Slashdot Mirror
How Google's Novel Management System Aids Growth
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Gary Hamel, visiting professor at London Business School, argues in a Wall Street Journal commentary that Google's 'novel management system seems to have been designed to guard against the risk factors that so often erode an organization's evolutionary potential.' Among Google's advantages: The 20% rule, an 'expansive sense of purpose' and the credo, 'keep the bozos out and reward people who make a difference.' Hamel also traces the company's evolution from Google 1.0, 'a search engine that crawled the Web but generated little revenue,' to Google 5.0, 'an innovation factory that produces a torrent of new Web-based services, including Gmail, Google Desktop, and Google Base. More than likely, 6.0 is around the corner.'"
google = amerifags!
All my friends and family use it, too!
woo
Many companies started out fresh and lightweight like Google did. The problem is that with success comes size. Companies like Microsoft get crushed under their own weight. If history is any lesson, Google will follow suit unless they truly are that smart. Only time will tell.
http://religiousfreaks.com/Was anybody else besides me wondering why Google was using a Novell system when they read the headline?
...Google Beta 5.0, 'an innovation factory that produces a torrent of new Web-based services, including Gmail, Google Desktop, and Google Base. More than likely, Beta 6.0 is around the corner.
Fixed.
As the artical points out, Google is pretty much going right where all have gone wrong in the past with traditional business models before. This is what makes them so innovative. The tremendous openess in the company, along with their creedo to do no wrong has also given them a squeky clean public image. The world loves Google and wants to see the friendly Giant smash the mean people eating one.
All that said, how long can Google really maintain it's unorthadox business methods while allowing VERY orthadox investors to buy stocks in the company. I'd say it's only a matter of time, and the price for become a truly large corporation. I can only hope that I am wrong.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
of 'The Seven Day Weekend' from Ricardo Semmler. The CEO of SemCo with revolutionary ideas about business. A lot of his ideas are mentioned in TFA.
Really great book if you're interested in the ideas behind firms like Google.
Now it's Google's turn in the box. With the way Google is getting involved in Politics, both in the US and China, I'm sure a lot of people are going to start having issues with them and I'm sure a lot of it will spill over into their workplace.
As a previous poster said, as it gets bigger, things will not go as well. Just as everyone turned on MicroSoft, I'm sure one say everyone will turn on Google as well. We're a fickle industry.
The article title came out "Google's management (has) AIDS"
Oops.
Oh absolutely, everyone has completely turned their back on Microsoft
[/sarcasm>]Changa hates change.
I read somewhere (I think it might have been Steve Yegge's blog) that Google has an unusually high number of employees per manager. This reduces their overhead, although it requires hiring employees who don't need as much supervision.
Anyone know if this is true? How many people report to a manager at Google?
...I'd say that Amazon is starting to turn into one of these. Their new S3 storage service is a very nifty thing; I've seen folks using it all over the place.
We're using it for the indi downloads and it's been working great - especially when paired with the Ruby API.
The Army reading list
Oh please. Google allows paediophile websites on it's service, which is against US law, and does NOTHING when confronted about it. Meanwhile it gives into all sorts of censorship demands by the Chicoms and bends over backwards to follow their highly represive demands.
People don't like google that much, and the more they learn about google's ultra liberal ways, the more they are hating it. Do no evil? Google embraces evil.
All it takes to cripple an innovative company is for people outside the tech world, usually managers from ivy league schools with big fancy MBA's, to come in and cement themselves into positions of power and shift the focus from innovation to profits. Happens all the time... people with MBA's don't really contribute much to society and they know it (honestly, slight contribution to efficiency, maybe, but absolutely nothing else), but they also know to look for the most up-and-coming sector and the companies in it to try and get positions high up.
:)
Eh, at least that's what I've seen happen. Hope I don't get modded down too much by angry managers.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
"It is driven by an open-ended mission to organize the world's knowledge..."
and:
"Google seems to have grasped the new century's most important business lesson: The capacity to evolve is the most important advantage of all."
My bet is on Google to solce the problems of a working A.I., maybe by accident, maybe by design.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Google's been clever, and they've used that cleverness to build huge market share and even entire markets.
And that's great. Good for them. They got this far when lots of others failed.
