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So many companies try to emulate how Google works. There are multiple books, hundreds or thousands of articles. People speculate on the perks, the review stru
by Periodic 10y ago
So many companies try to emulate how Google works. There are multiple books, hundreds or thousands of articles. People speculate on the perks, the review structure, the hierarchy, the autonomy.
However, when other companies try to imitate Google they always fail because they're missing a crucial piece:
Billions of dollars in ad revenue
Google doesn't work the way it does to be successful. It works that way because it is successful.
I found this no more evident than when I worked on Google Search itself.
- __derek__ 10y agoWe humans have a hard time reasoning about correlation and causation. Superstition comes so naturally.
- smallnamespace 10y agoThat's because causation is really hard to reason about. Often times it's not that A causes B or B causes A, but C causes both, or A and B causes each other at the same time.
- Afforess 10y agoNo. You're correct, causation is complicated, A-Z and all the greek letters too are part of a single cause. But the situation is worse than that. The reason humans are superstitious is that we don't seek answers, we seek narratives. We seek to explain without disrupting what we already believe. We might see the real cause and effect and rewrite what we see to fit what we want.
- __derek__ 10y agoYou sound like someone who's read The Black Swan. If you haven't, though, you probably don't need to.
- shmulkey18 10y ago"We are pattern-seeking story-telling animals." -- Ed Leamer in "Macroeconomic Patterns and Stories"
- furyofantares 10y ago> Google doesn't do what it does to be successful. It does it because it is successful. Those things aren't mutually exclusive and almost certainly are both true
- inopinatus 10y agoThe most pointed quote in the article is “No one wants to face the reality that this is an advertising company with a bunch of hobbies.” But without search, without Gmail, without Chrome, without Android, without the moonshots and all the "hobbies" Google's brand would wither, and its access to data at massive scale would be crippled, and its access to eyeballs would be curtailed, and the talent would walk. Others have built advertising businesses, but Google's dominance in advertising couldn't occur without the product mix.
- throwaway729 10y ago> Google's dominance in advertising couldn't occur without the product mix. This is absolutely accurate. Google is what it is because google.com is the best search engine in the world and because GMail is the best web-based mail client -- free or otherwise.
- rokhayakebe 10y agofree or otherwise. Correct, which is why many people have gmail for personal use and google apps gmail for professional. I can't use Outlook or Yahoo Mail; that's not due to a lack of trying.
- lobster_johnson 10y agoThere are better alternatives. I use Fastmail.com.
- Roritharr 10y agoI'd take Zimbra over Gmail any day.
- muninn_ 10y agoI don't buy it. Many companies are able to get the perks, culture, and autonomy right without being a multi-billion dollar company. It does enable Google to do certain things (like moonshot projects) that smaller companies can't do, but a lot of the perks I've seen are replicated in other companies. In fact, I think your comment "Google doesn't do what it does to be successful, it does it because it is successful" is completely ignoring how Google came to be successful in the first place, which was doing what you're saying it does because it's successful. Reading something like "How Google Works" goes over this exact thing in detail.
- ravitation 10y agoHe's not talking about the perks. He's talking about the design of the organization, beyond the culture. The structures, the roles, the processes. Autonomy is a value, but values only influence design.
- muninn_ 10y agoThe post I responded to mentioned (and naturally I mentioned this as well) perks, autonomy, structure, etc... and then says that the missing piece is billions of dollars in ad revenue. So I pointed out that many companies are able to get these things right (/imitate Google), without billions of dollars in ad revenue. It's not the ad revenue. That's my contention.
- ravitation 10y agoWhat I meant is that "perks" are just an outcome of a certain organizational structure designed around a set of values. There are multiple structures that allow for "perks", or are designed for autonomy. And, as you said, others have produced structures with similar results or based in similar values. But, he's talking about the specific structures at Google.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Periodic 10y ago
- ravitation 10y ago> Google doesn't do what it does to be successful. It does it because it is successful. I love this line.
- elcct 10y agoAnd it shares just so much ad revenue with publishers so they don't starve but can't develop at the same time
- matwood 10y agoReminds me of Valve's no manager management style: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-04-27/why-there-are-no-bosses-at-valve https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-04-27/why-there... When you have a lot of money, a lot of things work because you have a lot of money. You often see the same thing with people trying to emulate pro-athletes training methods. A genetically gifted pro-athlete can often succeed in spite of their training, and not necessarily because of their training.
- thearn4 10y agoThe endless spigot of cash from Steam is something that does enable Valve to take some very experimental leaps (VR, Steam machines, SteamOS, etc.) In my opinion, Valve also has the same shortcomings as google: practically zero customer support, and an un-curated app platform full of shovelware (finding gems on the Steam and the Google Play & Chrome Web Stores can be tricky). But there is still a ton to admire in both organizations.
- halomru 10y agoValve's platform full of shovelware is due to (perceived) consumer demand, not because of size or cost reasons. Steam used to be very selective in who gets in, and people complained that a lot of small developers were left out. So Valve added the greenlight system to let the community find the gems that Valve should let in. People still complained that too few games got in. So instead valve made major changes to improve recommendations and reviews and to establish a community of curators, and then opened the floodgates.
