Re:500 Google employees pen letter saying the firm should mo...
by nostrademons on Saturday December 01, 2018 @03:24PM
(#18578715)
It's cultural, and it's a feature not a bug.
Larry Page always encouraged internal dissent because he had a healthy appreciation for what he didn't know, and would rather get early warning within the company, where he could change his mind, than commit to a course and find that everyone who was right now works for a competitor. This actually paid off in a large way with several key decisions, like switching to the auction-based ad system, sponsoring GMail & Chrome, buying Android & YouTube, killing Google+, and putting Sundar in charge of day-to-day operations while kicking himself upstairs to Alphabet.
The flip side is that many Googlers do have a sense of entitlement that wouldn't fly at any other company, and it can be hard to focus the company to react quickly to threats or opportunities. But in some way that doesn't matter when some segment of the company is already reacting on its own to threats and opportunities; you just have to shift resources to get behind the folks that are already working on the right thing. (This is part of the motivation for Alphabet, where the idea is that Larry can quickly move capital into whatever random team happens to be working on a promising idea and double-down on winners.)
Larry Page always encouraged internal dissent because he had a healthy appreciation for what he didn't know, and would rather get early warning within the company, where he could change his mind, than commit to a course and find that everyone who was right now works for a competitor. This actually paid off in a large way with several key decisions, like switching to the auction-based ad system, sponsoring GMail & Chrome, buying Android & YouTube, killing Google+, and putting Sundar in charge of day-to-day operations while kicking himself upstairs to Alphabet.
The flip side is that many Googlers do have a sense of entitlement that wouldn't fly at any other company, and it can be hard to focus the company to react quickly to threats or opportunities. But in some way that doesn't matter when some segment of the company is already reacting on its own to threats and opportunities; you just have to shift resources to get behind the folks that are already working on the right thing. (This is part of the motivation for Alphabet, where the idea is that Larry can quickly move capital into whatever random team happens to be working on a promising idea and double-down on winners.)