"Google is a technology-driven company -- one founded by computer science prodigies who have hired more than 50 computer science Ph.D.'s."<p>In 2002 this was weird.<p>Internet entrepreneurs were not expected to be compsci Ph.Ds back then.<p>AVC discussed a new kind of tech CEO recently:<p>"The new tech CEO archetype is a computer scientist who got into product management early in their career, led large product teams at a big important tech company, is in their 40s, and has great taste in technology, tech talent, and most of all tech products."<p>Google was one of the first internet businesses to succeed big with computer scientists at the top, leading product.<p><i></i>EDIT, again:<i></i><p>Google is quite a different beast from Sun, SGI, or Viacom. You might disagree but that's OK. Somebody is always wrong on the Internet.<p>2002 was shortly after the dotcom bubble. Nobody knew what was going on or going to happen. The rise of computer scientist lead consumer-facing tech companies would have surprised people who had expected Pets.com to rule the world.<p>As the NYT article noted, Google was swimming against the tide at the time. History has proved them right.
Most of the comments here assume that this is a story that eventually had a happy ending, but I'm not 100% sure that's true.<p>Google eventually did find its business model in AdWords, of course, which moved the company from the fringes of the online advertising market to its heart. But the logic of advertising as a business model eventually led them to have to reject a lot of the things that early Google held sacred.<p>Back in Ye Olden Days, for instance, that if you looked at Google's "Ten Things We Know To Be True" manifesto (<a href="http://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/</a>), you would find a flat statement that one thing Google would <i>never</i> do was provide content like stock quotes and weather reports. Why? Because being the place people went for stock quotes and weather reports was how Yahoo did things, and early Google went out of its way to let you know that it was not going to be Yahoo. Yahoo was a big, messy, unfocused portal; Google was laser-focused on one thing and one thing only, search.<p>But then came advertising, and suddenly the logic that had led Yahoo into all those niches led Google right into them too. The advertiser's dream, of course, is to be in every last place where people turn their eyeballs; and things like stock quotes and weather reports aren't sexy computer science problems, but they <i>are</i> looked at. So Google quietly dropped that language from the "Ten Things" document and started Yahoo-ing themselves up.<p>Fast forward a decade-plus, and like kudzu, Google has slowly expanded into a million niches nobody back then could have foreseen. It's in my maps and my phone and my TV and my car; it's <i>everywhere.</i><p>In other words, Google found success by becoming the thing they originally positioned themselves as never wanting to be. Which turned out to be a pretty good business model! But it's also one of the hardest pivots in the history of pivoting.
I think what's most telling about this article is how little people outside of tech understood about the internet. I guess the dot com crash helped with the FUD, but the takeaway for me is that usually news orgs are behind when trying to understand where tech is going, and their insight can be stunted because of this.
What's amazing about Google is how problematic the quest for new business models is for them in spite of their advantages, and they are almost cursed by their success in one domain polluting the others.<p>But their really large problem is they're too smart and strategic for their own good. If you look at the ecosystems they construct the only long term winner in them is Google, and other companies are now highly aware of this.
they had soemthing that attracted a lot of eyeballs, but nobody wanted to pay for.<p>using ads as a substitue for micro-transaction was a brilliant idea, made google possible.<p>and ever since then, no other venture/product coming out of google has reached even a fraction of that revenue. you could argue that the alphabet split is not honest enough. core google should have been the ad engine, that's it. the one real, tough business they're operating. the rest seems like a PhD playground with not a lot of accountability.<p>whoever at google really had the idea for ads is the true genius behind their success.
Ads subsidize the existential 'can we try to solve this before we die' projects that Larry and Sergey consume themselves with.<p>Those projects were starting to weigh down Google's bottom line. Alphabet was a reaction to this in that - 'ok brainiacs at these side projects; you have a limited window to become remotely self sufficient; this won't go on subsidized forever'.<p>But again, most of Google's other web products are subsidized by ads. Google is _trying_ to become a pay-first product company, but they really have a disdain for support - they hate support. It's going to be interesting to see Google try and become a product company if the ad spigot starts to slow.