It seems that I'm one of the only people here who thinks the author of the article is on to something substantial. Here's why.<p>First of all, wanting to get into social is accepting to play second fiddle to Facebook - google is not a leader but a follower in this game. They're known for innovating and this seems to be at odds with that.<p>Second, as the author points out, Google is not very good when it comes to people and how they work play and interact. This is what social is all about, and it's very hard to put into an algorithm which is the Google way of doing things.<p>Third, I agree that making all bonuses dependant on the success of their social endeavours is a huge mistake. What happens to the really good algorithmic search people at Google? Do they bust their ass of doing what they do best, or do they try to implement some kind of social search that they know nothing about because that's what their bonus depends on. What will happen to my search results because of this? Yes, it will get worse, and yes it will undermine Googles core product. What Larry has done is basically told everyone that they should start working on something Google is historically not very good at and not worry about their core business. Huge mistake.<p>Fourth, this shows a poor understanding of the dynamics of incentives, which is something that a CEO of a company as large as Google should be very good at. Paying everyone a bonus based on how one division performs is at best disillusioning to the people who don't work in that division and have absolutely no control over their bonus. It doesn't matter how hard a division works if it doesn't have anything to do with social. What will this do to their morale? At best they'll just hum along, knowing there's not much they can do, at worst they'll start cannibalising their product to try and make it social.
I completely disagree with the article. The 25% bonus is not a blunder at all. It's a big shake-up that's certain, but based on what I've been reading about Google recently, I think it's actually quite a visionary move.<p>If you've been reading Hacker News for the last few months you'l' probably have read two major complaints about the company.<p><pre><code> 1) their search results are getting spammier
2) if you're an employee on the inside, there's more politicking than engineering going on.
</code></pre>
The +1 bonus addresses both.<p>In terms of spammy results, if millions of people are applying upvotes to good results every day, true human-eyeball search QA will be working at massive scale.<p>And <i>YES</i> the spammers botnets have probably already started +1'ing their spammy links, but hey, answering that is part of the bonus. (I can think of a few algorithms already that might actually further identify spam by finding 'unnaturally correlated voting blocks)<p>+1 directly improves Google's core business, which is finding good results in web search. Having 25% of your bonus tied to the success of Google's core business is appropriate.<p>The second major issue I've read about (nearing the point of deluge) is the problem with 'internal politicking'. It happens at all mega-corporations I'm sure, but how in the hell do you address it? Individual departments work against certain other departments, they willfully work a little slower or protest a little too much and some projects that didn't deserve to die do.<p>The complaints about Google's ability to innovate are evidence of this stuff. The internal middle managers' squabbles.<p>Well what better way to ensure that you cut through the corporate squabbles than by looking at all the projects you've got going on, picking the one that you think has the best chance of helping the bottom line and saying to everyone in the company "you can either help or get the fuck out of the way. 25% of your bonus is tied to this project"<p>If morale is going to be take a hit if this project fails, then the answer is don't fail.
Huh, interesting that people here don't seem to be getting this article.<p>Every organization has a culture, and every culture has blind spots: things that it doesn't value and is not good at. Because it doesn't value them, it doesn't bring in people who are good at them. Because it doesn't have people who know about them to remind everybody else about them, it continues not to value them.<p>The only way out of this is for senior management to realize that their beliefs about how to build a company -- the very foundation of their success to this point -- are now what is limiting them.<p>In this case, Google has gone massively overboard on hiring engineers, and has neglected designers, UX experts, human factors experts, people who understand the "soft side" of computing. What they need to do is to bring a bunch of such people in <i>and give them power</i>. But their whole hiring process is built around finding the very best engineers; they have no process for hiring "soft side" experts. Worse, they have nobody who even knows how to evaluate such people.<p>Now if Page realized all this, he could do something about it. But to realize it he has to see the limitations in his existing beliefs about who he wants working at Google, about what skills are important. <i>He has to realize he needs people unlike himself.</i> And he has to make a fundamental change in his vision of what kind of company Google is and how it can be most successful. It is very rare to see a CEO with the level of self-reflection to be able to make changes like that.
My comment there seems to have been immediately flagged as spam, so I'll say it here.<p>I think it must be much, much easier to write articles like this about managing Google than it is to actually manage Google.<p>We're talking about tying a portion of bonuses to performance in an area that is crucial to the success of this company! What a blunder, indeed.
