I don't see how that quote indicates that her "feud with Singhal was responsible for her 'demotion'...and eventual departure".
I'll admit that I generally dislike these books that construct a simple narrative out of anecdotes out of years of time, so I'm mostly responding because it's disappointing that this is the only top comment right now.
And (assuming it's true), believe it or not he's not the first person to resent someone bringing their expertise to bear on their baby, regardless of merit.
> In October 2010, it was made official. Mayer was removed from the top of Google’s search organization and put in charge of Google Maps and other “local” products.
> Technically, this was a lateral move, if not a promotion, because Mayer retained her vice-president title and she was, at the same time, given a seat on Google’s operating committee—then-CEO Eric Schmidt’s round table of top executives from the company.
> In reality, it was a demotion. Mayer was no longer in charge of what Google’s most important product looked like or how it worked. At Google, there was search, which generates nearly all of the company’s revenues and profits, and then there was everything else. Running Google search, Mayer was managing the most important product at the world’s most important Internet company. Running Google Maps, she was not.
Heh, so far up the food chain, being in charge of Google Maps is a demotion. If anything Google Maps is a genuinely good product and well used by many, as is search and Gmail. Could have been worse... Google+. I wonder how Googlers internally feel about maps, it should be "up there" next to search in terms of being amazing and well used.
Google probably has a better key to profit via Maps than it could ever hope to get by building a completely new social network. So dumb that it was so desperate to imitate Facebook and Apple that it let its best products languish or die, even though many of them (e.g. Reader) contained social network microcosms.
I consider Google Maps to be far more useful and better than Facebook. The sans/quality of G+ doesn't impact my view of Google Maps. It's just an amazing product, that got even better once it came on those feature phones with pseudo browsers, even if it took a whole minute to load some tiles, it was still amazing for going to appointments in new areas.
I have a lot of childhood memories of my dad in the car messing around in the dark with physical maps only to find a torn page or inaccuracies, heh.
Google Maps has reached its true potential only now that everyone has a smartphone with GPS. I don't think that it was entirely clear in 2010 just how important mobile would be, or that Google would play such a dominant role on mobile devices. The company was still fixated on Facebook's rise, but it's since jettisoned the focus on social networking (after Google Plus failed to take off).
Is that really so? I have actually stopped using Google Maps over the last couple of years as the last few redesigns have made it less useful and more frustrating. I would say that 2010 represents the peak of Google Maps' usefulness, and whatever it has been doing since then looks more like squandering potential than realizing it.
...But I also found Google Maps to be excruciating and effectively unusable on a mobile phone when I first tried it. I don't think I've actually tried using Google Maps on a phone since their last redesign. Perhaps that's what happened, they just switched from a design that was usable on a computer to a design that was usable on a phone, but I'd already given up on the phone experience so I didn't notice.
I don't think it's quite there yet. Google Maps for Mobile still has a ways to go in terms of feature completeness & accuracy, and there are a ton of additional ways search & profile data can be mined & surfaced in Maps results.
Although incremental improvements in data quality and data mining can certainly still improve the user experience (I've personally encountered many frustrating examples of this), their potential impact is clear now that everyone has Maps in their pocket.
The value of any such improvements to end users was drastically magnified by the availability of Maps on mobile devices with GPS. And that shift required many advances to occur independently of Google - Apple and the Android OEMs played a key role.
Just playing devil's advocate here -- sometimes very trusted lieutenants are put in charge of the underperforming divisions. One could see it that way too. That Page trusted Marissa with the ability to lift up the "local" division.
> Page consulted with [SVP of Engineering Bill] Coughran. Coughran said he could no longer peacefully referee what was becoming an increasingly hostile relationship between Singhal and Mayer. Coughran said that a couple times a week, one or the other would be in his office, complaining and asking to lead the organization.
> “We’re going to have to pick somebody here,” he told Page.
The feud was with Singhal. Page only picked the winner. I'd recommend you just read the book (the quotes are from chapter 6).
I worked at Google for a very long time and always wondered if Mayer wasn't in the OC because her and Page dated for awhile back at the beginning of Google. The optics of having your ex-gf in your inner circle seems like it would look bad, corporate politics or not.
Many of the other folks in the OC are super-long-timers and would've been around when Mayer and Page were an item, adding to the awkwardness.
I'll admit that I generally dislike these books that construct a simple narrative out of anecdotes out of years of time, so I'm mostly responding because it's disappointing that this is the only top comment right now.
And (assuming it's true), believe it or not he's not the first person to resent someone bringing their expertise to bear on their baby, regardless of merit.