Speaker 1: All Zone Media. Hi, Better Offline fans, It's me, your
Speaker 1: host ed zetron. Now Here in America, it's Thanksgiving, so
Speaker 1: we're all given the week off. Robert and Sophie have
Speaker 1: told me I'm not allowed to podcast and if they
Speaker 1: find out, they're going to once again put me in
Speaker 1: the carnival prison. And once again I was sent a
Speaker 1: lo quality jpeg of a gun by Robert. Unclear what
Speaker 1: it means. Nevertheless, this is one of my favorite episodes
Speaker 1: I've ever recorded. It's about a real shithead who destroyed
Speaker 1: a product I love, you love and we both are
Speaker 1: doomed to use every day. Now. If you're not in America,
Speaker 1: and this is a big problem, I don't know what
Speaker 1: to tell you. The podcast doesn't cost you any money, unless,
Speaker 1: of course, you pay five dollars a month for our
Speaker 1: cooler Zoe Media, in which case I apologize deeply. I
Speaker 1: will be sleeping not at all this week as penance
Speaker 1: for what I've done to you. For the rest of
Speaker 1: you in America, no penance necessary, Please enjoy this episode. Hello,
Speaker 1: welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed zig tron. Well,
Speaker 1: and in the next two episodes, I'm going to tell
Speaker 1: you the names some of the people responsible for destroying
Speaker 1: the Internet. And I'm going to start on February fifth,
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, when Ben Gomes, Google's former head of Search, well,
Speaker 1: he had a problem. Jerry Dishler, then the VP and
Speaker 1: GM of Ads at Google, and Shivvan Carterman, then the
Speaker 1: VP of Engineering Search and Ads on Google properties, had
Speaker 1: called something called a code yellow for search revenue due
Speaker 1: to and I quote emails that came out as part
Speaker 1: of Google's anti trust hearing steady weakness in the daily
Speaker 1: numbers and a likeliness that it would end the quarter
Speaker 1: significantly behind in metrics. That kind of unclear for those
Speaker 1: unfamiliar with Google's internal kind of scientology esque jargon, which
Speaker 1: means most people, let me explain, a good yellow isn't
Speaker 1: a terrible need to piss or some sort of crisis
Speaker 1: of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Stephen Levey's Tell
Speaker 1: All book about Google, refers to and I promise this
Speaker 1: is not a joke, the color of a tank top
Speaker 1: that a former VP of Engineering called Wayne Rosling used
Speaker 1: to wear during his time at the company. It's essentially
Speaker 1: the equivalent of deafcom I and activates as Levy explained
Speaker 1: a war room like situation where workers are pulled from
Speaker 1: their desks and into a conference room where they tackle
Speaker 1: the problem as a top priority. Any other projects or
Speaker 1: concerns are sidelined and independently. I've heard there are other
Speaker 1: colors like purple. I'm not going to get into that, though,
Speaker 1: it's quite boring and irrelevant to this situation. In emails
Speaker 1: released as part of the Department of Justices antitrust case
Speaker 1: against Google, as a previously mentioned, Dishler laid out several
Speaker 1: contributing factors. Search query growth was significantly behind forecast, the
Speaker 1: timing of revenue launches was significantly behind, and he had
Speaker 1: this vague worry that several advertiser specific and sector weaknesses
Speaker 1: existed in search. Now I want to cover something because
Speaker 1: I've messed up, and I really want to be clear
Speaker 1: about this. I've previously and erroneously referred to the code
Speaker 1: yellow as something that Gomes raised as a means of
Speaker 1: calling attention to the proximity of Google's ad side getting
Speaker 1: a little too close to Search. I'm afraid the truth
Speaker 1: is extremely depressing and so much grimmar. The code yellow
Speaker 1: was actually the rumble of the goddamn rot economy, with
Speaker 1: Google's revenue arms sounding the alarm that its golden goose
Speaker 1: wasn't laying enough eggs. Gomes, a Googler of nineteen years
Speaker 1: that basically built the foundation of modern search engines, should
Speaker 1: go down as one of the few people in tech
Speaker 1: that actually fought for an actual principle, and he was
Speaker 1: destroyed by a guy called Prabaka Ragavan, a computer scientist
