https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
"This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for
killing it.
The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search,
had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at
Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on
Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I
quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would
end the quarter significantly behind.
For those unfamiliar with Google’s internal scientology-esque jargon, let me
explain. A “code yellow” isn’t, as you might think, a crisis of moderate
severity. The yellow, according to Steven Levy’s tell-all book about Google,
refers to — and I promise that I’m not making this up — the color of a tank top
that former VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear during his time at the
company. It’s essentially the equivalent of DEFCON 1 and activates, as Levy
explained, a war room-like situation where workers are pulled from their desks
and into a conference room where they tackle the problem as a top priority. Any
other projects or concerns are sidelined.
In emails released as part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case
against Google, Dischler laid out several contributing factors — search query
growth was “significantly behind forecast,” the “timing” of revenue launches
was significantly behind, and a vague worry that “several advertiser-specific
and sector weaknesses” existed in search."
Via Christoph S.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