- oxide 10y agoOver 40% of the titles on Steam have been added in the past year alone. The floodgates need to close, now. As someone who has voted on hundreds of Greenlight titles, Greenlight is an abject failure IMO. It's flooded with garbage, the first few waves of approvals gave us some great titles that otherwise would have never seen the platform, but now it's a nightmare. There are no more approval lists. What's worse, it's the only way onto Steam. Your indie gem is just as likely to be lost in the shovelware noise as the latest idle game ported from mobile. Anyone with $100 can post games there. Anyone with more than $100 can purchase a service which votes their pre-purchased unchanged asset pack "game" through Greenlight. It's ridiculous. Tags and abandoned curator lists are not a solution to hundreds of shovelware titles clogging up the new releases section IMO. Unfortunately, nothing will change until something comes along to replace the current system entirely. Valve will act when they are forced to act, not before.
- 1_2__3 10y agoITT: A lot of people who have never worked for Google and don't realize how correct you are.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoThis is exactly correct. If you have a printing press that is dumping a couple of billon dollars into the basement every quarter in spite of what you're spending, you have the luxury of trying all sorts of novel things from a business perspective. That said, the margins on the search advertising business are shrinking, and have been for years now. You can cover for that by eliminating profligate spending and then eventually you can't. I think Ruth is the right person to handle that transition but its going to hurt in terms of people feeling that "the magic is gone." When that happens, Google is going to have to start rewarding operational efficiency gains at least as strongly as they currently reward popular science project type gains. And then it will be very interesting to see how they change and if the era of "but Google offers its employees ..." will be over. I hope the free sodas stay though.
- RandomOpinion 10y ago>When that happens, Google is going to have to start rewarding operational efficiency gains at least as strongly as they currently reward popular science project type gains. And then it will be very interesting to see how they change and if the era of "but Google offers its employees ..." will be over. One has only to look at Microsoft to see an example of what might happen. Things were very carefree there as well back in the '90s during their heyday when growth seemed limitless. It's also interesting to contrast Google / MS with Amazon, where Bezos has kept a tight rein on operational efficiency all along. They probably won't suffer as much when they reach their growth ceiling.
- nunez 10y agoTo be fair, that applies to many more things outside of Google: - "Why can't everyone stop being poor and get a job; it's not that hard!"
- panglott 10y agoIsn't this true of any large, profitable company, like Microsoft in the '90s? But surely the cultures these companies create are very different. Or is Google secretly a lot like Microsoft in the '90s?
- _RPM 10y agoYes, also, a lot of companies try to emulate Google's interview style for engineering.
- balls187 10y agoBy Billions of dollars in ad revenue, you actually mean high Revenue per Employee.
- dworin 10y agoThe best business practices to emulate come from successful in boring and fiercely competitive industries, where you can see if those practices are really making a difference. When a company has a single massively profitable product that's mostly protected from competition, it's hard to know if anything they're doing makes sense at all. But boring companies don't make exciting Fast Company headlines.
- mathattack 10y agoYes. Many management books and theories confuse correlation with causality. Another common example, "Companies with happier employees are more successful." But perhaps causality is the other way, "Employees become happy when their companies succeed."
- jamez1 10y agoOr perhaps there isn't causality either way. For example, perhaps good management tends to produce both happy employees and successful companies.
- mathattack 10y agoYes - very much so. This happens a lot. Frequently when you optimize on a metric, the correlations go away.
- fullshark 10y agoI wish more companies made that mistake
- usrusr 10y agoEnter the stock market and suddenly the cargo culting that results from causality mixups can successfully increase market capitalization for a while as long as enough people literally buy into the shared misconception. It must be hard to think straight in a domain where one of the most visible success metrics can be so misleading.
- mbesto 10y agoI'm oft reminded: Revenue solves everything
- ninjakeyboard 10y agoYou're absolutely right. There may not even be causality but they have to evolve together. You can't start a company and try to be like google. The food staff would be a primary expense and that would sink your company and turn off investors. You care so you conduct the M&M Project - things like that. It evolves with your success and keeps people around and interested.
- jondubois 10y agoI think a lot of tech companies are like this. Most tech companies by far succeeded because they were in the right place at the right time - But post-rationalization can make anyone look like a genius; and the illusion can last forever.
- anamoulous 10y agoSort of like the 20th century newspaper business.
- drvdevd 10y agoThe interesting thing about Google though, is their seemingly humble roots and how quickly they rose to billions in ad revenue. I still remember when they didn't exist. I believe that kind of quick, meteoric rise is a relatively new phenomena. A company of Google's scale would've taken 100 years to build, 50 years ago.
- fineline 10y agoSo if they'd started in 1966 it wouldn't have been built until 2066? Good job they waited until the nineties so they could leapfrog their alternate destiny.
- drvdevd 10y agoActually, yes. That's exactly correct. You can probably directly correlate their growth with the rise of widely available broadband internet access for homes in the 90s.
- snambi 10y agoThis is true. Google founders were extremely thrifty in the early days, before they started making money. They didn't compromise, but they didn't spend lavishly either.
- jhayward 10y ago> Google doesn't work the way it does to be successful. It works that way because it is successful. Correct, and commonly the case. There is a corollary as well - often the company (not commenting on G specifically) does not know precisely why they are/were a success, i.e. what very specific details were important vs other specific details that look important, but aren't. This lack of insight happens all the time and company culture can become fixed on things that they did as they became successful but were red herrings. A kind of cargo cult effect. One example I would give from Google is the early focus on "top school, top grades" "A" players as hiring filters - turns out that was useless, or worse. Kudos for figuring that out - but there are probaby at least a dozen other strong beliefs cooked in to the culture that are simply coincidental to success, not essential.
- SisypheanLife 10y agoAs someone at a google alternative, your second paragraph really hits home in nutshelling some experiences I have been through. It can feel dystopian when reality doesn't matter because the machine is big enough to keep turning on its own.
- king_kerr 10y agoExcellent point that puts this in its proper perspective.