Speaker 1: class traitor that sided with the management consultancy sect. More confusingly,
Speaker 1: one of their problems was that there was insufficient growth
Speaker 1: in queries, as in the amount of things that people
Speaker 1: were asking Google. It's a bit like if Ford decided
Speaker 1: that things were going poorly because their drivers weren't putting
Speaker 1: enough goddamn miles on their trucks. This whole story has
Speaker 1: personally upset me, and I think you're going to hear
Speaker 1: that in this but going through these emails is just
Speaker 1: very depressing. Anyway. A few days beforehand, on February first,
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, Kristen Gil, then Google's VP Business Finance Officer,
Speaker 1: had emailed Shashi Thakker, then Google's VP of Engineering Search
Speaker 1: and Discover, saying that the ADS team had been considering
Speaker 1: a code yellow to close the search gap it was seeing,
Speaker 1: vaguely referring to how critical that growth was to an
Speaker 1: unnamed company plan. To be clear, this email was in
Speaker 1: response to Thaker stating that there is nothing that the
Speaker 1: search team could do to operate at the fidelity of
Speaker 1: growth that the ads department had demanded. Shashy Forward did
Speaker 1: the email to Gomes asking if there's any way to
Speaker 1: discuss this with Sandharpashai, Google CEO, and declared that there
Speaker 1: was no way he would sign up for a high
Speaker 1: fidelity businessman for daily active users on search. Sakker also
Speaker 1: said something that I've been thinking about constantly since I
Speaker 1: read these emails, that there was a good reason that
Speaker 1: Google's founders separated search from ads. I want you to
Speaker 1: remember that line for later. A day later, on February second,
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, Thacker and Gomes shared their anxieties with Nick Fox,
Speaker 1: a vice president of Search and Google assistant, entering a
Speaker 1: multiple day long debate about Google's some lust for growth.
Speaker 1: This thread is a dark window into the world of
Speaker 1: growth focus tech, where the Kerr listed the multiple points
Speaker 1: of disconnection between ADS and search, discussing how the search
Speaker 1: team wasn't able to finally optimize engagement on Google without
Speaker 1: hacking it, a term that means effectively tricking users into
Speaker 1: spending more time on a site, and that doing so
Speaker 1: would lead them to and I quote, abandoned work on
Speaker 1: efficient journeys. In one email, Fox adds that there was
Speaker 1: a pretty big disconnect between what finance and ads wants
Speaker 1: Search was doing. Every part of this story pisses me
Speaker 1: off so much. When Gomes pushed back on the multiple
Speaker 1: requests for growth, Fox added that all three of them
Speaker 1: were responsible for Search and that Search was and again
Speaker 1: I quote, the revenue engine of the company, and that
Speaker 1: bartering with the ads and finance teams was now potentially
Speaker 1: the new reality of their jobs. On February sixth, twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: Gomes said that he believed that Search was getting too
Speaker 1: close to the money and ended his email by saying
Speaker 1: that he was concerned that growth is all that Google
Speaker 1: was thinking about. On March twenty second, twenty nineteen, Google
Speaker 1: VP of Product Management Darshan Kantac would declare the end
Speaker 1: of the code yellow. The thread mostly consisted of congratulatory
Speaker 1: emails until Gomes made the mistake of responding congratulating everyone,
Speaker 1: saying that the plans architected as part of the code
Speaker 1: yellow would do well throughout the year. Enter probaka Ragavan,
Speaker 1: then Google's head of Ads and the true mastermind behind
Speaker 1: the Yellow, who would respond curtly saying that the current
Speaker 1: revenue targets were addressed by heroic RPM engineering and that
Speaker 1: the core query softness continued without mitigation, a very clunky
Speaker 1: way of saying that despite these changes, query growth was
Speaker 1: not happening at the rate he needed it to. A
Speaker 1: day later, Gomes emailed Fox Andhaker an email he intended
Speaker 1: to center Ragavan. He led by saying that he was
Speaker 1: annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team.
