Friday, March 13, 2009

New hire

AOL has hired a Google executive as their new CEO. What I find interesting about this is that, when AOL wants to improve their Internet advertising, they go out and get a chief executive who has experience doing that very thing. I'm sure they're going to pay him a lot; if he can keep AOL going, he'll be worth it.

But if, say, Microsoft wants to improve their search business, they don't go to Google and attract away some of their top technical minds. Instead, they whine about how they're not allowed to bring in top talent from overseas, the best and the brightest, the magical folks who will elevate them into the stratosphere. They push for visas, they threaten to offshore massive numbers of jobs, when they could go out and pay for the top existing people.

Why are the rules different in these two situations, I wonder?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

do you understand how strange this sounds? these advertising wonks swap around all the time. but you extend that to wonder why Microsoft can't attract Google's top technical talent? I dunno, why can't Tata attract the top engineers from Mercedes?

You really wonder? Or you look for an edge to grind the axe?

Ok, anecdote from the real world: I was eating lunch in Building 10 at Microsoft, and I met some guys who work on the search engine. (If you're curious, I think they were Americans.) One described his job as "chasing taillights".

- mcfnord, who can spot a straw man

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