Why Google Misses Opportunities: A Report Delivered by the Tweeter Thing
January 1, 2021
Here’s a Twitter thread from a Xoogler who appears to combine the best of the thumb typer generation with the bittersweet recognition of Google’s defective DNA. In the thread, the Xoogler allegedly a real person named Hemant Mohapatra reveals some nuggets about the high school science club approach to business on steroids; for example:
- Jargon. Did you know that GTM seems to mean either “global traffic management” or “Google tag manager” or Guatamala? Tip: Think global traffic management an a Google’s Achilles’ heel.
- Mature reaction when a competitor aced out the GOOG. The approach makes use of throwing chairs. Yep, high school behavior.
- Lots of firsts but a track record of not delivering what the customer wanted. Great at training, not so good in the actual game I concluded.
- Professionalism. A customer told the Google whiz kids: “You folks just throw code over the fence.” (There’s the “throw” word again.)
- Chaotic branding. (It’s good to know even Googlers do not know what the name of a product or service is. So when a poobah from Google testifies and says, “I don’t know” in response to a question, that may be a truthful statement.
Did the Xoogler take some learnings from the Google experience? Sure did. Here’s the key tweeter thing message:
My google exp reinforced a few learnings for me: (1) consumers buy products; enterprises buy platforms. (2) distribution advantages overtake product / tech advantages and (3) companies that reach PMF & then under-invest in S&M risk staying niche players or worse: get taken down.
The smartest people in the world? Sure, just losing out to Amazon and Microsoft now. What’s this tell us. Maybe bad genes, messed up DNA, a failure to leave the mentality of the high school science club behind?
Stephen E Arnold, January 1, 2021
About Those Insider Threat Security Systems
January 1, 2021
Fortinet published a report about insider threats. You can get a copy at this link. The document reveals the trends and challenges facing organizations from insider threats; that is, someone inside an organization helps a bad actor access off-limits systems and services. One statistic jumped out at me: About 70 percent of the companies in the 2019 survey “feel moderately to extremely vulnerable to insider attacks.”
What about 2020? The Hollywood trade publication Variety published “Ticketmaster Will Pay $10 Million Fine to Settle Federal Charges It Hacked Rival’s System.” Hollywood. Companies brokering tickets in the time of Covid. I learned:
Ticketmaster agreed to pay a $10 million criminal fine to avoid prosecution over charges that it illegally accessed systems of a startup rival to steal proprietary info in an attempt to “choke off” the smaller company’s business, federal authorities said.
How did Ticketmaster compromise the target? Hacking, crimeware as a service, Fancy Dan penetration testing tools?
The answer? Read it for yourself:
A former employee of ticketing firm CrowdSurge (which later merged with Songkick) who had joined Live Nation shared URLs with Ticketmaster employees that provided access to draft ticketing web pages that Songkick had built in an attempt to “steal back” one of Songkick’s top artist clients, federal prosecutors said. Ticketmaster, owned by Live Nation Entertainment, said in a statement that in 2017 it fired both Zeeshan Zaidi, former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, and the former CrowdSurge exec, Stephen Mead, “after their conduct came to light.”
How do AI infused insider trading systems work? It seems that hiring an employee from a company with interesting ways of dealing with former employees’ access rights is simple.
Companies create their own insider threat issues. No software smart or dumb can prevent problems caused by lazy, incompetent, or distracted organizations’ staff.
Stephen E Arnold, January 1, 2021
Backscratching: No Big Deal, Of Course, Among Science Club Members
January 1, 2021
I read “Facebook : Inside the Google-Facebook Ad Deal at the Heart of a Price-Fixing Lawsuit.” The write up is interesting because it reveals how high school science club thinking operates. I learned:
Header bidding helped website publishers circumvent Google’s exchanges for buying and selling ads across the web. The exchange auctions ad space to the highest bidder during the split second it takes a webpage to load. Header bidding allowed the publishers to directly solicit bids from multiple ad exchanges at once, leading to more favorable prices for publishers. By 2016, about 70% of major publishers used the tool, according to the states’ lawsuit. Google worried a big rival might embrace header bidding, such as the Facebook Audience Network ad service, or FAN, cracking Google’s profitable monopoly over ad tools, the states allege. The Facebook service said it paid publishers $1.5 billion in 2018, the last time it provided such details on its financial payouts.
This seems to boil down to a slick way to ensure that maximum money rolls in from certain types of advertisers.
Here’s the swizzle:
the states allege in the final suit, Google gave Facebook special treatment. Among other things, it allowed Facebook to send bids directly into Google’s widely used software, known as an ad server, the draft lawsuit says. Typically, bidders go through an exchange, which sends the winner on to Google’s server. By circumventing the middleman, Facebook could face less competition and save money. Google charged Facebook 5% to 10% on each transaction compared with the standard fee on Google’s exchange of around 20%, and it barred Facebook from discussing pricing terms publicly, according to the draft lawsuit.