Speaker 1: In this very long email, he explained in arduous detail
Speaker 1: how one might increase engagement with Google Search, but specifically
Speaker 1: added that they could increase queries quite easily in the
Speaker 1: short term, but only in user negative ways, like turning
Speaker 1: off spell correction or ranking improvements, or placing refinements effectively
Speaker 1: labels all over the page, adding that it was possible
Speaker 1: that there are trade offs here between the different kinds
Speaker 1: of user negativity caused by engagement hacking, and that he
Speaker 1: was deeply, deeply uncomfortable with this, He also added that
Speaker 1: this was the reason he didn't believe that queries, as
Speaker 1: in the amount of the things with people searching on Google,
Speaker 1: were a good metric to measure search, and that the
Speaker 1: best defense against the weaknesses of queries was to create
Speaker 1: compelling user experiences that make users want to come back.
Speaker 1: Crazy idea there, what if the product was good? Not
Speaker 1: good enough? Of prabaka, so little bit of history about
Speaker 1: Google here. They regularly throughout the year do Core updates
Speaker 1: to Search. These are updates that change the algorithm. Let's say, okay,
Speaker 1: we're going to suppress this kind of thing. We can
Speaker 1: elevate this kind of thing. And they are actually the
Speaker 1: reason that search changes. It's why certain sites suddenly disappear
Speaker 1: or reappear. It's why sites get a ton of traffic,
Speaker 1: some don't get any, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: But they do a lot of them. The one that's
Speaker 1: really interesting and a little bastard and I went and
Speaker 1: looked through pretty much the last decade of these. The
Speaker 1: one that stood out to me was the March twenty
Speaker 1: nineteen Core update to Search, which happened about a week
Speaker 1: before the end of the code yell, meaning that it's
Speaker 1: very likely that this was a result of Prabaka's bullshit.
Speaker 1: So this was expected to be one of the largest
Speaker 1: updates to search in a very long time, and I'm
Speaker 1: quoting Search Engine Journal there. Yet when it launched, many
Speaker 1: found that the update mostly rolled back changes and traffic
Speaker 1: was increasing to sites that had been suppressed by previous updates,
Speaker 1: like Google Search's Penguin update from twenty twelve that specifically
Speaker 1: targeted spami search results. There were others that were seeing
Speaker 1: traffic as well from an update that happened on the
Speaker 1: first of August twenty eighteen that was a few months
Speaker 1: after Gomes became head of Search. While I'm guessing here,
Speaker 1: I really don't know. I do not work for Google.
Speaker 1: I do not have friends there. I think the timing
Speaker 1: of the March twenty nineteen Core update, along with the
Speaker 1: traffic increases the previously suppressed sites that one hundred percent
Speaker 1: were spamy seo nonsense. I think these suggest that Google's
Speaker 1: response to the Cojello was to roll back changes that
Speaker 1: were made to maintain the quality of search. A few
Speaker 1: months later, in May twenty nineteen, Google would roll out
Speaker 1: a redesign of how ads were shown on Google Search.
Speaker 1: Specifically on mobile, replacing the bright green AD label and
Speaker 1: URL color on ads with a tiny, little, bolded black
Speaker 1: note that said AD in the smallest font you could
Speaker 1: possibly put there, with the link looking otherwise identical to
Speaker 1: a regular search link. I guess that's how they managed
Speaker 1: to start hating their numbers. Hah. And then in January
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, Google would bring this change to desktop, and
Speaker 1: the vergins John Porter would suggest that it made Google's
Speaker 1: ads look just like search results now awesome. Five months later,
Speaker 1: a little over a year after the code yellow situation,
Speaker 1: Google would make Probakar Ragavan the head of Google Search,
Speaker 1: with Jerry Dishler taking his place as the head of Ads.
Speaker 1: After nearly twenty years of building Google Search domes would
Speaker 1: be relegated to the SVP of Education at Google Domes.
Speaker 1: It was a critical part of the original team that
Speaker 1: made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing
Speaker 1: the culture of the world's largest and most important search engine,
Speaker 1: was chased out by a growth hungry managerial type, several
Speaker 1: of them actually led by Probagar Ragavan, a management consultant
Speaker 1: wearing an engineer costume. As a side note, by the
Speaker 1: way I use the term management consultant there as a pejorative,
Speaker 1: while he exhibits all the same being counting morally young
Speaker 1: guided behaviors of a management consultant. From what I can tell,
Speaker 1: Ragavan has never actually worked in that particular sector of
Speaker 1: the economy. But you know who has. San Dhar Pishai,
Speaker 1: the CEO of Google, who previously worked at McKinsey, arguably
Speaker 1: the most morally abhorrent company that's ever existed, having played
Speaker 1: roles both in the two thousand and eight financial crisis,
Speaker 1: where it encouraged banks to load up on debt and
Speaker 1: floored mortgage backed securities, and the ongoing opiord crisis, where
Speaker 1: it effectively advised Perdue Farmer on how to growth hack
Speaker 1: sales of oxy content, an extremely addictive painkiller. McKinsey has
Speaker 1: paid nearly one billion dollars over several settlements due to
Speaker 1: its work with Perdue. But I'm getting sidetracked, but one
Speaker 1: last point. McKinsey is actively anti labor. When a company
Speaker 1: brings in a McKinsey consultant, they're often there to advise
Speaker 1: on how to cut costs, which inevitably means layoffs and outsourcing.
