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This divide-and-conquer approach even informed the basic algorithms running Google search. Rather than basing search results solely on a single source—the content of individual web pages—Google looked at links created by millions of people to determine a site's importance. Sergey called it "the democracy of the web," because each link was a vote cast in favor of a site's credibility. That approach made Google scale better than the competition, because the more the web expanded, the more links Google harvested for its ranking algorithm.
these people love to throw the term "democracy" around when they're the ones unilaterally deciding the rules
It had taken us a while to post our position, interview candidates, and extend an offer, so it was August 2001 before Stephanie Kerebel, a native of France, joined our group as globalization manager. She had years of experience in dealing with professional translators and immediately implemented cost—saving measures, such as paying for translation by the word and not the job. That alone cut our expenses in half.
lol
"Here are Overture's policies," AOL said, dropping a phonebook-sized document on the table with a thud. "These are their editorial policies for what is allowed and what is not. Let's see yours."
"Fine. We'll show you ours," Alan replied. "Let's set up an appointment and do it right." We had no policy manual. But we would have one by the meeting the following Monday. Five minutes after that exchange, Omid was on the phone to Sheryl. "Overture has a binder," he told her. "We have to have a binder! We have to have a binder!"
Sheryl and AdWords staffer Emily White spent the weekend pulling one together. While they were at it, they pulled together an editorial team. AOL wanted to know how many people Google had dedicated to reviewing ads and approving them. By enlisting everyone in advertising operations who had ever looked at an ad, Sheryl stretched four to fifteen. "We didn't lie to them," she asserted, "but we included everyone we possibly could."
amazing, such classic fake-it-til-you-make-it behaviour
Eric Schmidt's choice of Susan's mid-range revenue estimate proved unduly conservative. By the end of the contract's first year, we were far above the highest projections. Part of that success may have been attributable to a small shift made by an enterprising engineer. The day after the deal went live, John Bauer added code that boldfaced the keyword a user had searched for when it appeared in an ad, making it obvious that the ad was relevant. That single improvement increased clickthrough rates by four hundred percent. One engineer. One change. Four hundred percent.
it's amazing how the situation leads us to believe that so much impact could be attributed to one single change, when really an alternate explanation is that it was an obvious change which should have been present anyway, others just missed it, this guy saw it first. engineer hero worship is dumb. none of this is a solo effort
What if we let users opt out of accepting our cookies altogether? I liked that idea, but Marissa raised an interesting point. We would clearly want to set the default as "accept Google's cookies." If we fully explained what that meant to most users, however, they would probably prefer not to accept our cookie. So our default setting would go against users' wishes. Some people might call that evil, and evil made Marissa uncomfortable. She was disturbed that our current cookie-setting practices made the argument a reasonable one. She agreed that at the very least we should have a page telling users how they could delete their cookies, whether set by Google or by some other website.
the ringing of the evil detector is a symptom of a much earlier mistake
In mid-2003, Susan put some product plans and strategic documents on MOMA that required a password to access. She was concerned that the sales team might accidentally spill too much to clients. As head of product management, Jonathan told her to make the documents accessible because Google so strongly valued the free flow of information among staff members. Only performance appraisals and compensation were off limits. "This is extremely unusual for a company to do," Eric Schmidt often reminded us at our weekly TGIF meetings, "but we will continue trusting everyone with sensitive information unless it becomes a problem."
In September 2003, it became a problem. Information about our revenue numbers and Larry and Sergey's stock holdings started showing up in news reports. Eric immediately clamped down, telling Omid and me to stop including revenue numbers in TGIF presentations. Passwords on MOMA were no longer forbidden. It was a shame, Eric observed, that reality had finally come to Google.
The source for the stories turned out to be a low-level administrator feeding information to an outsider. She was asked to leave. In January 2004, though, long after that first small leak had been plugged, a much bigger crack appeared in our wall of secrecy. The same month we hired our first corporate security manager, John Markoff from the New York Times wrote a series of articles in which he reported details of products in development and the results of an internal audit conducted in preparation for a possible IPO. The information had been extremely confidential and closely held. The leak was ultimately traced to a senior manager who had known Markoff for years. He left the company as well, though the true reason for his departure was not made public, leading to much speculation.
From that point on, I had to ask for access to the project information I needed to do my job. It felt odd, as if with each ironclad, password-protected gateway the company installed, it locked out a little more of its original corporate culture.
Shortly before going public, Google clamped down completely. According to SEC rules, every employee who had access to intimate knowledge about the state of the business would be restricted from freely buying and selling the company's stock. I, and most others, gladly traded ignorance about our bottom line for the bliss of being able to cash out whenever we were ready to do so. The days of innocence in the garden of data had officially come to an end.
or just like make it all public idk
Google's obsession with metrics was forcing me to take stock of my own capabilities. What did I bring to the table? What were my limits? How did I compare? Insecurity was a game all Googlers could play, especially about intellectual inferiority. Everyone but a handful felt they were bringing down the curve. I began to realize how closely self-doubt was linked to ambition and how adeptly Google leveraged the latter to inflate the former—urging us to pull ever harder to advance not just ourselves but the company as a whole.
Toward the end of my Google run, a newly hired senior manager put into words what I had discovered long before. "Let's face it, Doug," he confided, "Google hires really bright, insecure people and then applies sufficient pressure that no matter how hard they work, they're never able to consider themselves successful. Look at all the kids in my group who work absurd hours and still feel they're not keeping up with everyone else."
IPPR Progressive Review 25(2)
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multiple authors
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multiple authors
IPPR Progressive Review 25(2)
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
IPPR Progressive Review 25(2)
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
[...] In the Information Age, access to and control over knowledge and ideas has become a potent new source of power.
Like nature, existing nature is a commons that has been built up over millennia. Its opportunity cost is zero which means that its price should in theory also be zero. But in modern economies a complex web of intellectual property rights ensure that artificial scarcity is imposed and profits are protected - just as the floodgates of abundance should be being pried open.
Here the task for the left is to develop a serious alternative to contemporary intellectual property regimes. It is a fantasy to think that the present system of intellectual property rights can be easily dismantled. Aside from anything else, they are deeply ingrained in domestic and international legal systems. [...]
Underpinning all of these proposals is a recognition that property rights are not neutral or fixed. Property relations invariably reflect power and class relations in society. [...]
not sure if "opportunity cost" is the most appropriate term here. the last para is good tho
[...] We are unprepared for the coming decade of disruption. Globalisation is likely to continue to evolve, with economic power shifting eastwards. [...]
WOW. fuck right off
The much used word "strategy" is not understood as the step-by-step removal of constraints (administrative, political, economic) so as to make an insoluble problem soluble. There is a confusion between winning today's battles, which is one thing and making tomorrow's battles winnable, which is quite another.
quoting Sir John Hoskyn, Thatcher's former advisor