What’s up? Nothing. Think of the deal as the lunch at one of those College Bowl type of competitions for science club members.
No big deal, of course.
Stephen E Arnold, December 31, 2020
Google Pins HR Hopes on New Executive
December 29, 2020
Perhaps this move will help Google recover some much-needed goodwill. The Times Union reports, “Google Hires New Personnel Head Amid Rising Worker Tensions.” The company has hired Fiona Cicconi, formerly the executive VP of HR at pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. One major challenge for Cicconi will be overseeing Google’s roughly 130,000 employees as most continue to work from home until anywhere from July until September of next year. She will also have to make their transition back to Googley offices around the world as smooth as possible. But working around the pandemic may be the least of her worries. Writer Michael Liedtke reminds us:
“She is also walking into a company that has seen its relationship with its workforce change dramatically in the past few years as more employees have become convinced that it has strayed far away from the ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto that co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin embraced in its early years. In 2018, thousands of Google employees walked off the job and staged public protests in a backlash spurred by concerns about how the company had been handling sexual harassment claims against top executives and managers. Google has also faced employee outrage about potential bids on military contracts and, more recently, the murky circumstances surrounding the abrupt departure of a respected artificial intelligence scholar, Timnit Gebru. After a dispute over a research paper examining the societal dangers of an emerging branch of artificial intelligence, Gebru said Google fired her earlier this month. Google maintains the company accepted her offer to resign. The rift incensed hundreds of Google employees who have signed a public letter of protest.”
Google has apologized for the way it treated Gebru, but hard feelings linger. We hope Cicconi will be able to help the company maintain a better relationship with its many employees, but the head of personnel can only do so much. The rest depends on other executives behaving well. Will the culture change?
Cynthia Murrell, December 29, 2020
Failure: The Reasons Are Piling Up
December 28, 2020
Years ago I read a monograph by some big wig in Europe. As I recall, that short book boiled down failure to one statement: “Little things add up.” The book contained a number of interesting industrial examples. “How Complex Systems Fail” is a modern take on the failure of systems. The author has cataloged 18 reasons. Here are three of the reasons, and it may be worth your time to check out the other 15.
- Complex systems contain changing mixtures of failures latent within them.
- Change introduces new forms of failure.
- Failure free operations require experience with failure.
I am not an expert on failure although I have failed. I have had a couple of wins, but the majority of my efforts are total, complete flops. I am not sure I have learned anything. The witness to my ineptitude is this Web log.
Nevertheless, I would like to add a couple of additional reasons for failure:
- Those involved deny the likelihood of failure. I suppose this is just the old “know thyself” thing. Thumb typers seem to be even more unaware of risks than I, the old admitted failure.
- Impending failure emits signals which those involved cannot hear or actively choose to ignore.
The list of reasons will be expanded by an MBA pursuing a career in consulting. That, in itself, is one of those failure signals.
Little things still add up. Knowing about these little things is often difficult. I am not away of a hearing aid to assist whiz kids in detecting the exciting moment when the digital construct goes boom.
Stephen E Arnold, December 28, 2020
Oracle: Has It Put Extra Flavor in the Cinnamon Java Ordered Up for Google?
December 25, 2020
I read “Oracle’s Hidden Hand Is Behind the Google Antitrust Lawsuits.” (Note: This is a paywalled info item from a “real” news outfit.) I am not sure if the write up is on the money, but it is entertaining to thing that a giant company can hold a grudge for a decade and trigger a monopoly mindset. The main point is that Oracle has been working away to get Google into monopoly jail. That’s an okay idea I assume.
But the nifty part of the story in my opinion is this statement:
Oracle has fallen behind the tech giants in the marketplace, yet is notching one legal and regulatory win after another against them, Google especially. While Google, Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have experienced double-digit revenue growth in recent years, Oracle’s annual sales have stayed relatively flat at just under $40 billion. Earnings last fiscal year totaled roughly $12.7 billion, a fraction of its rivals’.
Wow. I thought that Oracle’s challenges stemmed from its core product, its support policies, and its founder’s flying his jet over Santa Clara when aircraft were to be asleep in their hangers. Then there is the Oracle versus open source database world. And there have been minor spats like the dust up with MarkLogic. Yeah, MarkLogic! Big time. I won’t mention the big house or the racing yachts.
Is it accurate to say that times are tough for outfits like Hewlett Packard, IBM, SAP, and similar dinosaur-style firms.
From my viewshed, Google is falling prey to management seppuku. Oracle’s efforts — assuming they were effective — are not going to exact revenge. Oracle probably believes they are. Nope, Oracle’s perception — like that of other fading technology giants’ about their future — is a digital Ptolemaic theory. Interesting but a bit off base.
