How Google Decides To Cancel a Project

The New York Times is running a story about the criteria involved when Google scraps one of their projects. While a project's popularity among users is important, Google also examines whether they can get enough employees interested in it, and whether it has a large enough scope — they prefer not to waste time solving minor problems. The article takes a look at the specific reasons behind the recent cancellation of several products. "Dennis Crowley, one of two co-founders who sold Dodgeball to Google in 2005 and stayed on, said that he had trouble competing for the attention of other Google engineers to expand the service. 'If you're a product manager, you have to recruit people and their "20 percent time."' ... [Jeff Huber, the company's senior vice president of engineering] said that Google eventually concluded that Dodgeball's vision was too narrow. ... Still, Google found the concepts behind Dodgeball intriguing, and early this month, it released Google Latitude, an add-on to Google Maps that allows people to share their location with friends and family members. It's more sophisticated than Dodgeball, with automatic location tracking and more options for privacy and communication."

Comments

Re:But will this work in your company?

[rmerry72]

Companies can't grow bigger indefinitely. At some point, a successful company should start generating a consistent revenue stream for its owners (shareholders).

Nope. Unfortunately that is not the way the economy works. Shareholders are not looking for revenue or profit (ie cash, dividends) from companies. They are looking for wealth. Specifically increases in the share price. That requires growth - or at least the appearance of it - and for that companies need to "invest" in new markets, technologies and products.

A steady revenue stream will not keep your share price up as lots of investors - particularly institutional investors which make up the far bulk of share ownership today - sell out and look for higher yield stocks. Our stock market does not look at the overall size or profitability of an organisation and certainly doesn't reward over all size. The important thing - the only thing - is growth.

And before anybody chimes in with the obvious, yes in today's downtrodden economy when most of the world is going backwards, just standing still and not shrinking is enough "growth" to stand out from your competitors.