article, but the writing was so sloppy.
[+] [-] ghshephard|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skkbits|12 years ago|reply
1. Highly educated parents. His father has Ph.D. and is considered pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence ( source : wikipedia) 2. Mother : Comp. Science professor 3. His brother Carl Page Jr. sold company called eGroups to Yahoo!. So when you consider all this facts together, with kind of upbringing he had it less surprise that he followed the suit and created search engine. I bet this sort of environment must have played crucial role when he went for VC capital. If you have read crossing the chasm it talks about how a company with few hundered people can go mainstream. Larry leveraged all his background, upbringing and knowledge he had to create one of great software product.
[+] [-] zhemao|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tarang|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinqi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riggins|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 627467|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vijayboyapati|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] argumentum|12 years ago|reply
The idea of investors bringing in a "professional" CEO has largely died, thankfully. It must have been incredibly frustrating for Sergey/Larry to see a younger Mark Zuckerberg go from strength to strength as Founder/CEO while they had to pretend Schmidt was in charge for "adult supervision".
[+] [-] yeukhon|12 years ago|reply
In particular the whole "Larry as a visionary", "Larry is socially awkward", "Larry is not traditional" makes me feel more welcome in this world. I too am that kind of person (it is up for future to judge whether I am visionary :)). But this is the exact article I need to pursue my dream of making things "happening". If you want to carry out your vision, you need to delegate. You need to set the tone "this is what we do, and we do this this way."
Ideas just happen to come to us every minute but we are too caught up in fighting the current. That's the big Google problem: it is too huge too slow too bureaucratic to get things done, even after Larry is back as CEO. This is why I am more leading toward startup environment (I am about to graduate soon), this is why people leave big corporations. I wasn't appreicating why Google was moving in so many directions. But it is true. I long know Google is outside my tech tweets. Not enough hype for me to notice until special events. Nothing exciting. I hope one day they realize simplicity is the key (please fix your UX). Outside of privacy and security worries, I believe Google does have the collective power and sum to make a life-dependent integrated platform. It is up to Google executives to decide whether they will make such platform as open as possible, as friendly as possible, to both end users, sales and engineers.
I truly envy him being a genius and intelligent at making things. I hope one day I too will be recognized. Enough said, there is always an opportunity for everything. Only I can make that happen.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] n72|12 years ago|reply
Oh come on. As owner of history's largest ad platform and someone who's made ungodly amounts of money from it, this seems like a massively hypocritical and un-self-aware thing to say.
[+] [-] chris_mahan|12 years ago|reply
* for varying definitions of the truth.
[+] [-] mkattam|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blazespin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zelphyr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsaul|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dosh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|12 years ago|reply
I had the privilege/fun of consulting at Google for four months last year and getting a glimpse inside the company was more than interesting.
I think the filter that projects should offer 10x improvements sets high expectations. If Google is the first to develop a general purpose AI then their valuation will approach infinity.