Interesting article. I agree - Google is now singing FaceBook's mantra and potentially losing sight of their own.<p>Today, Google knows who I email most often, who my contacts are, what's happening in my life (via my Calendar), what I like to read and bookmart (via Reader), what I like to talk about (via Google AdSense/Analytics on my blog and via Search), even places I tend to go often or plan to go (via GMaps). The list goes on.<p>That is a huge piece of the puzzle. They need to figure out a way to put all of that together rather than push (and potentially fail) new "social" incentives.<p>There are two parts to this that escape me -<p>1. Whatever happened of "Google Me"? How is it that no one ever mentions that anymore?<p>2. Google has (IMO) <i>always</i> been a company that places emphasis on being algorithmic than having humans do the work for them (if that even makes sense). It's part of their DNA. That's hard to change.<p>Finally, this is Google chasing the <i>current</i> fad, and forgetting to focus on what's the next thing.<p>[Edit - Formatting]
Personally, few things rile me up like a manager giving me directives to 'evangelize' products to my family & friends on my personal social accounts. I am currently in this situation. I have no problem evangelizing on social accounts tied to the company (the company's official twitter, facebook, etc.) or writing posts on the company blog, but I do not use my personal social accounts for company business and don't plan on doing so in the future. Maybe I'm just old, but I need a separation between my business and personal life on the web.<p>I'm sure the techs who keep the servers running in the Google data centers love having 25% of their bonuses tied to social products they may truly dislike, don't use, etc.
These are all just cheap shots.<p>If something goes wrong down the road, the writer can crow "I told you so" and strut around like a rooster. If nothing goes wrong, then who remembers some unknown writer in some forgotten rag?<p>The beauty of these naysayers is that, like a broken clock (or a stuck display ;) ), they're right about the outcome (and not the cause) once in a while by sheer chance.
I think large changes to complex systems are fraught with risks, and Larry's changes are quite large. But given how different Google is, as a company, than any other company out there, its not really possible to evaluate this change apriori as a 'win' or as a 'blunder.'.<p>I've been out of the 'plex for a year. But when I worked there, every year things changed; from bonus plans, to quality of life 'perks', to who ran what. Google is good at change, they change things all the time.<p>Google measures a lot. For some it seemed like extreme surveillance but it really was mostly about measuring effectiveness. Of course it also reduced the time to catch the contractor who helped his friends help themselves to some laptops to about 15 minutes after they were noted as being missing :-).<p>They don't always interpret what they measure well. The feedback loop on that seems poor.<p>From the outside it would seem that Larry is embracing one of the core Google beliefs which are "Change things to be what you think is the better way, measure what you change, fix what you break." Does that belief scale to the CEO's office? Guess we'll see. If its broken it won't stay broken since I'm sure there are a number of experiments in place to provide feedback on its effectiveness.<p>The only danger to Google at that point is whether or not they can understand and internalize the feedback effectively. That was a skill I didn't see a lot of when I was there.
I wish Google continued to being an awesome Information Retrieval company that they always were. I loved Google's original mission, the automation and the algorithms.
I don't necessarily agree that social is a blunder, but I do agree with the analogy of comparing social to a party. Just like having a party everywhere, all the time is not appropriate, so having social elements everywhere can quickly get old.<p>I go to Facebook when I want to see what my friends are doing, but I don't necessarily want to see what they are doing all the time. Imagine if social elements were deeply integrated into Google search, distracting you with stuff from friends every time you tried to do a Google search on a programming topic.<p>The challenge I think will be to see if Google can properly integrate social aspects where people will appreciate them, and leave them out of places where they will just be a distraction or a frustration.
Imagine one central place where all Google products would be conneced. It would look like an improved Facebook main page: stream of information from gmail, reader, picasa, groups, docs, news, link recomends (+1) from friends, ORDER BY important; with search bar at top and gmail chat at the bottom. Fail or win?