But there's no evidence that they're smart enough to survive long-term. In fact, it seems to me that Google thinks they're better and smarter then their competition. I doubt that seriously.
Elitism may be out of fashion, but Google is famously elitist when it comes to hiring. It understands that companies begin to slide into mediocrity when they start to hire mediocre people. A-level people want to work with A-level people.
The only problem is that a company cannot thrive longterm with only A-level people. As a software company grows and matures so the average age of the company code base increases, and there's a gradually increasing requirement for maintenance of the older products. A-level people rarely consider their primary task in life is settling in as a maintenance coder on products that are no longer considered to have a substantial "wow" factor.
Having said that, code maintenance can be some of the most demanding work around, as programmers are asked to come up to speed on outdated code they didn't write and make it do things it was never designed to do. But, speaking generally, this isn't considered something that will make you stand out in your company and it's not where A-level people want to be.
Equally well, having everyone take a turn at maintenance doesn't work either. I would imagine that there's few programming tasks worse than taking over code that's been maintained by half a dozen people who only wanted to move on to other things. You probably aren't going to get any of the awards mentioned in the article by burying yourself in old code, regardless how valuable that might be.
Seriously, look at the submitter...
Looks strikingly similar to the models that 3M, IBM and possibly a number of other companies used during their rapid growth periods, particularly in their research/development departments. An emphasis on employee driven product development has high overhead to the number crunchers (lots of work is thrown out) but it really only takes 1 unique application of an idea (all ideas are old) in 100 to more than make that back.
Rod Taylor
Very good point you have there.
Google 1.0 was a search engine that crawled the Web but generated little revenue; which led to Google 2.0, a company that sold its search capacity to AOL/Netscape, Yahoo and other major portals; which gave way to Google 3.0, an Internet contrarian that rejected banner ads and instead sold simple text ads linked to search results; which spawned Google 4.0, an increasingly global entity that found a way to insert relevant ads into any and all Web content, dramatically enlarging the online ad business; which mutated into Google 5.0, an innovation factory that produces a torrent of new Web-based services, including Gmail, Google Desktop, and Google Base. More than likely, 6.0 is around the corner.
It should be:
Google 1.0: A nobody search engine
Google 2.0: Outsourcing search engine
Google 3.0: Contextual ads in searches
Google 4.0: Adsense network
Google 4.1: Information hoarding of users
My version 4.1 highlights Google's recent overt interest in aggregating data on its users through services like the personalized homepage, Gmail, Gcal, Gchat, and the Google Desktop. Why is it not 5.0? Because these enhance the previously established revenue streams without changing the way they make money. It is not an evolution in Google's financial model, just new ways to better target their contextual ads (3.0 and 4.0).
In order for a 5.0 to happen, Google has to redefine its primary revenue stream or add a new one that pulls in revenue from a seperate audience. My point is made most clear by highlighting the benefiting party of each evolutionary step:
Google 1.0: A nobody search engine - You and me
Google 2.0: Outsourcing search engine - Yahoo/AOL/portals
Google 3.0: Contextual ads in searches - Web advertisers
Google 4.0: Adsense network - Web masters
Google 4.1: Information hoarding of users
Likely candidates for a 5.0 would be:
Television or radio advertisement domination
Online music store, or other type of goods for cash type of business
Online payment system (clone paypal)
A novel online service as a subscription service (seems least likely with Google's history)
Those would be Google 5.0.
everything google has is still BETA -- how many years can you be beta, really?
Code maintenance, yeah, those are the jobs we will outsource to India and China.
A-level people want to do what is best for everybody (for themselves and the company). If Google keeps rewarding people who make the most contributions, then code maintainers will be rewarded. Maintenance is considered a low-tier job at hierarchical companies where only people working on the 'wow' products are rewarded.
The whole point of googles flat structure makes it possible to have maintenance be a sexy task within the organization by allowing rewards to go where they should go too. I would say that 'most companies' create the hierarchy because they don't have the guts to manage the way that google does.
I've worked at far too many companies where the disconnect between espoused values and actual values create the kind of situation you describe (ie maintenance coding is a loser job, best avoided or gotten promoted out of).