Speaker 1: McKinsey is to the middle class. What fleshy in bacteria
Speaker 1: is the skin. But back to the emails, which are
Speaker 1: a stark example of the monstrous, disgusting rot economy, the
Speaker 1: growth that all costs, mindset that's dominating the tech ecosystem.
Speaker 1: And if you take one thing away from this episode,
Speaker 1: I want it to be the name Prabakar Ragavan, and
Speaker 1: I'm understanding that there are people responsible for the current
Speaker 1: state of the Internet. These emails, which I really encourage
Speaker 1: you to look up and if you go to where's
Speaker 1: youreaed dot at, you'll be able to see a newslet
Speaker 1: that has links to them. Well, these emails tell a
Speaker 1: dramatic story about how Google's finance and advertising teams, led
Speaker 1: by Ragavan, with the blessing of CEO Sandhar Pashai, the
Speaker 1: McKinsey guy, actively worked to make Google worse to make
Speaker 1: the company more money. This is exactly what I mean
Speaker 1: when I talk about the economy, an illogical, product destroying
Speaker 1: mindset that turns products you love into torturous, frustrating, quasi
Speaker 1: tools that require you to fight the company to get
Speaker 1: the thing you want. Ben Gomes was instrumental in making
Speaker 1: search work both as a product and a business. He
Speaker 1: joined the company in nineteen ninety nine, a time long
Speaker 1: before Google established dominance in the field, and the same
Speaker 1: year when Larry Page and Sergey Britain tried to sell
Speaker 1: the company to Excite for one million dollars, only to
Speaker 1: walk away after Vinnard Coosler and Excite investor and co
Speaker 1: founder of some Microsystems that's now a VC who tried
Speaker 1: to stop people going to a beach in half Moon Bay, Well,
Speaker 1: he tried to low ball them with a seven hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand dollars offer, also known as a one
Speaker 1: hundred square apartment in San Francisco. In an interview with
Speaker 1: Fast Companies Harry McCracken from twenty eighteen, Gomes frayed Google's
Speaker 1: challenge as taking the page erank algorithm from one machine
Speaker 1: to a whole bunch of machines and they weren't very
Speaker 1: good machines at the time. Despite his impact and tenure,
Speaker 1: Gomes had only been made head of Search in the
Speaker 1: middle of twenty eighteen after John Gillanderia moved to Apple
Speaker 1: to work on its machine learning in AR strategy. Domes
Speaker 1: had been described as Google's searches are beloved for his
Speaker 1: ability to communicate across Google's many quite decentralized apartments. Every
Speaker 1: single article I've read about Gomes and his tenure at
Speaker 1: Google spoke of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation
Speaker 1: of one of the most important technologies ever made, a
Speaker 1: man who had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with
Speaker 1: a and I quote Gomes here guiding light of serving
Speaker 1: the user and using technology to do that. And when
Speaker 1: finally given the keys to the kingdom, the ability to
Speaker 1: elevate Google Search even further, he was rap fucked by
Speaker 1: a series of rotten carerists trying to please Wall Street,
Speaker 1: led by Probakar Ragavan. Do you want to know what
Speaker 1: Provacar Ragavan's old job was? What Probacar Ragavan, the new
Speaker 1: head of Google Search, the guy that ran Google Search,
Speaker 1: that runs Google Search right now, that is running Google
Speaker 1: Search into the goddamn ground. Do you want to know
Speaker 1: what his job was? His job before Google, He was
Speaker 1: the head of search for god damn Yahoo from two
Speaker 1: thousand and five through two thy and twelve when he
Speaker 1: joined the company. When Probakar Ragavan took over Yahoo Search,
Speaker 1: they held a thirty point four percent market share, not
Speaker 1: far from Google's own thirty six point nine percent, and
Speaker 1: miles ahead of the fifteen point seven percent that Microsoft's
Speaker 1: MSN Search had. By May twenty twelve, Yahoo was down
Speaker 1: to just thirteen point four percent and had shrunk for
