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Former Google CIO Suggests 'Do Dumb Things'
itwbennett writes "Speaking at the CA Expo in Sydney, Australia, former Google CIO Douglas Merrill shared some management tips he learned during his tenure at the search giant. At the top of the list: 'Don't be afraid to do dumb things.' Merrill recalls that 'most of the early Google hardware was stolen from trash and as the stuff they stole broke all the time they built a reliable software system. Everyone knew we shouldn't build our own hardware as it was 'dumb', but everyone was wrong. Sometimes being dumb changes the game.' Another pearl of wisdom from Merrill: 'the more project management you do the less likely your project is to succeed.'"
is he saying that if the hardware he made was, say, 20% more power hungry and 10% more expensive it would have rendered Google's business idea unworkable. I'm not sure I buy it. Maybe it allowed him to scale up with less capital, but I think a 20% slower google would still have won hearts and minds during the period it was being created.
Nullius in verba
Google succeeded because it was at the right time at the right place. Nothing else. Yes, there were other search engines before it, but Google set a standard and ran with it. Try the same approach in the same field of business today and you will fail. Invariably. Likewise with the next EBay, the next Amazon, the next Facebook. No, they were not the first. But they were amongst the first and they were there and "the best" at just the right time when the service they offered suddenly got popular.
That's all that is to their success. Nothing more, nothing less. Just pure luck. You might also say good timing, but I kinda doubt anyone can actually predict so accurately when which service hits the sweet spot. If he could, most of these services would be in one hand. Why? Because that person/organization would have hit the sweet spots more often than anyone else. Duh.
I wouldn't take any advice from any of those "successful" companies. They didn't do anything right where everyone else was too stupid. They were just lucky to be the one that were lucky enough to be the one being at the right place at the right time with the right product.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Does anyone here even read the summary together with the article itself and see if it makes sense? He did *not* say "do dumb things". That statement implies that you know its a dumb thing to do and it will not work, yet you do it anyway. In this case you *are* dumb and should be fired. He said "don't be afraid to do dumb things", which has a totally different meaning. It means that you should try approaches that may be non-obvious, but at least you are attempting to solve whatever the problem at hand is in an ingenious way. Sometimes it does not work and you look foolish, but you often get innovative solutions to tough problems.
Project management is an inverted parabola. Too little and you will fail due to lack of direction and budget, too much and you will smother it.
BAD project management gets in the way... a project manager is suppose to get obstacles out of the way of the talent and provide resources where needed... not crack the whip because they are idiots.
rubbish...
Sorry someone will end up doing the job of the project manager. Seen it happen dozens of times.
Get a real one and you see what was missing...
Get a myopic dick and they can grind things to a halt.
its funny how the uber wealthy have advice like 'its not about the money', 'take risks' ' you can always start over' 'the economy isn't that bad' etc etc.
Sure, they made it and we didn't, but it does taint their objectiveness to towards the real world.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is like asking a 110-year-old man how he got to live to be so old, him answering that he ate Ho-Hos every day, and then you adding Ho-Hos to your daily diet. Forget correlation != causality. There's not even any correlation here.
You have to remember that this was during the last bubble and Google is rather famous for going against the flow. "Everyone" was using the investment money to buy Sun hardware with Oracle databases and those expensive chairs. Google went dumpster diving and because that ZERO cost hardware failed all the time came up with software that could deal with unreliable hardware meaning that google never had to buy 5 nine hardware at insane prices.
This was repeated by Facebook. You will find endless experts claiming you could never scale either PHP or MySql to be a serious site, yet one of the largest sites in the world runs on those two. Same as google proved linux was far more capable then just being a hobby OS for nerds. And proved it again with Android.
Google could afford to offer gmail with insane storage space because they had a very cheap hardware infrastructure. Had they build it with "proper" hardware and software the costs would have been astronomical.
But hey, you know better then Google because you run what mega-corp?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.