This all stinks of geese and golden eggs, but Wall Street's memory of positive indicators only extends to the last quarterly result.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Google 5.0, 'an innovation factory that produces a torrent of new Web-based services, including Gmail, Google Desktop, and Google Base
Can someone please care to explain how Google Desktop and Google Base (and *all* other services except Gmail) make mokey for Google? Is it innovative to use the old "underpants gnomes" logic?
It's not a troll when it's true
Google's apparent indifference to the use of Google Groups by anonymous posters to wreck Usenet with SPAM, off-topic posts, and overall abuse has led some to call for a Usenet Death Penalty (configuring news servers to drop all articles originating from a given site). See:
Call for UDP against Google Groups
Well, everybody does that, don't they? Even the Bush administration does that. The key is in your perception of who the bozos are, and who makes a difference...
Gary Hamel, visiting professor at Slashdot Business School, argues in a Wall Street Journal commentary that Slashdot's 'novel management system seems to have been designed to guard against the risk factors that so often erode an organization's evolutionary potential.' Among Slashdot's advantages: The 20% non-dupes rule, an 'inflated sense of purpose' and the credo, 'keep the noobies out and reward people who agree with you.' Hamel also traces the company's evolution from Slashdot 1.0, 'a small clique that pontificated about the Web but generated way too much body hair,' to Slashdot 5.0, 'a group-think factory that produces a torrent of super-heated techno-fetishistic mutual masturbation' . More than likely, 6.0 is around the corner.
In fact, I would venture to say that while Google has released a lot of products in recent time, none of them have been great. At least not to the standards they once held. It seems having Google attached to the name is more important than the product itself.
"an innovation factory that produces a torrent of new Web-based services"
Anyone got a link to this torrent?
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Leave it to Google to come up with a better design than "alphabetically, by author, then title"
(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
The premisse is that you can reduce all the richness of human beings to an unidimensional measure. The best teams I worked with have a diversity of talents, each one contributing for the success.
Two words:
Continuous refactoring.
You just explained why everything google does is perpetually "beta."
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Special Report / China and the internet
The party, the people and the power of cyber-talk
Apr 27th 2006 | BEIJING
From The Economist print edition
At present the party has the upper hand. It is starting to sweat, though
IMAGE
“DO YOU know how serious a mistake you’ve made?” Yan Yuanzhang recalls an official asking him not long ago. Mr Yan had been summoned to Beijing’s Internet Propaganda Management Office to talk about his websites. They were causing, he was told, the Communist Party to lose face. They were providing material that foreign media could use to attack China. They were illegal and must be closed down within 24 hours.
“Farewell, worker comrades,” wrote Mr Yan in notices posted that day on his China-based websites, China Workers Net and Communist Net. Visitors could hear a lugubrious rendition of the communist anthem, the Internationale, through their computer speakers as they read. “Whether there is any hope of starting again, heaven knows.” He says now that he will relaunch one of the two sites on May 1st, this time on a server in Taiwan.
It is remarkable that the websites lasted as long as they did. Mr Yan, who is not a party member, launched them on May 1st last year to mark Labour Day. The aim, he says, was to provide platforms for a “leftist” critique of China’s embrace of “Dickensian capitalism”. They did not, as he tried to explain to the city government, attack the party itself or its leaders. But they did provide something the party abhors: uncensored news about worker unrest. In September he launched a bulletin board on which visitors could directly post their comments. Messages complained about corruption, the privatisation of state-owned enterprises and the hardships of unemployed workers.
As Mr Yan talks, he gets a text message on his mobile phone. It is from Tan Jiaming, a university student in southern China who has been running a website of similar outlook, Revolutionary Marxism. It too, the message says, has been closed. The student had posted a notice entitled “Strongly Protest the Snuffing Out of the China Workers Website by the Beijing Authorities”. He was summoned to hear a dozen officials threaten him with expulsion from his university for backing Mr Yan.
IMAGE
Six years ago Bill Clinton described China’s efforts to restrict the internet as “sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall”. But as China’s web-filtering technology has grown more sophisticated, and the ranks of its internet police have swelled, some have begun to wonder. A report in 2003 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace suggested that, despite the difficulties the internet posed to authoritarian regimes, it could also be used to fortify them. China, the authors concluded, had been “largely successful at guiding use” of the internet. At a congressional hearing in February on American companies involved in internet business in China, a Republican congressman, Christopher Smith, said the internet there had become “a malicious tool, a cyber sledgehammer of repression”.