Speaker 1: the previous nine consecutive months, and was being beaten by
Speaker 1: even the newly released Bing. That same year, Yahoo had
Speaker 1: the largest layoffs in its corporate history, shedding two thousand employees,
Speaker 1: or fourteen percent of its overall workforce. The man who deposed,
Speaker 1: Ben Gomes, someone who worked on Google Search from its
Speaker 1: very beginnings, was so shit at his job that in
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine, Yahoo effectively threw in the towel
Speaker 1: on its own search tech, instead choosing to license Being's
Speaker 1: engine in a ten year deal. If we take a
Speaker 1: long view of things, this likely precipitated the overall decline
Speaker 1: of the company, which went from being worth one hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty five billion dollars at the peak of the
Speaker 1: dot com boom to being sold to Verizon for four
Speaker 1: point eight billion dollars in twenty seventeen, which is roughly
Speaker 1: a three thousand square foot apartment in San Francisco. With
Speaker 1: search no longer a priority, in making less money, for
Speaker 1: the company, Yahoo decided to pivot into Web two point
Speaker 1: zero and original content, making sum bats that paid off,
Speaker 1: but far far too many that did not. It spent
Speaker 1: one point one billion dollars on Tumblr in twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: only for Verizon to sell it for just three million
Speaker 1: dollars in twenty nineteen. Zimbra in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: ostensibly to complete with the new Google Apps productivity Suite,
Speaker 1: only to sell it for a reported fraction of the
Speaker 1: original purchase price to VMware a few years later. That's
Speaker 1: not his fault, but nevertheless, Yahoo was a company without
Speaker 1: a mission, a purpose, or an objective. Nobody and I'll
Speaker 1: speculate even though his leading the company really knew what
Speaker 1: it was and what it did. Anyway, just a big
Speaker 1: shout out right now to Kura Swisher, who referred to
Speaker 1: Pradaka as well respected. When he moved from Yahoo to Google.
Speaker 1: He absolutely nailed at Kara bang up job. In an
Speaker 1: interview with ZDNTS Dan Farber from two thousand and five,
Speaker 1: Ragavan spoke of his intent to align the commercial incentives
Speaker 1: of a billion content providers with social good intent while
Speaker 1: at Yahoo and his eagerness to inspire the audience to
Speaker 1: give more data. What anyway before that? It's it's actually
Speaker 1: hard to find out exactly what Ragavan did, though according
Speaker 1: to zd net, he spent fourteen years doing search and
Speaker 1: data mind research ibm MM. In April twenty eleven, The
Speaker 1: Guardian ran an interview with Ragavan that called him Yahoo's
Speaker 1: secret weapon, describing his plan to make rigorous scientific research
Speaker 1: and practice to inform Yahoo's business from email to advertising,
Speaker 1: and how under then CEO Carol Bart's the focus had
Speaker 1: shifted to the direct development of new products. It speaks
Speaker 1: of Ragavan's scientific approach and his steady process based logic
Speaker 1: to innovation that is very different to the common perception
Speaker 1: the ideas and development are more about luck and spontaneity.
Speaker 1: A sentence that I'm only reading to you because I
Speaker 1: really need you to hear how stupid it sounds and
Speaker 1: how specious some of the tech press used to be. Frankly,
Speaker 1: this entire article is ridiculous, so utterly vacuous that I'm
Speaker 1: actually astonished. I don't want to name the reporter. I
Speaker 1: feel bad. What about Ragavan's career made this feel right?
Speaker 1: How has nobody connected these thoughts before I have a
Speaker 1: day job. I run a PR firm, I am a
Speaker 1: blogger with a podcast, and I'm the one who said, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: drag Uller is now the CEO of the blood Bank.
Speaker 1: Nobody saw this. Nobody saw this at the time. I
Speaker 1: just feel a bit crazy. I feel a bit crazy.
