Jon Finegold · Top Commenter · Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Before I rant, let me say I'm a huge TechCrunch fan and have been for a long time. It is one of the first things I check in the morning. However, it seems there are now too many writers, posting too many editorial pieces like this that have some random opinion based on 1 or 2 anecdotal tales. What happened to all the great, compelling, breaking news on start-ups. There is a lot less of that and a lot more of this type of fluff.
Rant over, now for my comment. It is great that Google experiments with so many things and when they don't take off, they shut them down. That is how they maintain their entrepreneurial spirit within a big giant. Whether its buying companies and incorporating some of the people and some of the tech, whether its putting stuff up on labs, this is a great thing for them to keep doing and when something doesn't work or strays too far from core, shut it down. That seems smart to me and should be encouraged at more big tech companies and not trashed. If they stop experimenting they will fail, and if the don't shut down experiments that didn't work they will fail. Ignore this post Google and keep trying new things and cleaning up things that didn't go as planned.
Reply · 41 · · September 3 at 12:23pm
Keith Kreizel · St. Andrew's School
Jon,
I agree with your statement. I believe that the way to succeed is to test and than test again till you find a program that will succeed. I believe the beauty of Google is they are not afraid of taking an idea and changing it to make it better.
Reply · 3 · · September 3 at 12:54pm
Constantin Buschmann
I absolutely agree, with both parts. Especially concerning the first paragraph: I was confused to read an article that feels as if it were written 100% out of the blue. I do not know what the journalistic standard for a tc editorial piece is, but this one is not showing at any point that there has been an adequate amount of thinking. in my opinion, It is - at most - a commentary of someone who puts his own very personal and not very complex opinion out there to.... well I don't really know what for! Companies face choices no matter how innovative they are. Google and Apple are no different. Just the opposite is the case: if they pick up a lot of very innovative high-risk projects they will have to drop some of them. So no surprise here. Steve Jobs is not a god and his company has displayed more than a bit of what you would dub "MBA-thinking" in the last years by super-sizing their business models to max out profits in all directions. No surprise here either. What is surprising is that there is not a single fact in the article that tells me it is more than "good-old-times" opinion taking into consideration the pieces that match and leaving out a lot of pieces that don't match.
Reply · 2 · · September 3 at 12:55pm
Saju Thomas · Top Commenter · Jersey City, New Jersey
I think guys who are responsible for Corporate Dev a.k.a M&A at Google are MBAs. They buy companies/products they think are cool without enough due diligence, product fit or monetization potential. Google has made some brilliant acquisitions in the past including Android, Maps, Earth, but now MBAs are in charge.
Reply · 1 · · September 4 at 12:54pm
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David Kralik · Thunderbird School of Global Management
This has to be one of the poorest written articles I have ever read at TechCrunch. A corporation's sole existence is to make money. That's not MBAspeak, that's reality. If they don't make money by staying focused, they can't change the world.
It sounds like you are you blaming MBAs on Google's failure to monetize and stay focused. And I have no idea what evidence you have to argue that Apple is no longer in the life-changing business.
Second, Steve Jobs, Larry Paige, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt do not have MBAs. So your title is just way out of left field and throwing that line line in the second to the last paragraph just makes you sound stupid.
Speaking of stupid, please, spell Gaddafi right next time.
Reply · 34 · · September 3 at 12:17pm
Tristan Walker · Stanford University
well said
Reply · 1 · · September 3 at 12:58pm
Dan Austin
Speaking of stupid, there's no 'right' way to spell Kadafi... Qadhafi... Gathafi...
Reply · 7 · · September 3 at 5:26pm
Alan Carl Brown · Top Commenter · San Jose, California
I think its been mathematically demonstrated that his name cannot be correctly spelled. Nor can his breath be effectively quelled.
Reply · 1 · · September 4 at 12:33am
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Richard Thorne · Developer at Noisy Duck
Cutting useless junk is not the end of innovation at Google, it's the end of useless junk at Google. Get lost with this "sky is falling"-style crap.
Reply · 14 · · September 3 at 11:35am
Gregory Pierce · Top Commenter · Atlanta, Georgia
They were always in the business of business because... they are actually publicly traded - wait for it - businesses. To insist that all of these companies should keep limited appeal niche products or continue to treat them like charities is just silly. To assert that CEOs and MBAs are at odds with techies is just stupid. The whole point is profitability and all the techies want to be profitable just as much as the next guy. They want to be paid, they want to not be pushing a shopping cart in 6 months.