Some of the companies testifying at the hearing—Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!—deserved a grilling. Why, for instance, had Microsoft, at the request of Chinese officials, removed a popular site in December from its Chinese version of MSN Spaces, a service for personal diaries and blogs? Yahoo! too had questions to answer about reports that information it provided to the police about its e-mail services had helped put dissidents behind bars. More recently Reporters Without Borders, a human-rights group, said that a Hong Kong unit of Yahoo! had given the police a Chinese use
It is the bozo who is first to call another person a bozo.
I don't trust these Google people: they behave as though they are angry about something.
How the King's Novel Wardrobe Aids His Rule
that's not silk... that's his bare *ss!
'nuff said? not quite...
google isn't bullet proof. if they were, theyd actually make enough money to grow instead of parting fools from their money by funding ops from equity markets.
this is a marketing expense bubble enabled by the current bubble economy. when times get hard, and they will, google is in BIG trouble since advertising is one of the first expenses to get the rug pulled out from under it.
the stock price indicates google is bulletproof but, then again, the naz looked bulletproof at 5000+. truth be told, that's when it was at its weakest point ever.
caveat emptor - and i don't play this knowingly ignorant love fest game.
oh, and i LOVE google and google groups.
I Would Never Work For Google..... Not because I don't want to, but because Google would never let me in the door. Despite 12 years of Software Development experience, they still require a high GPA which I can never modify/rectify no matter how many life corners I may turn. Let that be a lesson to the new CS students. It's too bad too. I am your typical Make Magazine fanatic who brings "outside the box" thinking to his job. Always looking to do more than the initial requirments when appropriate, always looking to add that little extra bit of "wow", always looking to make life easier for the end user. My current boss loves it, and at least he'll feel safe knowing that Google will never steal me away. -CF
Please not that I'm not talking about management that have experience, training, and/or education in technology. Regular managers and folks with MBA's are better suited to environments like factories and non-tech corporations, where the majority of their workforce is not particularly smart or well trained in a profession that's much closer to lawyers, engineers, and architects than accountants or average corporate employees. I think alot of managers forget they're talking to incredibly intelligent folks when working in the tech industry, and not some guy on an assembly line or somebody working their way up from the mail room. When was the last time you saw a lawyer dealing with someone inexperienced with law telling them what to do?
I know it's not quite the same, but my point is that software engineers and programmers are more than intellectually capable of making a large portion of management into a network program that works like an autonomous democracy; it really seems like most of what managers do are relics and old customs from the days before the internet, and have just managed to cling on for roughly the past decade. Supply chains, distribution, and resource allocation should be the job of well designed software alongside the more seasoned employees, or just seasoned tech people that went ahead and got an MBA.
If you have a good company with a good reputation with lots of skilled people working together without the bungling of incompetent higher ups, who's to say that potential clients couldn't just file a request detailing what they need and in what time? and that all that had to happen was that the most experience and respected employees got together, sketch out the architecture and put a timeline into the network telling what had to be done when? Seems like a good idea to me. If you didn't finish what was decided upon on time, you get a cut in pay or some other disciplinary action. Just like any other job, screw up enough and you get fired, let people who want to work in an intelligent community-run company do it and love it and make their money.
Anyway, marketing and designing a sellable product aren't really the jobs of management... they have a lot of control over what happens, but they don't contribute. I could be completely wrong here, but in all honesty I've never met someone who only specialized in business administration who knew anything about what would sell as software. There shouldn't more than a handful of people specializing in economics and business overseeing what goes on just to make sure there aren't any avoidable fuck ups.
Bah, I'm getting all idealistic from extreme lack of sleep. I could be flagrantly, abhorrently wrong, and I know I'm at least somewhat incorrect... but I'm pretty sure I'm onto something useful. I still have no idea what most corporate employees do, and I've become pretty much convinced that the majority of cubicle workers that aren't coding or engineering are in on a huge scam to get a regular decent paycheck (Yeah, I have lots of friends with these kinds of jobs, and yes, I pay attention when lots of people complain about working about 1/3 of the time they're at the office... I dunno, sounds wasteful to me, the kind that can be gotten rid of by trimming the work force and telling the less productive to do something useful with their lives).