Speaker 1: But to be clear, this was something written several years
Speaker 1: after Yahoo had licensed its search technology to Microsoft in
Speaker 1: a financial deal that the next CEO, Marissa Maya, who
Speaker 1: replaced Barts, was still angry about for years. Ragavan's reign
Speaker 1: as what zd Neat referred to as the search Master
Speaker 1: was one so successful that it ended up being replaced
Speaker 1: by a search engine that not a single person in
Speaker 1: the world enjoys saying out loud. The Guardian article ran
Speaker 1: exactly one year before dramatic layoffs at Yahoo that involved
Speaker 1: firing entire divisions worth of people, and four months before
Speaker 1: Carol Barts would be fired by telephone by then chairman
Speaker 1: Roy Bostock. Her replacement, Scott Thompson, who previously served as
Speaker 1: president of PayPal, would last a whole five months in
Speaker 1: the role before he was replaced by former Google executive
Speaker 1: Marissa Mayer. In part because it emerged he lied on
Speaker 1: his resume about having a computer science degree. Hey, Brobaka,
Speaker 1: did you not notice that? Anyway? Whatever, Barts joined Yahoo
Speaker 1: in two thousand and nine, so about four years into
Speaker 1: Braba Kha's reign of terror. I guess, and she joined
Speaker 1: in the aftermath of its previous CEO, Jerry Yang, refusing
Speaker 1: to sell the company to Microsoft for forty five billion dollars.
Speaker 1: In her first year, she laid off hundreds of people
Speaker 1: and struck a deal that I've mentioned before to power
Speaker 1: Yahoo Search using Microsoft's being search engine tech, with Microsoft
Speaker 1: paying Yahoo eighty eight percent of the revenue it gained
Speaker 1: from searches, a deal that made ya who are couple
Speaker 1: hundred million dollars for handing over the keys and the
Speaker 1: tech to its most high traffic platform. As I previously stated,
Speaker 1: when Brabakhar Ragavan, Yahoo's secret weapon was doing his work,
Speaker 1: Yahoo Search was so valuable that it was replaced by
Speaker 1: Bing its sole value. In fact, I mean, maybe I'm
Speaker 1: being a little unfair. There's a way of looking at
Speaker 1: this that you could say that Yahoo's entire value at
Speaker 1: the end of his career was driven by nostalgia and
Speaker 1: association with days before he worked there. Anyway, thanks to
Speaker 1: the state of modern search. It's actually very, very difficult
Speaker 1: to find much about Ragavan's history. It took me hours
Speaker 1: of digging through Google and at one point being embarrassingly
Speaker 1: to find three or four articles that went into any
Speaker 1: depth about him. But from what I've gleaned, his expertise
Speaker 1: lies primarily in failing upwards ascending through the ranks of
Speaker 1: technology on the momentum from the explosions he's coursed. In
Speaker 1: a wide interview from twenty twenty one, GLAD handler Stephen
Speaker 1: Levy said Ragavan isn't the CEO of Google, he just
Speaker 1: runs the place, and described his addition to the company
Speaker 1: as a move from research to management. Bill Levy calls
Speaker 1: him a world class computer scientist who has authored definitive
Speaker 1: text in the field, which is true. He also describes
Speaker 1: Ragavan as choosing a management track, which definitely tracks with
Speaker 1: everything I found out about him. Ragavan proudly declares that
Speaker 1: Google's third party ad tech plays a critical role in
Speaker 1: keeping journalism alive and a really shitty answer to a
Speaker 1: question that was also made at a time when he
Speaker 1: was in aggressively incentivizing search engine optimized content and a
Speaker 1: year after he'd deposed someone who actually gave a shit
Speaker 1: about search. Under Ragavan, Google has become less reliable and
Speaker 1: it's dominated by search engine optimization and just outright spam.
Speaker 1: And I've said this before, but look, we complain about
Speaker 1: the state of Twitter under Elon Musk and justifiably he's
Speaker 1: a vile, anti, semi racist bigger. We all know this.
Speaker 1: It's fully true. We can say a million times. However,
Speaker 1: I'd argue that Ragavan, by extension Sandhar Pashai, deserve one
Speaker 1: hundred times more criticism. They've on unfathomable damage to society.
