4 ms·

Do you get the impression they re-designed the organization, with moonshots at their moonshot factories, while incremental improvements at the rest of the org?

• ChuckMcM 10y ago
  Given the discussions I've had with friends still there and friends who have left, I would say that yes, Google is constantly redesigning the organization. Oddly enough the experience was very similar to Sun Microsystems as it grew, it redesigned its own internal organization several times. It was a running joke at Sun that when a big re-org hit it was "some new chapter in the MBA handbook." Google is famously data driven (even when it hurts) and has taken a lot of criticism (justified in my opinion) about not being able to create any new business outside of search and search advertising. I saw, and commented on, the Alphabet re-org as a way to get better visibility into the data coming from the organization. Spend vs revenue. Robots aren't carrying their weight? Toss them over. Making cell phones too hard? Sell it off. If you work in companies like this long enough you begin to recognize that the organization can constrain what products you can even attempt to build. When the Sun "Voyager" (aka the 'portable') came out we joked that Sun could build any computer it wanted to, as long as you didn't mind it looking like a workstation. A partner Tadpole had built an actual laptop. But the Sun hardware engineering organization couldn't get there from a clean sheet of paper. For that reason alone it is critical that Google keep re-organizing until they find a formula that works for them.