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Yet another example of a management guru hitching his/her star to a hot company.
Most innovation theorists in b-schools would desperately like to believe that managing a whole company like an R&D lab is the way to go. It may be true, but Google hasn't shown it yet. Their money-making business models (AdWords/AdSense) were mostly developed (or stumbled upon) before Google grew into this "innovation factory".
Less glamourous but effective models for the long term, like the Toyota Production System, demand that management have an absolute grip on how their business operates, and always compare their performance vs. some measurable reality. The rest is tools and techniques.
Google is still young - let another 10 years pass, and see what happens. People get stale - it's just part of the human condition. The only way I see to gaurd against this is to ensure that there is a controlled degree of turnover in staff (especially managmement) so that nobody gets too comfortable.
A friend of mine run a small company.
...
He tried to hire only the best of the best for a while and after gave up.
You cannot reward everybody in the company otherwise reward loose its meaning. So you must choose. If you have a team with a guy who is 2 times beter than an average employee in another company, he is still mediocre compared to his colleague who is 2.1 times beter.
In addition, the less performant employees are the 'disposable' percentile. At the next company difficulty they know they are terminated, so even if they are top-performers by other companies standards, they still are under basic underperformer pressure.
Even by paying top-salaries for less performing, they were leaving because of the pressure and the lack of consideration.
Ironically, even the top performer were leaving, because in his company they were yet another genius
Finally he managed beter results keeping some looser in his company ( buffer/fuse employees ). It happened very quickly for him but off course his company was not google, there was no hype to keep employees working there. And also people having his company on their resume were not automatically considered as half-god by concurent companies.
Capitalism exists only to make a society more efficient than other economic systems and help civilization progress, mostly in terms of standard of living in the ways of medicine, food, shelter, and that sort of thing alongside aiding our desires to find out who and what the hell we are and what we're doing here (arts, religion, philosophy, exploratory and theoretical science). That is the be all and end all for capitalism, there is no other point to it. The problem is that alot of people don't see it that side of it with the drive to succeed, and see money as the only reason we have this setup. The worse of these are usually MBA's, and the worst are usually CEO's and fellow higher-ups, the ones hell-bent on driving the gap between rich and poor as far apart as possible. While many economists and "captains of industry" would have the world believe that a free market and their version of capitalism is the real thing, nothing could be further from the truth.
The current system is a perversion of the original idea: products are no longer judged on quality and craftsmanship but on advertising, stifling real innovation or foresight into the long term effects certain products can have on the future, such as global warming, toxic waste, growing amounts of artificial chemicals in the land, water, and air, side effects of artificial chemicals in agriculture and livestock, side effects of pharmaceuticals, etc. The best example I can think of here would be Monsanto, who have used advertising to present a friendly image while using lawyers to silence reporters and competitors and massive amounts of cash to silence the FDA about rBGH, the artificial hormone given to cows to increase milk production, which is banned in every other civilized nation but the US because of possible cancerous effects (not to mention their Agent Orange or GM crops).
Anyway, that was a slight tangent. The point is that the entire concept of making money through the manipulation of money without thought to the end result defeats what I believe strongly to be the idea behind capitalism: reward through ingenuity, invention, and hard work in a way that benefits society. The idea is not to find as many tax and regulation loopholes and cut as many corners as possible to increase the top 5 employees salaries to 7 digits. Civilization also needs a well educated, well paid, large middle class to produce large numbers of people who will succeed because of their talent and ideas to progress and keep from collapsing, which is disappearing.
Remember, money is only a system of measurement, and the stock market is imaginary, as it is an abstract concept of people paying for paper what other people say they should. The only thing of real worth is labor. MBA's should not be paid as handsomely as they are for essentially supervising a company. The goal of a company's CEO should not be making money by whatever means possible, but rather making sure that the company's work and products are the best they can be, as logically, that will make you profitable and that's the only reason you should be profitable.
I'm going to be slightly smug and end with a quote by someone much smarter than me:
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
If you seriously think that all coding jobs within Google are equal, you are nuts. As a software engineer who graduated from a top school, I can tell you that people in this industry are VERY big into what project you're working on. If you think that an engineer for search quality or Google Earth isn't more respected within the company than someone who maintains the software behind the parallelized OS or does some other relatively more mundane job, then you are reading far too many WSJ articles that idealize things.
