I guess we all kinda knew that, but it’s always nice to have a study backing your opinions.
I don’t know what the hell is going on at Big G HQ, but it doesn’t seem like they have much of any real mission these days.
The company is increasingly compelled by Wall Street pressures
The latest round of layoffs was practically dictated by activist investors like Christopher Hohn.
Stupid short sighted crap too. Complaining about excessive compensation and too much stock given away… That’s the people who build the best generation of money making products there. If they have no skin in the game and aren’t being compensated well, they aren’t going to attract and keep the best talent. The best talent is going to go to companies like Tesla and OpenAI and various startups where those people have a chance to become millionaires on stock options.
It’s one thing to pull the Netflix strategy, keep only the very best of the best people, pay them a lot, and get rid of everybody else. But treating labor overall like a cost and not an investment is not a good long-term strategy.
If they have no skin in the game and aren’t being compensated well, they aren’t going to attract and keep the best talent.
I think the theory being challenged is that “best talent” translates to “most lucrative product”.
Certainly, there’s no shortage of shitty mass market crap that makes enormous amounts of money purely by saturating the market. What’s more, the model of cornering the market through regulatory capture or cartelization means that the talent of your staff has less and less of an impact on your market dominance. Eventually, when you’ve got a full blown monopoly, the only thing you really care about is the margin on your sales.
It’s one thing to pull the Netflix strategy, keep only the very best of the best people, pay them a lot, and get rid of everybody else.
Netflix hasn’t even been following the Netflix strategy. They’re routinely cutting bait on the highest watched shows and opting for cheaper productions with less overhead. One reason they love pumping out anime stems from the fact that licensing an English sub of a foreign media import is crazy lucrative relative to sourcing original content from Hollywood.
WB is taking this strategy into overdrive with their quest to saturate HBO with reality TV and old movies.
Generally agree.
But it depends on what your product line is. Does Google want to be Microsoft (new flavor of the same old crap, cloud centric, no special talent needed just competent coders and project leadership) or do they want to be OpenAI (push the envelope of what’s possible and commercialize it)?
If the goal is to be Microsoft, this investor’s comments are accurate. Fewer staff, less compensation, just get a few well paid product managers with a vision and a buggy whip to drive the coders to build it. Higher margins will mean more profits.
If the goal is to be OpenAI, this investor is dead wrong.
Netflix hasn’t even been following the Netflix strategy.
I was talking about their employees, not their content. Their content strategy is brain dead. They cancel so much stuff that it’s not even worth getting into a Netflix show because it’ll probably be cancelled after one season.
It might work, in the short term. But without quality content people will give up on Netflix and they will be the ‘budget option’.
HBO is doing the same thing- I really think their management must be on drugs or brain damaged or something. HBO was THE most recognizable brand name for QUALITY content in the entire industry, and they killed it in favor of ‘max’ which is generic and means nothing and blends in with everyone else’s ‘plus’. And lopping off their own content is equally stupid.
Just like Boeing putting the useless McDonnell Douglas bean counters in charge of the company post merge, WB put the people who ran Discovery into the ground in charge. Sad to watch.
