Google made $224 billion from ad revenue in 2022, which has helped hide four major cultural problems within the company, according to former Google engineer Praveen Seshadri.<\/p>\n
Why we care.<\/strong> Although Seshadri was not a member of the search team, he offers some interesting insights from within Google that may help us understand why Google has been lagging behind Microsoft and OpenAI in the ongoing AI wars \u2013 and why Google brought back co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin during its \u201ccode red\u201d<\/a> period.<\/p>\n Google\u2019s four cultural problems.<\/strong> Seshadri, who worked at Google for three years, wrote that Google has four cultural problems: <\/p>\n No mission.<\/p>\n No urgency.<\/p>\n Delusions of exceptionalism.<\/p>\n Mismanagement.<\/p>\n Seshadri wrote these are all \u201cnatural consequences of having a money-printing machine called \u2018Ads\u2019 that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins.\u201d He added:<\/p>\n \u201cWhile two of Google\u2019s core values are \u2018respect the user\u2019 and \u2018respect the opportunity\u2019, in practice the systems and processes are intentionally designed to \u2018respect risk\u2019. Risk mitigation trumps everything else. This makes sense if everything is going wonderfully and the most important thing is to avoid rocking the boat and keep sailing on the rising tide of ads revenue.\u201d<\/p>\n Not the Google of 10 years ago.<\/strong> I was reminded of the 2013 Founders\u2019 Letter, published by then-CEO Page in May 2013.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s amazing what you can achieve with a small dedicated team when you start from first principles and aren\u2019t encumbered by the established way of doing things. \u00a0Yet I\u2019ve learned over time that it\u2019s surprisingly difficult to get teams to be super ambitious because most people haven\u2019t been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking. \u00a0They tend to assume that things are impossible, or get frightened of failure. \u00a0It\u2019s why we\u2019ve put so much energy into hiring independent thinkers at Google, and setting big goals. \u00a0Because if you hire the right people and have bold enough dreams, you\u2019ll usually get there. \u00a0\u00a0And even if you fail, you\u2019ll probably learn something important.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also true that over time many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, with a few incremental changes. \u00a0This kind of incrementalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, because change tends to be revolutionary, not evolutionary.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Google CEO Larry Page, 2013 founders letter<\/a> (via Wayback Machine)<\/p>\n Based on what Seshadri wrote (among others), it sounds like Google has drifted away from that 2013 vision Page laid out. Now Google seems to have become what it used to be against, where at least some of its teams are essentially \u201cswimming in molasses.\u201d<\/p>\n While Google is hardly irrelevant in 2023, Google is facing challenges on several fronts. Google\u2019s rushed Bard announcement<\/a> truly was the opposite of the risk mitigation Seshadri wrote about \u2013 and Google employees bashed CEO\u00a0Sundar Pichai after the launch, calling it \u201cbotched\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n Read Seshadri\u2019s article.<\/strong> The maze is in the mouse<\/a><\/p>\n The post Ex-Googler: Ad revenue is hiding Google\u2019s fundamental problems<\/a> appeared first on Search Engine Land<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Google made $224 billion from ad revenue in 2022, which has helped hide four major cultural problems within the company, according to former Google engineer Praveen Seshadri. Why we care. Although Seshadri was not a member of the search team, he offers some interesting insights from within Google that may help us understand why Google has been lagging behind Microsoft and OpenAI in the ongoing AI wars \u2013 and why Google brought back co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin during its \u201ccode red\u201d period. Google\u2019s four […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"h5ap_radio_sources":[],"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-seo-blogs"],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":false,"author_link":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/author\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craighordlow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}