Whenever a company is doing well at the moment, somebody writes an "In Search of Excellence" type of book or article explaining why. Then a few years later (sometimes a few months later) the company falters despite the fact that their "great/innovative/creative/yada-yada-yada" practices haven't changed a bit.
Now if a writer looked at 100 start-up companies and predicted which ones would succeed and which ones would fail in the next 5 years based on their management practices and he got most of them right, I'd be impressed. Picking today's winners is all too easy.
Google is in the honeymoon phase. It just went IPO. Its too early to draw any lessons about its "success". The biggest test is when Google suffers a setback and has to do layoffs. Another test is when people start retiring prematurely to play with their money...and yes, as you mention, grunts are left with code maintenance. Everybody used to sing praises about Sun Microsystems too (with fluff articles about the "wacky" pranks employees would pull -- as signs of "innovation" and "creativity" -- and the casual dress code), and now look at where Sun is.
With all of the "brainpower", what makes headlines? The products of companies they bought (not the products developed from within) and copies of other companies' products:
- Google Earth (originally developed externally by Keyhole)
- Skechup (originally developed externally by @Last Software)
- Writely (originally developed externally by Upstartle)
- dodgeball social networking (originally developed externally by dodgeball.com)
- GoogleTalk (instant messaging idea copied from ICQ and others)
- AdWords (patented externally by Overture)
- GMail (internet mail idea copied from Hotmail)
- GoogleMaps (mapping idea copied from Mapquest and others)
This points out there is a flaw in the system. They may have thousands of "little 'Googlettes'" (to quote TFA) running inside of the company, but the true innovation is happening outside of the company. These ideas weren't created by the Mensa-like brains who passed the Google hiring gauntlet.
The article mistakenly says that Google's management ideas are novel, but they aren't; they are copied from a number of other companies, some of which are still around, some of which aren't.
At the end of the day, Google still gets its revenue from advertising, which is no different from any other portal since circa 1996. The quality of Google's core application (search results) is subjective. Google's primary user-interface is trivial (from the end-user's standpoint, it has few states). Easy rise, easy fall.
Ultimately, the question becomes: Who wrote this article? A journalist for the Wall Street Journal? Nope. The article's author is Gary Hamel, who owns a management consulting business. This is a fluff promtional piece he can add to his resume when trolling for new clients. That's why the article is offered for free (no registration required); it's an advertisment.
The greatest irony is that the former senior vice president of engineering at Google pre-IPO and shortly post-IPO was Wayne Rosing (who in 2004 held about 28 million dollars worth of Google stock).
It's my understanding that Rosing has no college degree.
I guess I'm nuts then.
Come on, seriously now: do you honestly thing that the programmers who work on Google Earth and/or Search Quality are competing for the same jobs as someone who maintains the software behind the parallelized OS? As a programmer and sometimes manager in this software industry (I guess that's what you'd call it, these days my code is mostly report-generation and accounting software, but that's another story), I can tell you often server programmers couldn't care less what application programmers do (and vice verse), but management knows that BOTH may be important.
Kudos for you for graduating from a top school. Given the fact that your academic expertise is far beyond mine (I graduated with a literature degree from a crappy school), you probably understand the subject better than I do. However, you might want to look at http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html
for more info on what the parallelized OS thingy they've got going on in there and (if you do) I think it might change your mind about whether or not it is 'mundane'.
Huh? Lets keep a perspective here.
Let's wait 5 years to see if Google is indeed so wonderful, ground-breaking, innovative blah blah blah.
The rapid growth trajectory they are on at the moment has been traced by many tech and other companies in the past, and along the way things get more complicated and organisations and their environment can change dramatically, often for the worse. G. are not unique in this or any respect, and don't live outside of history.
I'd also like to dispute statements that Google is "an innovation factory that produces a torrent of new Web-based services, including Gmail, Google Desktop, and Google Base "? There is nothing innovative about the items in that list at all - Google didn't invent (nor even significantly improve) web-based email, nor web-based database front-ends, nor good search algorithms nor desktop search nor photo-sharing on the web nor web-based satellite mapping nor the delivery of contextual web-based advertising etc etc etc. And to call the 'Google Desktop' an innovation when it is just a round up of basic software tools (many of which aren't even Google's) is especially dumb.
