Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…The guy who created the distributed infrastructure. Right after the buzz failure, he is inspired to write this memo, like the Bill Gates 1995 internet memo. There’s a sea change going on. The internet is becoming more people oriented. Social media could be a problem for us. The social media challenge requires a decisive and substantial response involving a significant deployment of personnel right away. Essentially the internet was now starting to organize around people in this web 2.0 era, not just pages and applications with the things that were the domain of Google. Here's why I want to pause David, and I’m going to take it in a little bit different direction than I think you’re probably expecting, which is so therefore they went after Facebook. I think it’s a little bit more related to the palace intrigue at Google and a little bit less on the nail strategic. If you zoom out and look at the company right now, it’s pretty fragmented. It’s got different fiefdoms with big personalities at the top of each of these fiefdoms, Android, Chrome. Search, YouTube developer relations, trying to will a Google platform into existence. Different products with competing goals. Ultimately they all help Google’s overarching mission, but there are a lot of elbows starting to come out. Android was its own fiefdom, totally off on its own island, fighting an existential battle. Chrome is starting to do the same stuff as Android. They’re building their own operating system. It’s not clear what belongs in an Android camp versus a Chrome camp. Sundar hasn’t unified them yet. Search, very protected separate team, especially the core people doing search ranking and monetization. No one touches them. YouTube is totally separate. Gmail is massive and it really is the only one in 2009-10 at the company that owns identity. Since it’s the only Google property that you actually have to log into. YouTube has its own entirely different username and password system. It’s a mess, right? It’s a complete mess. Larry’s sensing this, he’s not CEO at the time, but he is realizing the company’s all over the place. He decides he’s just going to come back and get the company on track. I think Google Plus is just the thing he picked as the single thing to try to galvanize and unify the company around. No matter what they picked and how they executed it, it was going to create a lot of carnage. I can buy that.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.