A technology product is not a research project that keeps consuming cash forever and never becomes productized. If you want that - there is an open source model for that venture. But *if you're taking someone else's money* to build your product, they want a return on investment. If you don't want to deal with that, bootstrap it with your own money and you never have to worry about if/when it becomes profitable.
Reply · 9 · · September 3 at 12:02pm
Adam Rodnitzky · San Francisco, California
Wow. This has to be the worst article I've ever read on TechCrunch (and I've read a lot of bad ones, along with many good ones as well). As an MBA who has started three startups (two before business school, one after and one exit to date), I never felt like a nursery school child while I busted my ass to make money from the cool technology we built so we could stay in business and keep innovating. Jon Evans, you probably generalize all MBAs as douchebags without actual proof that that is the case. Conversely, I think we have all the proof we need here to draw our own conclusions about you.
Reply · 7 · · September 5 at 6:22pm
Jules Dessibourg · UChicago
If you want me to throw down an angry op-ed (wrote one way back on a dipshit trust fund fellow's dumb NY Daily News article), let me know.
Reply · 2 · · September 5 at 7:11pm
Phil Schwarz · UChicago
Wow. Agreed. That is awful. What exactly is the editorial process in place here? Asserting that MBAs (as one broad, general group, no less) have ruined companies based on a comically small set of examples is ridiculous. The only thing that this article proves is that Jon Evans is neither smart enough to be writing for TechCrunch nor be accepted to an MBA program.
It's a good thing TechCrunch isn't run like a business or worried about monetization. I'm sure the sale to AOL and the site redesign were done to "change the world."
Reply · 2 · · September 6 at 11:18am
Luke Langford · Harvard Business School
"Larry Page = MBA killing Google's product innovation" WTF TechCrunch? He's one of the computer engineer co-founders... this is unnecessary anti-MBA hate.
Reply · 7 · · September 3 at 12:46pm
Brian Guenther · Product Management at Zynga
Agree Luke, this was a ridiculous article. Time to ditch TC.
Reply · 1 · · September 3 at 8:04pm
Deepak Nayal · London, United Kingdom
It is not the triumph of the MBAs. The fact is that no matter how great the technology is, you have to put a business model around it so that it can reach out to the people. It is just a confirmation of the reality, which is that technology and business have to go hand in hand. Even in the case of Steve Jobs, his projects that only focused on technology and design (such as Lisa and Next) did not do well in the market. But he did learn, and realized that no matter how good the technology is, it is of no use if it cannot sell.
This also works the other way around. No matter how good the business-side is, if the technology/product you are selling is not good or is not what people want, the venture is going to fail.
Deepak
http://www.olsup.com
Reply · 6 · · September 3 at 12:28pm
Phani Pandrangi
Speaking of getting rid of junk - perhaps TechCrunch can do a bunch of clean-up as well - starting with getting rid of ill-conceived and inarticulate articles like this one.
Reply · 5 · · September 3 at 3:49pm
Greg Williams
Jobs did make a huge difference, but he is just one man, and he didn't develop the Apple product line by himself. His biggest contribution was to be a visionary and open a path for a legion of talented people to accomplish great things. At my business school, they referred to that as "leadership". Innovative companies like Apple, Google and Salesforce invest in new ideas, which can result in world-changing products.
Remember though, there were other innovators before this current crop, and there will be new ones in the future. HP and IBM were once innovative world-changers. Tandy created a generation of tech geeks with the TRS-80, (yes kids, when dinosaurs roamed the earth we used our TV sets as monitors and cassette tapes for data storage). The concept of financing experimental projects didn't begin at Apple or Google - it started at 3M, which resulted in such profitable "accidents" as Post-It notes.
"Profit" is neither literally nor figuratively a four letter word. Companies with outstanding engineers and innovative products that ignore the bottom line fail and fade into history, or get acquired by a more profitable competitor. Zenith was once a shining example of American innovation in the electronics industry, and today it's essentially just a brand name used by LG.
Some of the MBAs in the world are also techies at heart, and try to make companies viable so that they can continueto bring amazing changes to the world.
Reply · 4 · · September 3 at 9:35pm
Misery Lou
Zenith still exists at all? Wow. I had no idea.
Reply · · September 4 at 5:23am
Chizzy Menkiti · Houston, Texas
Well said!