Stephen E Arnold, December 25, 2020
What Can a System Administrator Do? The Zoom Example
December 22, 2020
I don’t want to make a big deal of what is common knowledge among those who are system administrators. My French bulldog does not worry about a person with root access. He chews his bone and barks at UPS trucks.
I, on the other hand, do know what system administrators can do and do do. After more than 50 years of professional work, I have learned first hand what unmanaged, poorly supervised, and careless watching of watchers can yield. Let me tell you: There’s quite a bit of excitement out in the real world.
But why listen to an old timer who should be ensconced in a Covid ridden old-age home?
Navigate to “Ex Zoom China Employee Faces US Dissident Censoring Charge.” To make the story short, a person with root access or access to functions of a system administrators censored customers’ information.
Is this important?
Yes, but not because Zoom is more or less like other successful high technology companies.
The action illustrates the inherent weakness of existing controls over systems access. The alleged perpetrator may have been acting due to personal beliefs. The individual could have been paid to block the content. The person with access could have been following orders.
The point is that a system administrator can do many things: Monitor a colleague, gather data in order to blackmail a person, alter information, block content, and define what is real and verifiable.
Let’s take another step. Read “Study Finds That Robots Can Pressure People to Do Risky Things.” Let’s assume that some people are more likely to respond to robot pressure. A robot can be either a Boston Dynamics type of mechanical reindeer or a software script. An engineer with root can instruct a software robot to deliver information of a specific type to people. Some of those people will respond and maybe do risky things. Other people will believe the outputs and make decisions within that information frame. Like goldfish in a bowl of water, the environment becomes that which is accepted. That’s what a system administrator can do if so inclined and operating without oversight.
Is the online information reality real, accurate, or shaped?
Stephen E Arnold, December 21, 2020
Google: High School Science Club Mini Revolt. Mini? Why Not Maxi?
December 17, 2020
Ah, remember the good old days. No one knew about thumb typing. High school students contented themselves with chemistry experiments, electronics kits, and weird tin girder thingies. Now the HSSC has grown up, but has failed to leave behind the beliefs, precepts, and insights of their youth.
I thought about the then and now perspective when I read “Google AI Researchers Lay Out Demands, Escalating Internal Fight.” As if the assorted lawsuits were not enough to bedevil the senior management of the Google. I know the allegations about fiddling with online advertising are colorful, but just maybe that’s another facet of what I call HSSCMM or the high school science club management method. The idea is that teen spirit allows some bright young people to discard history, expected behaviors, and social conventions in order to demonstrate the superiority of the young mind.
Yeah, how is that working out?
Let’s recap:
- Google management seems to have an issue with staff who want to explain how smart software can become biased. How does this get fixed? Just work through the weird explanations emitted by Google and then ask the question, “Are there other ways to ignite a social issue powder keg?” The answer is, “Well, probably.”
- How can a company find itself in the litigation hot seat in multiple jurisdictions? Easy. Treat the European Community as if they were slightly dull and non-Googley critics of the world’s largest online ad system. Create a situation which allows the company to come to the attention of 40 US states attorneys general. Recite the mantra about competition and a free service. Are there other ways to catch attention of people who sue for a living? The answer is, “Well, probably.”
- A couple of days ago, the Google infrastructure with Chubby, Sawzall, and their pals crashed. Nifty. Some can get by without Gmail, but what about the father who used the fine tweeter system to share this thought: “I’m sitting here in the dark in my toddler’s room because the light is controlled by @Google Home. Rethinking… a lot right now.”
Does it seem that the HSSCMM is fraying at the edges?
Am I concerned? Nope. Just amused. I think there are lessons to be learned from these Google missteps just as there are from the SolarWinds’ misstep. (What’s the cost of remediating this minor hiccup? A few bucks? An ad like Facebook’s in the Wall Street Journal? Or an AT&T telemarketing promotion of its outstanding video service?)
Integrity, ethical behavior, and an effort to deliver solutions that work are not priorities. That’s too bad. Once upon a time, high school science clubs meant something sort of positive. Today the sort of negative has won.
That explains a great deal about the social and technical environment in which these almost comical actions are unfolding.
Do you have a HSSCMM T shirt? Messrs. Brin and Page may be wearing theirs now.
Stephen E Arnold, December 17, 2020
The Future? High School Science Club Management
December 15, 2020
With the discrediting of MBA programs, legal training, and art history, what’s a hard charging, Type A, materialistic over achiever supposed to do? The answer, according to Fast Company, is revealed in this article: “Everyone Should Be ‘CEO’ of Their Job and Manage As If They Own That Part of the Business.” However, before I highlight some of the insights in this high school science club management schema, I want to mention that “everyone” is singular; thus, the “their job” should be “an employee’s job or his or her job,” and the plural verb “own” is a singular; ergo, “owns”. Now that the sloppy grammar is behind me, let’s turn to the post MBA world.
