Does Google Want to Be Broken Apart?
October 10, 2017
There’s nothing like a 23 hour travel spree to make new thoughts flow. Sitting in a noisy airport in Tuscany, I read “Google CEO Sundar Pichai: ‘I Don’t Know Whether Humans Want Change That Fast’” surprised me.
The “management by ambiguity” leader of the GOOG granted another interview. The story, which appeared on October 7, 2017, and made its way to Tuscany on October 8, 2017, contained some statements I found thought provoking.
Let’s look at three I circled as memorable:
Item 1: Mistakes
“I recognize that, in the Valley, people are obsessed with the pace of technological change,” he says. “It’s tough to get that part right… We rush sometimes, and can misfire for an average person.”
Comment: Yep, there are impacts particularly when the outfit making the mistake may be the big dog in the kennel.
Item 2: Information control
“Once everybody has access to a computer and connectivity, then search works the same, whether you are a Nobel laureate or just a kid with a computer.”
It’s tough to find information when some of the data are [a] censored, [b] not indexed, and [c] not updated once indexed.
Item 3: We’re no big deal…
No single company or country can change the pace of progress. Nobody is trying to socially engineer anything [here] – we are trying to solve hard problems.
Interesting. I wonder if companies affected by Google’s last 20 years would agree?
Item 4: Break up my company, please!
As a big company, you are constantly trying to foolproof yourself against being big, because you see the advantage of being small, nimble and entrepreneurial. Pretty much every great thing gets started by a small team.
Will governments force Google to bunsha or will Google just break itself up?
Stephen E Arnold, October 10, 2017
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