Speaker 1: You really can't fix the damage they've been doing and
Speaker 1: the damage they'll continue to do, especially as we go
Speaker 1: into an election. Ragavan and his cronies worked to oust
Speaker 1: Ben Gomes, a man who dedicated a good portion of
Speaker 1: his life to making the world's information more accessible, in
Speaker 1: the process burning the Library of Alexandria to the goddamn
Speaker 1: ground so that Sundaar Pshai could make more than two
Speaker 1: hundred million dollars a year, and Ragavan, a manager high
Speaker 1: by Sundar Peshai, a former McKinsey man. The King of
Speaker 1: Managers is an example of everything wrong with the tech industry.
Speaker 1: Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual
Speaker 1: academic credentials, Ragavan chose to bulldoze actual workers, people who
Speaker 1: did things, and people that care about technology and replace
Speaker 1: them with horrifying toadies that would make Google more profitable
Speaker 1: and less useful. Since Prabaka took the reigns of Google
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty, Google search has dramatically declined with these
Speaker 1: foor search updates I mentioned, allegedly made to improve the
Speaker 1: quality of results, having the adverse effect increasing the prevalence
Speaker 1: of spammy shitty search optimized content. It's frustrating. The anger
Speaker 1: you hear in my voice. The emotion is because I've
Speaker 1: read all of these antitrust emails. I have gone through
Speaker 1: this guy's history, and I've read all the things about
Speaker 1: Ben Gomes too. Every article about Ben Gomes where they interviewed,
Speaker 1: is this guy just having these dreamy thoughts about the
Speaker 1: future of information and the complexity of delivering it at
Speaker 1: high speed. Every interview with Ragavan is some vague bullshit
Speaker 1: about how important data is. It's so goddamn offensive to me,
Speaker 1: and all of this stuff happening is just one example
Speaker 1: of what I think are probably hundreds of things happening
Speaker 1: across startups or that have happened across startups in the
Speaker 1: last ten or fifteen years, and big Tech two. And
Speaker 1: it's because the people running the tech industry are no
Speaker 1: longer those who built him. Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Speaker 1: left Google in December twenty nineteen. The same year is
Speaker 1: the code yellow thing, and while they remained as controlling shareholders,
Speaker 1: they clearly don't give a shit about what Google means anymore.
Speaker 1: Propakar Ragavan is a manager and his career, from what
Speaker 1: I can tell, is mostly made up of did some
Speaker 1: stuff at IBM, failed to make Yahoo anything of no,
Speaker 1: and fucked up Google so badly that every news outlet
Speaker 1: has run a story about how bad it is. This
Speaker 1: this is the result of taking technology out of the
Speaker 1: hands of real builders and handing it to managers at
Speaker 1: a time when management is synonymous with staying as far
Speaker 1: away from actual work as possible. When you're a do
Speaker 1: nothing looking to profit as much as possible, who doesn't
Speaker 1: use tech, who doesn't care about tech, and you only
Speaker 1: care about growth, well, you're not a user. You're a parasite.
Speaker 1: And it's these parasites that have dominated and are now
Speaker 1: draining the tech industry of its value. They're driving it
Speaker 1: into a goddamn ditch. Ragavan's story is unique in so
Speaker 1: far as the damage he's managed to inflict, or if
Speaker 1: we're being exceptionally charitable, failed to avoid, in the of
Speaker 1: Yahoo on two industry defining companies, and the fact that
Speaker 1: he did it without being a CEO or founder is remarkable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's far from the only example of a manager falling upwards.
Speaker 1: I'm going to editorialize a bit here. I need to
Speaker 1: think about your job history. I want you to think
Speaker 1: about the managers you've had. I've written a lot about management,
Speaker 1: and specifically to do with remote work and the whole
Speaker 1: thing around guys who don't do work, who are barely
Speaker 1: in the office telling you you need to be in
Speaker 1: the office. This problem is everywhere. Managers are everywhere, and
Speaker 1: managers aren't doing work. I'm sure someone will email me
Speaker 1: now and say, well, I'm a manager and off I'll
Speaker 1: do work all the time. Yeah, make sure you do.
Speaker 1: That's why you're emailing me telling me how good you
Speaker 1: are at your job. People who actually do work don't
Speaker 1: feel defensive about it. People who do things then are
Speaker 1: part of the actual profit center. They don't need a
Speaker 1: podcast to tell them they're good at their job. What
Speaker 1: I think the problem is in modern American corporate society
Speaker 1: is that management is no longer synonymous with actually managing people.