Here’s a passage I circled in red:
My mantra is that everyone should be the “CEO” of their own role and manage their area as if they own that part of the business.
Now let’s try to focus on the message, not the sloppy grammar. The idea is that if I need a person to paint a wall, I should allow that person to be the CEO of the work. What about selecting the color? Should the painter pick another color? What about arranging elevator buttons?
Yes, initiative.
What if the wall must be painted before the guests arrive? Is the painter to select the time and pace of the work or just keep painting when the visitors pop in the door.
What about a minor project like replacing an Oracle database with a whizzy Amazon system?
Okay? Now we have arrived at the point which makes it clear that most people who are supposed to be managers are out of their comfort zone. MBAs, lawyers, accountants, and art history majors with an influential father and a great smile have to confess, “Hey, I know zero about this Amazon AWS Quantum Database idea.”
What’s the fix for the clueless president or senior manager? Here are the tips that will guarantee a Covid response type solution or the security methods in use at companies like FireEye:
Take the initiative
Be a team player
Ask for help
Listen
Take risks.
Let’s look at each of these.
Taking initiative is okay, but when people are paid to do a job, those people need to do the job. Yes, that includes protesters at Google type companies. A person is hired for a reason; therefore, do the work. Forget slogans. Put down the mobile phone. Do the work.
Be a team player is great when there is a team. I have news for the science club management adherents: Talking on Zoom and sending Teams messages is not a team environment. Since most companies are seizing Covid as an opportunity to slash costs, yip yap about teams in a asynchronous, distributed Zoom-type world is the antithesis of team building.
Ask for help. Great idea but from whom. Should the person struggling with AWS ask his or her boss for guidance when the superior is an art history major. Sorry, cutting out canvas and stretching it is not a skill directly applicable to the Byzantine world of database system engineering.
Listen. To whom? A colleague whom one does not know on a Zoom-type call? A contractor who shows up and asks, “What’s the problem?” Does one listen to a lawyer from Steptoe & Johnson explain how to break an encrypted message, or does one seek an NSA-type specialist to do the job?
Take risks. Now that’s a super idea, particularly when the individuals may not have a good understanding of the context, upsides, downsides, and costs of a particular decision.
To sum up, the high school science club management method is not one which makes me feel warm and fuzzy. There are old fashioned ideas which seem to have some merit; for example:
- Expertise
- Planning
- Commitment
- Detail orientation
- Persistence
- Integrity
- Effort
- Thoughtfulness.
What do you get when everyone is a CEO? Check out the availability of personal protective equipment in some major US cities, the delivery of packages by the United States Post Office, and the content filtering mechanisms in place at some social media outfits.
That’s what high school science club management methods deliver and in thumbtyper time.
Stephen E Arnold, December 15, 2020
Google Issues Apology To Timnit Gebru
December 15, 2020
Timnit Gebru is one of the world’s leading experts on AI ethics. She formerly worked at Google, where she assembled one of the most diverse Google Brain research teams. Google decided to fire her after she refused to rescind a paper she wrote concerning about risks deploying large language models. Venture Beat has details in the article: “Timnit Gebru: Google’s ‘Dehumanizing’ Memo Paints Me As An Angry Black Woman” and The Global Herald has an interview with Gebru: “Firing Backlash Led To Google CEO Apology: Timnit Gebru.”
Gebru states that the apology was not meant for her, but for the reactions Google received from the fallout of her firing. Gebru’s entire community of associates and friends stay behind her stance of not rescinding her research. She holds her firing up as an example of corporate censorship of unflattering research as well as sexism and racism.
Google painted Gebru as a stereotypical angry black woman and used her behavior as an excuse for her termination. I believe Gebru’s firing has little to do with racism and sexism. Google’s response has more to do with getting rid of an noncompliant cog in their machine, but in order to oust Gebru they relied on stereotypical means and gaslighting.
Google’s actions are disgusting. Organizations treat all types of women and men like this so they can save face and remove unsavory minions. Gaslighting is a typical way for organizations to downplay their bad actions and make the whistleblower the villain.
Gebru’s unfortunate is typical for many, but she offered this advice:
“What I want these women to know is that it’s not in your head. It’s not your fault. You are amazing, and do not let the gaslighting stop you. I think with gaslighting the hardest thing is there’s repercussions for speaking up, but there’s also shame. Like a lot of times people feel shame because they feel like they brought it upon themselves somehow.”
There are better options out there for Gebru and others in similar situations. Good luck to Gebru and others like her!
Whitney Grace, December 15, 2020
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