In a sales organization you can tie people upto a similar performance incentive structure, because everyone (the majority) sell. The key being, the people you are incentivizing should have the ability to move the story forward. I find it odd about the entire co's bonus being attached to social, when the entire co is not allowed/designed to 'do social'.<p>What is the point of incentivizing gmail/maps/apps/search to do social? (some social widgets make not a coherent social strategy).<p>Its a textbook wrong move. May be implementation details differ - but that info is available in the article
I hate the writing of the article, but the point of having a 25% bonus tied to social being a dumb move I actually find myself agreeing with based on the information presented. (I'd love to read the full memo...)<p>People should share social features because they want to, not because they're getting a bonus. Google is ignoring an intensely valuable internal feedback mechanism by re-aligning their employees to adopt new social features without skepticism.<p>The other big problem I see is tying bonus compensation to an area where you are looking for passion and innovation is the easiest way to replace intrinsic motivation with external motivation, the latter having been proven ineffective in research over and over and over again. You can't incentivize passion, you can only create the environment for it. They will likely end up with products built for bonuses instead of products built out of passion as a result.
It strikes me that Larry Page shouldn't be making this decision about bonuses at all. It should be up to the head of social to make the call about how he wants to motivate his folks. One of the biggest complaints you hear in large organisations is that they don't get to reward their people how and when they want to. Larry Page just made this a problem for Googlers, big time.
I'm actually surprised Google is trying to compete with Facebook. Their whole premise is they develop products outside the realm of chasing someone else's product or service. This is what separates them from every other company out there.<p>To me, this decision is WAY too late, as the article points out. You can't win the game when you haven't even been on the field for the majority of the match. This is going to be a HUGE blunder and cost them dearly. Dropping a ton of cash and effort into chasing a dead horse is going to come back and haunt them. I give Page about 2 years tops before they pull the plug on him.
How is the incentive a blunder? Google employees can voluntarily devote a large portion of their paid time to any project of their choosing. By announcing this incentive, Larry is actually focusing the efforts of whole company into the market he thinks they need to grab.<p>I say the move is genious. There might be a little fewer tomato gardens on the campus at the end of the year, but he'll be leveraging the ideas and strength of the whole workforce into that single market. Zuck might very well have something to worry about now.
My impression is that the fundamental factor in play is catching eye balls. Social networking like facebook is a success on this perspective. But facebook can't be the end of the story, I hope not.<p>Stop aping existing social networking services. Make something people want, something that provides a new dimension to human interaction.<p>Smart phones is a disruptive technology change which should provide opportunities for new usage and applications which would be disruptive too. This "market" opportunity emerged post facebook and because of Android, google has a significant advantage over competitors it could and should leverage.<p>The wise points at the moon and the fool looks at the finger. Social networking is the finger. Look where it points to and target this. Restore the initiative of creativity and invention. Reconsider google wave for instance.
How much of an incentive is a 25% bonus modifier? I can imagine people (who presumably are already paid well) ignoring the incentive entirely, and continuing to work on more interesting projects.<p>Additionally, many people will be in positions entirely irrelevant to social: This includes non-engineers, perhaps sales, and people working at lower levels of the engineering stack (i.e. people working on large scale filesystems, racking servers, the chef...). These people are more likely to be alienated or more simply confused, rather than encouraged in the long run.
When I heard that Eric Schmidt was stepping down I couldn't help but be reminded of the "free ice cream" video from a few months earlier (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbg8IOfdbA0" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbg8IOfdbA0</a>). I wonder if that video hit a nerve. It should have, because this is the way a lot of people are perceiving Google these days. And I think that perception is primarily the reason Google hasn't been very successful in their social offerings.
I agree that tying these bonuses for everyone's participation is Larry Page's first big blunder.<p>I think there's two things that google can do to be a leader in the social space. Maybe you won't agree.<p>First. Buy Reddit. Buy all of Conde Nast if you have to, Larry.<p>Second. Given that search is an instant gratification thing (which google does so well) what would happen if, like in a subreddit, I wanted to be aware of goings on in a certain subject? Facebook is great for checking up on what a bunch of my friends are doing all over the world. But if I want a good daily overview of what's going on in a subject I'm interested in, with generally good coments, I go over to Reddit. Google could rule in this "automated newsgroup" space quite well. You would turn to this space to get commentary on articles all over the web. Google could keep it free from bots and not easily gamed. But Reddit's doing it right, and has the biggest userbase. (And yes, I find it pretty annoying most days, but now I filter out a lot of the subreddits I don't like.)<p>My point here is that Google should look at and learn from Reddit's model so much that it'd be better if they just bought it outright.
I think the author has seriously missed the mark in the comparison of Google vs. Facebook mission statements. Google's mission statement is to organize the worlds information. Facebook is organizing your personal/social information. That is all facebook really is, a good organization of your relationships, photos, things you like, etc. etc. This is directly inline with Google's mission.