Reply · · September 4 at 6:47am
Natasha Goncharova · Works at TNR Global
Have faith. Encourage MBAs to learn, educate the willing ones how to to flipp the right switches (how to program); find ways to get them on board to learn CS. Advocate for CS Basics to be a mandatory class in all MBA programs, just like Finance Basics. They may never become as good as developers who've been practicing since their childhoods, but they can get better. Many engineers do not want to manage (Woz had no interest in managing others.) 'MBA' was, and still is, a concept of its own time (~ 100 years old) that came to life during the industrialization era. 'Innovative Geeks' is the concept of its own time (~ 15-20 years old). There is a whole generation of MBAs who are capable to become valuable contributors in tech companies (soon the world won't have anything but tech companies). Do not polarize, bring the two together.
Reply · 4 · · September 3 at 1:00pm
Michael Hollman · Ithaca, New York
This is the journalistic equivalent of the hackneyed "Black people drive like this.... White people drive like this..." comedy routine.
I look forward to the follow-up where you explain why CPAs are dreadful in every way by smashing watermelons with an oversized mallet.
Reply · 4 · · September 3 at 9:22pm
Jonathan Smith · Accenture
It seems Mr. Evans has something against MBAs!
Firstly, I'm not an MBA, but think that so called 'techies' seem to bash anyone, not just MBAs though they are the poster boys, who has some idea of how to commercialise businesses in the tech sector.
So to the article, Mr. Evans has misquoted the essay... essay reads, "what it was like to watch venture capitalists and professional managers run ArsDigita"... not MBAs, last I checked you didn't need an MBA to be a manager by profession.
...See More
Reply · 2 · · September 3 at 3:33pm
Walter Maguire
I think the author is overgeneralizing. Innovation is not dependent on whether someone is an engineer or has an MBA, but is more dependent on how well those people can innovate. Just like engineers go towards their comfort zone of stuff that's more elegantly done, new for newness' sake, or just plain cool, many MBAs are going to go to their comfort zone of spreadsheets and cash flows. It's a matter of being able to confront a high degree of uncertainty with the tools at hand. If you want to blame anyone, blame business schools for focusing too much on mechanisms that make the uncertainty appear to go away - nice, clean financial or operational models that can go into a spreadsheet. The ability to innovate is learned, and the source of that learning is less important than how important the person is at putting it to work.
Reply · 1 · · September 4 at 10:01am
Nick Bradley · Waltham, Massachusetts
The apocalypse is here! Just kidding. Of course suits take over certain businesses, of course Google and Apple will change.. and not always in the best way. But that's the beauty of tech, isn't it? Apple took off because Steve Jobs put his soul into what he did, and he wasn't (and isn't) the only one there doing that. If these companies start running more like MBAs envision them, maybe they'll do well with it, maybe not. My money's always on the guy with the passion and the vision, degree or no degree.
Tech will only change when we change it. Don't like MBAs running companies? Start your own and stomp them, tech-style.
Reply · 1 · · September 3 at 12:15pm
Derek Scruggs · Top Commenter · CTO at StatsMix
Lately Google reminds me of the last ten years of Microsoft: always chasing someone else's successful business rather than coming up with something new.
Reply · 1 · · September 5 at 10:21am
Sidney Schalk · FU Berlin
This is just a bad editorial piece with a black-and-white view. There are many MBAs out there (like me) who are techies and developers as well. I did my MSc in business administrator, but focused on business informatics and have been a web developer for about ten years now. Where do I rank on your scale?
Reply · 1 · · September 4 at 6:25am
Mark Fischer
"With Jobs’s departure and Page’s new focus, it seems that Apple and Google are no longer primarily in the business of changing people’s lives..."
Don't you think its a bit early to say that Apple is no longer in the business of changing lives?
Reply · 1 · · September 3 at 1:29pm
Margrit McIntosh · Tucson, Arizona
http://www.slate.com/id/2302388/ "Why Apple with be fine without Steve Jobs"
Reply · · September 3 at 4:55pm
Alan Carl Brown · Top Commenter · San Jose, California
You mean a week is not enough time to see how a trend plays out?
Everybody wants to change how we live. That's where the money is. That's where the applause is. That's where your mom gets what the heck it is that you do.
Reply · · September 4 at 12:38am
Alex Philips · Spring, Texas
Looks like it might be time to get rid of TechCrunch from my Google homepage.... This is absolute rubbish...
Reply · 1 · · September 4 at 4:34pm
Thomas McGuire · Top Commenter
I feel like I've been tricked into reading a Steve Gillmor article.
Reply · 1 · · September 4 at 3:56am
keng_ca (signed in using Yahoo)
If the MBAs had their way, Page would not be running Google. And they would view every project within google as a compartmentalized, stand-alone cost center, because that's what they do.
