4/07/2015

Headline April 08, 2015/ ''' MANAGING GOOGLE'S IDEA FACTORY '''


''' MANAGING GOOGLE'S IDEA 

FACTORY '''




BY THAT TIME, Mayer had moved into management, becoming a key executive at Google. Her title was: ''Vice President of Search Products and User Experience''.

Mayer, in one article, said her job was  ''to oversee everything that had to do with Google search; what users saw on the homepage, and all the code written behind it.''

A BusinessWeek profile of her said that she  ''helps decide which new initiatives get the attention of the company's founders, and which don't.'' Various biographies and profiles have also given credit-

For leading the development of both Google's search product and its homepage, as well as overseeing Google News, Gmail, Google Chrome, Google Health, Froogle, and more.

Glamour,  in a profile titled  ''The Visionary,''   said the very act of Googling, from the logo to the perfect list of links,  is  ''like a trip into Marissa Mayer's mind.''

[Mayer told the magazine, ''It's hard to tell where my aesthetic ends and Google begins.'']  San Francisco magazine wrote, ''Just about everything that goes on at the Mountain View company.........falls under Mayer's lens.''

Such claims are somewhere in the gray area between truth and poetic license. No one disputes that Mayer played a pivotal role in shaping how consumers interact with Google.

She seems to have a rare ability   -particularly for an engineer  -to understand what consumers want. But her province was the consumer-facing side, where she signed off on products before they reached the market.

May was not on the three-person team that developed Gmail. She had nothing to do with the business side, which developed products for advertisers and from which the bulk of Google's revenues comes.

Nor did she manage the guts of search itself   -the algorithms that give us the results we want. That was a separate team. Even the look of Google isn't solely, a function of Mayer's vision.

Sergey Brin designed the minimalist look of the Google's home page and the original Google logo, a designer.  Ruth Kedar refined it to its current look.

[Although Mayer didn't conceive of the Google doodles that appear on the home page  -these began in 1999, when Brin and Page put a stick figure on the landing page to signify that they were out of office at Burning Man  -she did oversee them.]

One person who is a fan of Mayer's says that, while she didn't make all the decisions how the home page looked, she adopted that point of view, policed it, and curated it.'' 

She seems to have done so in an extraordinarily detailed way, famously testing 41 shades of blue in order to create coherence among different Google products.   
The exaggeration of Mayer's role may not have been her fault  -the superwoman myth made for an exceptionally appealing narrative for journalists  -but it still caused resentment inside Google, a sense that she was given credit for things that weren't all hers.

''In the early days, the publicity was all about Google, and it was all great,'' says a former Google employee. ''In the later days, it was 'We've created a Monster.''' Another former employee narrates that there are multiple possible narratives about Mayer.

''Is she a great product person and technologist?'' he asks. ''You bet. But is she insecure and needs attention? You bet. Is she narcissistic? You bet. All these narratives have a grain of truth to them.''

In some quarters, the problem was bigger than resentment of Mayer's growing fame. Among those who worked closely with her there is an undercurrent of skepticism about her skills as a leader.

''While she did a lot of good and useful things, she alienated people, because she jumped to conclusions about products and she was not always right, but she always thought she was right,'' says a Google executive.

A product manager who worked for her feels that she eventually became a hindrance, more of a  micro-manager  than a help. ''All she did was move pixels around,'' he says. ''There was huge dissatisfaction that built.

She became more and more authoritarian, and she would just say no if she wasn't in a good-mood or she didn't like the colour.''

He adds, ''I absolutely hated working for her, and you could not find a single peer of mine at Google who would work with her again.''

The Honour and Serving of the  ''operational research'' continues. 

With respectful dedication to the Students of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:


''' WonderStudents '''

'''Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

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