It seems like the Page move is a step in the right direction. The article takes that premise as an assumption, and then goes on to argue that Page's first few leadership plays won't be a panacea against Google's problems, which I think is missing the point, that they're taking a good first step, at the cost of saying that it won't solve all of their problems.
I love this quote:<p><i>It focuses Google on Facebook's mission. Google's mission is to "organize the world's information." Facebook's mission is to "give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." In a way, Page's edict tells employees: "Stop working on Google's mission and start working on Facebook's.</i>
A bit of an aside from the assertions of the article, but there is some research to suggest tying anything that involves creative solutions to a bonus is actually a disincentive: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/opinion/20ariely.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/opinion/20ariely.html</a>
It's only a blunder if it doesn't work. And that depends not on the bonus but whether there's a clear top-down plan for a well-defined social product. Bottom-up development, where each team figures out whether/how to integrate into +1... that will probably amount to nothing revolutionary. If social "features" are just spread like jam around all of Google's offerings, the result will be a sticky mess that nobody wants to touch.<p>But Google has a good fall-back position with +1, since the worst case scenario is that it simply evolves into a global digg/reddit-style thumb's up signal for the relevancy of a search result (which alone would be a great result). Beyond that, success in "social" will depend on having a well-defined product that's good enough to sell itself, so I basically agree with the article.
How do you know it was an "accident?" He wants the entire company to think about integrating social into their products. He wants people to be thinking about how to accomplish this. Android, Chrome, Ads, Docs, etc.<p>By the end of 2011, a lot of "social" is going to appear in places you didn't expect.
> Google has a blind spot about the "human element" in usability<p>I agree with that. I reported a problem with search localization 3 times for the last 2 years to my friend who is working at Google. And monthes after the last time I saw the bad localization behaviour in the search.<p>I also had to involve my friend for this bug and a few gmail ones because I just could not find the feedback form.<p>1. That was a one-three years ago.
2. The bad behavior is that Google search invited a new user (without its cookie) with a locale based on geolocation instead of much better indicator - browser accepted languages.
3. This behavior is extremely annoying when you search from the Linux console in Links (or Lynx) that has no yet native language installed.
IMO, Google COULD tackle "social", but not with the same approach that worked with facebook. They ought to forget about facebook's approach and attack from another angle. I have some ideas how it could be done, but it's a bit of a conundrum to say the least.
A similar take on it was discussed here: "You Can’t Threaten People Into Being Social" <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2425512" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2425512</a>
I think there is plenty of space for Google to be more "social" without building a Facebook. FB is a form of aggregating and extracting value from tenuous social relationships that would be too much work otherwise. Google needs to make the same within their space - which is search, mail for end users and ads for content/service providers.<p>Going head-on Facebook is stupid. The one who succeeds will not have invented a better Facebook - will have invented the next social thing, whatever that is.
For everybody hating on the author, he is not just a nay sayer, he actually offered a valid solution. Also there is nothing that will disenfranchise employees faster than tying their income to something that they cannot control. Also, Google has dominated search, web mail, smartphones, this author is just lending advice on how to bring it all together for social. It might be just me but I would rather have friends tell me what's wrong with me than praise me all the time.
I found the article pretty good. It states clearly the issue:<p>Google need to be clear to their employees what the definition of success in social and they should define it based on their strengths rather than the competition's product.<p>I believe Google is very close to getting there: they need to deliver a great ChromeOS experience and they improve their apps.<p>I wait impatiently to give Google 2 photo-sharing customers who won't make it to facebook: my parents.
Why does Google need to have some centralized social product? I think that the strongest thing about +1 is that it's totally built on top of their wildly successful core product. Its social, but it's more passive, and relevance remains at the core. I don't need another timeline of stuff that is relevant to people I know, but not necessarily me.
It really seems to me that Google is failing to understand social media the same way Microsoft failed to understand the internet back in the '90s. So the question always is: what will Facebook fail to understand?
To get me to change social networks, Google will have to convince my friends to switch; especially my close ones, as using Facebook to communicate with many of them has replaced email.
I wish people would keep some of their opinions to themselves, classifying something as a 'blunder' because you don't agree with it is just bad reporting.<p>You wanted a startup and there you have it, with startups there is a certain amount of risk involved which galvanises people to succeed.