I have a big problem with the way most companies are run - where profit is the driver rather than product (there's nothing wrong with profits, but customers don't buy a product just so the seller can make a product) - but this post badly misdirects blame.
Reply · · September 3 at 1:20pm
Ray Cromwell · Top Commenter
Google hasn't got rid of 20% time and experimentation. They've just killed off some officially hosted versions of some stuff that made it out of internal experimentation and that no one was really using. Inside Google, people are still doing crazy stuff.
Reply · · September 3 at 11:23am
Dean Higginbotham · Top Commenter
Sign of the times. Google is adjusting as needed for the present and near future. imo, it looks to be more strategic offensive than reactionary defensive.
Reply · · September 3 at 12:51pm
M K (signed in using Hotmail)
if brutalizing, torturing and murdering thousands are signs of tyrants in decline then NATO should've dissolved years ago. If lessons of Mubarak and Khadafy have anything to teach us it's that any kind of social and economy reform must be aligned with the interests of the strongest superpower or you're fu*&ed.
It never ceases to amaze me how naive, bright-eyed and hopelessly self-righteous sheltered westerners are :) it's kinda adorable in a way.
Reply · · September 3 at 11:37am
Noriaki Sueoka · Kyoto University
I can't understand this article well, because I believe a good company keeps changing to adapt to the world with new challenge and good portfolio of both, business and technology.
Reply · 1 · · September 6 at 12:45am
Mista Majani · Top Commenter · Head of Product Development at Ghafla
LULZ @ yet another techie who views building a business as an unneccesary bonus.
Pulak Khurana · New Jersey Institute of Technology
Seriously, you're going to blame MBAs for making money for a corporation? I don't mean this as any offense to anyone, but many of these engineers wouldn't be able to leave their parents' basement without someone to guide them on how to monetize their craft.
And why is it that everything that Google starts has to be amazing? At least they try to cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit by trying new things. Why do you think they fail? They find out one more item that doesn't work. That's not failiure.
Yanıtla · · 03 Eylül, 13:55
zirboo(Yahoo'yu kullanarak oturum açtı)
Love how nerds try to insult one another in meager attempts to feel better about their chosen major in college...'no offense'
Yanıtla · · 03 Eylül, 21:22
Pulak Khurana · New Jersey Institute of Technology
Haha.. I didn't mean it as an insult, nor was I defending my major. Take it as you wish, "cool person." :)
Yanıtla · · 04 Eylül, 10:50
David Robins · Üst Düzey Yorumcu · Binfire.com'da CEO/Founder
Big companies have harder time to innovate than smaller ones! I don't thing MBA's are taking over the tech, they are taking over big companies as always. They only chase the big $$$.
Yanıtla · · 03 Eylül, 12:02
Glenn Miller · Aliquippa, Pennsylvania
Great observations. Not to worry, the techies will type and the MBAs will take notice and the thing will monetize. It has always been so, eh?
Yanıtla · · 03 Eylül, 11:29
Steven Zahl
Google, like any good business, needs to eliminate slow-moving products and develop new ones. Its an unending cycle. Remember the Mac Cube?
Yanıtla · · 03 Eylül, 11:51
Frankie Kang · Konami'de Producer
The idea that corporations can change the world for the better is true, as long as they hitting fiscal targets and keeping stockholders happy. Back then, Google had so much shareholder love, no one questioned why they were putting in so much money into their think tanks and experiments. Times change.
Yanıtla · · 03 Eylül, 14:40
Dharmesh Bhatt · Üst Düzey Yorumcu · Colgate University
I disagree. Google is run by Larry Page, who in my opinion is as far away from a suit as can be. Google was changing the world when it was just him and Sergey, without all the side projects. If they're trying to reproduce that kind of focus, and they manage to come up with something like Page Rank again, it'll be more innovative than a hundred pet projects that they shut down.
Yanıtla · · 03 Eylül, 15:13
Paul Ricard · Üst Düzey Yorumcu · HEC Paris
Communism is the shit bro.
Yanıtla · · 03 Eylül, 12:35
Neeraj Bansal · MPower Mobile'de EVP and Co-Founder
blah blah blah...
Yanıtla · · 03 Eylül, 16:53
João Guilherme Sousa · Üst Düzey Yorumcu · Deloitte'de çalışıyor
"With Jobs’s departure and Page’s new focus, it seems that Apple and Google are no longer primarily in the business of changing people’s lives;"
How do you come to that conclusion? Jobs departure hasn't had any meaningful effect on Apple's product line and Page has been there for less then a year. He's not in the business of changing people's lives because he shut down projects that didn't work?
