Check out this Valleywag post,
The Height of Google's Hubris, which calls out Google SVP of product management
Jonathan Rosenberg, for his 4,492-word self-described "treatise," pretentiously entitled
From the Height of this Place, posted recently on the
official Google blog.
From Valleywag:
Jonathan Rosenberg, a top executive at Google, has let loose with a 4,492-word treatise on the future quoting presidents and deriding "the faceless scribes of drivel." It is the best window yet into Google's egomania. [...]
What marks the essay is the pervasive reek of superiority — that Google knows best, and that Googlers can impose their values on the world.
What marks me most is that Google is paying SVPs to write 4,492-word internal email "treatises" that start ...
Today is Presidents' Day here in the United States, when we honor the birthdays of two of our country's greatest leaders, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. A few weeks ago many of us were lucky to witness, either in person or via TV or the web, a masterful inauguration speech by the newest President, Barack Obama. The speech was rife with poignant points and subtle historical allusions: "We the people" came directly from the US Constitution, while "all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness" echoes both the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. (Many of these nuances were only revealed to me upon reading the transcript.)
As expected, President Obama aptly captured the wary mood of the nation. After all, we are in the midst of what is likely the worst economic situation of our lifetimes. In the US alone, 2.6M people lost their jobs in 2008, followed by nearly 600,000 more last month, and on the Monday following the inauguration companies around the world, including Caterpillar, Pfizer, ING, and Phillips announced job cuts totaling over 75,000. Add to that our dependence on fossil fuels, the resulting (and accelerating) climate change, and national security concerns, and you can feel the gravity of this pivotal moment.
... and which fellow Googlers evidently like so much that they encourage him to post it publicly.
First, for a global company, it's horifically US-centric. (There's a difference between writing for a global audience and reminding people that you know you are writing for the US audience, yet communicating worldwide
quand meme.)
Second, uh, how do I put this?
Who are you again? Is this George Will, Thomas Friedman, or Paul Krugman writing? I'm sorry, no. It's the VP of product management. That's right. OK. And
what does this have to do with what's coming in the next release?It continues:
In fact, since the challenges the world faces are, to a large degree, information problems, I believe the Internet is one of the "new instruments" that the President and the world can count on. And how do a great many people use the Internet? What is the first place many of them go when they conduct research, seek answers, do their work and communicate with their friends and family? Google. Ours is much more than a passing role in this next phase of history, rather we have the responsibility and duty to make the Internet as great as it can possibly be.
Do I detect some
noblesse oblige?
Just when it seems that everybody and his brother (e.g.,
Time) has answer for how to save newspapers (except, of course,
the newspapers), Google decides to weigh in:
The experience of consuming news on the web today fails to take full advantage of the power of technology. It doesn't understand what users want in order to give them what they need. When I go to a site like the New York Times or the San Jose Mercury, it should know what I am interested in and what has changed since my last visit. If I read the story on the US stimulus package only six hours ago, then just show me the updates the reporter has filed since then (and the most interesting responses from readers, bloggers, or other sources). If Thomas Friedman has filed a column since I last checked, tell me that on the front page.
Beyond that, present to me a front page rich with interesting content selected by smart editors, customized based on my reading habits (tracked with my permission). Browsing a newspaper is rewarding and serendipitous, and doing it online should be even better. This will not by itself solve the newspapers' business problems, but our heritage suggests that creating a superior user experience is the best place to start.
First, the
best thing about the Google user interface is that there's so little of it, a testament to Google's self-discipline and to the reality that keyword search doesn't need much UI (compared to say BI or ERP). Second, I'd challenge the notion that anybody wants to go to a newspaper site and have it remember preferences et cetera. I don't know about you, but I don't want to go to a newspaper site at all. I love news. I love reading. But I want the news to come to me, (today at least) in my RSS reader.