Speaker 1: It's not about getting the people what they need. It's
Speaker 1: not about organizing things and making things efficient and good.
Speaker 1: It's not about execution. It's about handing work off to
Speaker 1: other people and getting paid handsomely. And if you disagree
Speaker 1: easy at better offline dot Com, I will read your email,
Speaker 1: maybe I'll even respond. But the thing is management has
Speaker 1: become a poison in America. Managers have become poisonous because
Speaker 1: managers are not actually held to any kind of standard. No,
Speaker 1: only the workers who do the work are. What happened
Speaker 1: to Ben Gomes is one of the most disgusting, disgraceful
Speaker 1: things to happen in the tech industry. It's an absolute joke.
Speaker 1: Ben Gomes was a goddamn hero. And I really need
Speaker 1: you to read the newsletter and read these emails. I
Speaker 1: need you to see how many times him and Thaka
Speaker 1: great Well were saying, hey, growth is bad for search.
Speaker 1: The thing that Ben Gomes was being asked to do
Speaker 1: was increase queries on Google, the literal amount that people's search.
Speaker 1: There are many ways of looking at that and thinking,
Speaker 1: oh shit, that's not what you want. Surely you don't
Speaker 1: want no queries. You don't want people not using it
Speaker 1: at all, but queries going upwards. Lennearly suggests that if
Speaker 1: you're not magic good to use the growth, at least
Speaker 1: the people are not getting what they want on the
Speaker 1: first try, which, by the way, kind of feels like
Speaker 1: how Google is nowadays when you go to Google and
Speaker 1: the first result and the second result, and the fifth
Speaker 1: result and the tenth result just don't get what you
Speaker 1: need because it's all that SEO crap. Now, this is
Speaker 1: all theorizing. But what I think prabagar Ragavan did was
Speaker 1: I think he took off all the fucking guidelines on
Speaker 1: Google Search. I think he rolled back changes specifically to
Speaker 1: make search worse, to increase queries, to give Google more
Speaker 1: chance to show you adverts. I am guessing don't have
Speaker 1: a source telling me this, but the pattern around the
Speaker 1: core search updates. The fact that Google Search started getting
Speaker 1: worse toward the middle and end of twenty nineteen and
Speaker 1: unquestionably dipped in twenty twenty. Well that's when Prabaka took over.
Speaker 1: That's when the big Man took the reins. That's when
Speaker 1: Drac Killer got his job at the blood bank. And
Speaker 1: this is the thing. There's very little that you and
Speaker 1: I can actually do about this. But what we can
Speaker 1: do is say names like probagar Ragavan a great deal
Speaker 1: of times so that people like this can be known,
Speaker 1: so that the actions of these scurrilous assholes can be
Speaker 1: seen and heard and pointed at and spat upon. I'm
Speaker 1: not suggesting spitting on anyone, No violent acts. No can
Speaker 1: be pissy on the internet like the rest of us.
Speaker 1: Now I'm ranting. I realize i'm ranting, but this subject
Speaker 1: really really got to me. But it's not the only one.
Speaker 1: In the next episode, I'm going to conclude this sordid
Speaker 1: three part fiasco with a few more examples, and how
Speaker 1: many of these managers, these bean counters, devoid of imagination
Speaker 1: or ability or anything of note save for that utter
Speaker 1: slug likability. To protect oneself, I want to talk about
Speaker 1: how these people manage to obfiscate their true intentions by
Speaker 1: pretending to be engineers, by pretending to be technologists and
Speaker 1: pretending to be innovators. I want to tell you all
Speaker 1: about how Adam Masseri destroyed Instagram, and I want to
Speaker 1: tell you how little Sam Altman has achieved other than
Speaker 1: making him and his friends rich. See you next time.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and
Speaker 1: composer of the Better Offline theme song is matter. You
Speaker 1: can check out more of his music and audio projects
Speaker 1: at Matasoalski dot com M A T t O s
Speaker 1: O w s Ki dot com. You can email me
Speaker 1: at easy at Better offline dot com, or check out
Speaker 1: Better Offline dot com to find my newsletter and more
Speaker 1: links to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 1: Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
Speaker 1: more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
Speaker 1: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.