There is, in fact, very little that Google has done in terms of products or its business model that is 'innovative' by any stretch of the imagination. Let's face it, they haven't really invented much at all.
They are indeed very good at buying up other small innovative companies, they do web search well, they run a good ad banner network in AdSense, and offer good software like GDS, Picasa, SketchUp and other titles for free. I thank them for that, and their business has indeed successfully delivered those things to me and millions of other people, but I'm not going to lose my sense of judgement about the company because of these nice but hardly innovative achievements.
There's a certain plausability in believing that individuals with very high GPAs or good puzzle solving skills would be better contributors to an engineering or scientific-oriented company than slightly less "qualified" candidates, but there's really no proof of it.
From a behaviorism point of view one could argue that the leadershp of a company like Google with so much postive reinforcement today from nearly every direction might easily acquire superstitious beliefs about what makes their company so successful. When you're living through a period of "doing everything right", it's hard to figure out which actions are wrong.
Another company that hired only A-level talent, robustly avoided B-level talent, ran strong internal competitions to try and attract other employees onto your star project, and talked a lot about "darwinian" processes running between internal projects was: Enron
Like Google now, Enron back in the day had management consultants writing magazine articles about the wonders of their "fluid" structure, the way petty beaurocrats were kept out of people's way, and their hiring practices. It was The Way Of The Future. Enron was the best, was going to take over and Rule Supreme. Like Google, Enron was proud that it didn't just keep to one boring idea of what they did, the company could perpetually reinvented itself.
Those standard management structures exist for a reason. If google finds a way to work without them long-term, then good for them. But it's harder than it might seem.
Lets not forget that Gary Hamel had Enron "leading the future", his now revised book, with its decentralized management structure. As many of us know, in the current thinking decentralized structures promote innovation at the expense of control. Hamel's one sided view of structure didn't work out so well.
Googles 20% +10% rule is jsut best practice from the 3M post-it case taught to every HBS MBA with the 10% twist. It works. Its not new. Google does some things exceptionally well. But I don't need a revisionist telling me about that.
Or.. you can do what google is trying to do, and keep your staff stimulated, thereby not letting them go 'stale'. If people are kept in an environment where they actually get to do work that they enjoy doing, then they will manage to keep up with the times. Old engineers are still good engineers, and still understand modern developments. The internet, or at least the services being run on the net, changes rapidly, and some people don't enjoy the changes that much.
:s ), then I actually to my shame have enjoyed the small slices of programming that I've been able to do, even though they've been simple database apps and web-apps, and can see why internet technology is being used even as a replacement for compiled applications these days, so maybe I'm not going to go stale yet.. anyway I'll stop ranting, but I wonder how many other aspiring coders like me have had their spirits crushed by the ickiness of web coding, and the fact that applications/games coding these days tends to only take place in highly structured environments where you dont have much creative control etc. In fact even that is starting to sound attractive to me compared to just babysitting the network here.. maybe I should stop whining and go start coding up some OpenGL apps again.. wonder if I can convince management to let me do that as part of my job :p
I've always found HTML, web scripting, databases, that kind of thing, quite dull, and was always more interested in making games (good old non-web apps, though networking is allowed for multiplayer), meaning I'm kind of getting left behind already at 22. Now that I've got a job as an IT admin, and haven't done any decent coding since starting University (used to enjoy coding simple games/AI before Uni, but then everything suddenly got rather boring when I had to start using HTML, Java, and at one point Visual Basic
which is totally what she said
You make an interesting point. Keeping people motivated with an innovative frame of mind might very well be one way to address the "staleness" issue.
These ideas aren't new. Have any of you read Built to Last? Google walks and talks like a textbook example of a visionary company.
Capitalism is the only thing that has lifted the standard of living for billions of people on this planet. Not generosity, not socialism, not "living wages" but pure bloodthirsty competition. This competition has made everyday products cheaper for all allowing more and more people to enjoy a decent life.
I wouldn't expect a lover of Marx to understand that though.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.