And I don't just don't get your title. Larry was a founder at Google, he created the damned company. In what way have the MBAs triumphed if he is the CEO? How have MBAs triumphed when Tim Cook was chosen by Steve Jobs to run Apple?....
Your article is not very coherent, TechCrunch really needs some editing muscle, fast.
Yanıtla · · 04 Eylül, 05:23
Andrew S. Baker
More like the tragic incoherence of what was formerly known as journalism...
Not sure what conclusion I was supposed to reach by reading this article, but I didn't manage to get there. I was somewhat waiting for a page 2, if only to make it to some sort of point.
Yanıtla · · 04 Eylül, 03:42
Michael B. Smith
It reads like an author with a deadline who didn't have a fully developed concept.
I think it's best summarized by part of the first sentence of the second paragraph; "just a dumb thing".
Yanıtla · 1 · · 04 Eylül, 04:50
telekenetix2006(AOL'u kullanarak oturum açtı)
There are some flaws in your logic when comparing Apple and Google. For an example, let us look at two companies.
1. Lala ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lala_(website)).
Apple bought this company and immediately shut it down. They have yet to release a product of similar function.
2. Aardvark ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine)).
Google bought this product, but I left it running smoothly. They are shutting it down as a standalone product, however it is going to be integrated into Google+.
I just wanted to say that I had to stop reading this article after it became clear who it is you favor. Whatever argument you are arguing, you can't effectively make it while taking sides.
Yanıtla · · 04 Eylül, 07:39
Sunil Madhu · Üst Düzey Yorumcu · New York, New York
It isn't MBAs that kill innovation. it's people who can't innovate that does that. Growth comes from a combination of innovation and solid execution. Experience is a great teacher. having an MBA or lack there of has fuck all to do with innovation or execution. Like most degrees, it simply gives us a foundational understanding of a domain. Practice makes perfect. Your article is an op-ed, but your opinions appear to be based on incorrect assumptions.
Yanıtla · · 04 Eylül, 07:58
Richard Altman · 39 yaşında
hold a globe, go to the washroom and cry while looking at the mirror.
Yanıtla · · 04 Eylül, 02:17
Michael Maldonado · Cisco'da Sr. IT Business Analyst
What's even more hilarious is the fact that CEO's have really nothing to do with Q by Q profit - it's the middle men, the sales teams, and the engineering innovation that really produce. CEO's are big, dumb, good looking monikers with pedigrees - most of the time. I mean seriously.. they are like a short term brand and their influence is so high level that most of them have no F'ing idea even what the crux of the product or technology is that their company sells.
Yanıtla · · 04 Eylül, 11:23
t_manifest(Yahoo'yu kullanarak oturum açtı)
“Like watching a group of nursery school children who’ve stolen a Boeing 747 and are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off.” HAHA! So True!
Yanıtla · · 04 Eylül, 08:28
Recai Iskender · Ankara Üniversitesi Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi
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Yanıtla · · 04 Eylül, 11:12
Jordan Elpern-Waxman · UPenn
I've seen this phenomenon all too often of techies blaming all of the world's problems on MBAs, even when the people involved in the particular problem at hand don't have MBAs (in this case, Page, Jobs, and Benioff). My cousin who I love dearly and who has 40+ years in the Valley does this all the time. It's as if "blaming the MBA" has some sort of magical voodoo power to exorcise the demons of capitalism. As a techie <b>and</b> an MBA I say, can't we all just get along?
Yanıtla · · 04 Eylül, 13:26
Ben Bell · Little Rock, Arkansas
I know this is not the meat of the article, but is Benioff's comparison really so inadequate? http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/siemens_helps_torture_a_new_generation_in_bahrain.php
Yanıtla · · 04 Eylül, 18:27
jsmith149299(Yahoo'yu kullanarak oturum açtı)
Apple treats its employees well, even in china. and has never indirectly murdered anyone. a CEO is NOTHING like a dictator. No CEO in history has ever indirectly killed someone. (Except for just one or two outliers, where the product is manufactured shoddily and leads to someone's death. such as a bad bridge or building.)
Yanıtla · · 04 Eylül, 20:33
jsmith149299(Yahoo'yu kullanarak oturum açtı)
I guess tobacco CEOs killed a few. but not DIRECTLY and not QUICKLY. the article stands correct.
Yanıtla · · 04 Eylül, 20:36
Simon Taylor
Sergey and Larry stepping up, and Google entering it's Adolescence as a business are likely related. Shows they mean business. It's a shame that good little startups go to Google to help owners cash out, rather than to bring product to market.
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