User-generated content then gets thrown under -- or should I say, sent to the back of -- the bus:
Of course, the greatest user experience is pretty useless if there's nothing good to read, a truism that applies not just to newspapers but to the web in general. Just like a newspaper needs great reporters, the web needs experts. When it comes to information, not all of it is created equal and the web's future depends on attracting the best of it. There are millions of people in the world who are truly experts in their fields — scientists, scholars, artists, engineers, architects — but a great majority of them are too busy being experts in their fields to become experts in ours. They have a lot to say but no time to say it.
Systems that facilitate high-quality content creation and editing are crucial for the Internet's continued growth, because without them we will all sink in a cesspool of drivel. We need to make it easier for the experts, journalists, and editors that we actually trust to publish their work under an authorship model that is authenticated and extensible, and then to monetize in a meaningful way. [...]
We won't (and shouldn't) try to stop the faceless scribes of drivel, but we can move them to the back row of the arena. As Harry Truman said in 1949, "We are aided by all who want relief from the lies of propaganda — who desire truth and sincerity."
This, of course, raises enormous questions about who we trust, who we don't, who gets to decide, and most importantly, who's "we"? Ironically today, courtesy of
PageRank, the motto is not "in Google we trust" but "in other webmasters we trust." The post seems to suggests that Google may be placing more trust in itself going forward. Not good.
ERP and BI get their turn under the bus next:
But as powerful as it can be in politics, data has the potential to be even more transformational in business. Oil fueled the Industrial Revolution, but data will fuel the next generation of growth. One of the largely unheralded by-products of the Internet era is how it has made the power of the most sophisticated analytical tools available to the smallest of businesses. Traditionally, business software packages have treated data reporting as a second class citizen. Here is my cool new feature, they say. Oh, you want to know how many people use it? You want the flexibility to organize and assess this data in ways that work best for you? Well, let us tell you about the analytics module! It's only tens of thousands of dollars more (not counting the 18% annual maintenance fee in perpetuity ... sucker!!)
In reality, the natural order was
first to build the operational systems that let you collect the data
and then provide tools to analyze it. The latter without the former would have been worthless. There was no conspiracy, myopia, or ignorance. First, people built MRP and then ERP and then SFA and then CRM systems. As those were implemented, a mass of new data became available to analyze, data warehousing took off, and both ERP and independent BI vendors built tools to analyze it.
He continues:
Fortunately that's not Google, nor can it ever be. All of our products should reflect our bias toward giving our customers, users, and partners as much data as possible - and letting them do with it what they wish. Then they can run their business like we do, by making decisions based on facts, not opinions. Here at Google the words of every colleague, from associates to vice presidents, carry the same weight so long as they are backed by data. (If you don't think we live up to this standard then please feel free to correct me ... but you better have the facts to prove it!!!)
(I hate to be anal but "nor can it ever be" is speculation and not data-based.)
I thought I spent from 1995-2004 at Business Objects enabling companies to make fact-based decisions leveraging the data collected in their operational systems. Hmm. I guess I was doing something else, because until Google "invented" the idea, I guess it wasn't actually happening.
This next one surprised even me.
Who'd have guessed that Google has, of all things, SAS envy?Hal Varian likes to say that the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. After all, who would have guessed that computer engineers would be the cool job of the 90s? When every business has free and ubiquitous data, the ability to understand it and extract value from it becomes the complimentary scarce factor. It leads to intelligence, and the intelligent business is the successful business, regardless of its size. Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai.
Since I'm running short of both time and cynicism I need to stop here. Be aware (or amazed) that I'm stopping some 1,400 words short of the suitably haughty ending:
It seems only fitting to conclude this Presidents' Day treatise, which began by quoting our 44th president, with a statement from our first. And so, having thus imparted to you my sentiments as they have been awakened by the occasion which brings us together, I shall take my present leave.
Doesn't this guy have some
R&D projects to go kill?
-- Your Faceless Drivel-Generating Scribe
//Dave
PS: See
Ries and Trout's Immutable Rule #18: Success leads to arrogance and arrogance to failure.
