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I think that this post sums it up and illustrates why it's hard to replicate this kind of success : Google won because Google. There were a slew of innovations

by sgt101 10y ago

I think that this post sums it up and illustrates why it's hard to replicate this kind of success : Google won because Google. There were a slew of innovations (adwords, pagerank, clean design, big data, 20% time, management style) that added up to a win. The replication recipe - be really clever and try really hard.

InclinedPlane 10y ago
Well, to be fair, you can adopt some of their component strategies and still be successful, which I'm sort of surprised isn't more common. Traditional data center management is still ubiquitous, it's been like a decade and a half now, I'm surprised that the "google-way" isn't more common. Though partly that is somewhat dependent on vertical integration in system manufacturing. The interesting thing about a lot of the big successful tech companies is that they blend things that are often difficult to find together naturally, which makes their success difficult to replicate. Google basically runs on alien technology, they're sort of the ... I guess Tesla or SpaceX of web-apps. It's possible to do what they do, but it's so outside the range of the traditional way of doing things that it would take a tremendous amount of talent, vision, and determination to pull it off. Though google is also very dysfunctional in places so from a business sense it's not actually as hard to compete against them as it may seem. Apple is built on a weird marriage of solid aesthetic sensibilities and solid engineering fundamentals. And then Amazon which marries cutting edge fulfillment to a solid web store front-end. For a lot of these things it'd be straightforward to try to build one aspect, but getting all of them together is a huge challenge.
- sgt101 10y ago
  I like your binaries for Apple and Amazon, my observation in other corporates is that these opposed capabilities often steal resource and opportunity from one another. Somehow that isn't happening at Apple and Amazon, I guess the question is : "why not"?

by sgt101 10y ago

InclinedPlane 10y ago

Well, to be fair, you can adopt some of their component strategies and still be successful, which I'm sort of surprised isn't more common. Traditional data center management is still ubiquitous, it's been like a decade and a half now, I'm surprised that the "google-way" isn't more common. Though partly that is somewhat dependent on vertical integration in system manufacturing. The interesting thing about a lot of the big successful tech companies is that they blend things that are often difficult to find together naturally, which makes their success difficult to replicate. Google basically runs on alien technology, they're sort of the ... I guess Tesla or SpaceX of web-apps. It's possible to do what they do, but it's so outside the range of the traditional way of doing things that it would take a tremendous amount of talent, vision, and determination to pull it off. Though google is also very dysfunctional in places so from a business sense it's not actually as hard to compete against them as it may seem. Apple is built on a weird marriage of solid aesthetic sensibilities and solid engineering fundamentals. And then Amazon which marries cutting edge fulfillment to a solid web store front-end. For a lot of these things it'd be straightforward to try to build one aspect, but getting all of them together is a huge challenge.

sgt101 10y ago
I like your binaries for Apple and Amazon, my observation in other corporates is that these opposed capabilities often steal resource and opportunity from one another. Somehow that isn't happening at Apple and Amazon, I guess the question is : "why not"?