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If your company has multiple business lines that grow at 15% YOY, and you keep hiring say, 10,000 employees every year, eventually, the majority of your revenue

If your company has multiple business lines that grow at 15% YOY, and you keep hiring say, 10,000 employees every year, eventually, the majority of your revenue will be from existing, not new, product lines and most of your employees will be working on products that either fail, copy, or are not innovative. If and when, a product group becomes a major hit and rockets to a billion users, you'll say it's innovation, but in reality, probably 0.1% of the employees got to work on it. Everyone else will feel like there's no innovation going on in the group they work in. You cannot have a company continually hitting iPhones every year. Even Steve Jobs said he only worked on three disruptive innovative products: The Apple 2, the original Mac, and the iPhone, and those were spaced out by very long periods. You can't grow a company to billions in revenue and tens of thousands of employees and have all of them working on new stuff, and no significant overlap with existing product categories of competitors.

stcredzero 9y ago
you'll say it's innovation, but in reality, probably 0.1% of the employees got to work on it. This is irrelevant. So long as the new innovative product succeeds and is allowed to cannibalize the existing products, the company stays on top, riding the new wave. Even Steve Jobs said he only worked on three disruptive innovative products: The Apple 2, the original Mac, and the iPhone, and those were spaced out by very long periods. It's not relevant that there were only 3 products spaced out by a lot of time. The significant point is that someone was allowed to do the disruptive innovation, and that the new products were allowed to cannibalize the existing products to some extent.
- cromwellian 9y ago
  And you believe no one at Google is being allowed to work on disruptive innovation, not even 0.1% of employees? The point is, Apple, Google, FB, Amazon, Microsoft, et al are all trying to find the next big disruptive thing. They all invest billions in R&D, but they also have to run their main cash cow businesses. In every company, there's going to be politics, risk aversion, and symbiotic copying with competitors. This is no different at Google, Amazon, or Apple. And for the rank and file employees who aren't working in R&D or on super-secret disruptions, things will seem fairly pedestrian. Yegge's claim that Google is 100% focused on competitors is a vast exaggeration.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    And you believe no one at Google is being allowed to work on disruptive innovation, not even 0.1% of employees? No. But I'm not so sure that Google knows how to get the new thing to successfully cannibalize the current product line. And for the rank and file employees who aren't working in R&D or on super-secret disruptions, things will seem fairly pedestrian. You are telling me this as if I disagreed with it? Why? Yegge's claim that Google is 100% focused on competitors is a vast exaggeration. From what you've written, it would seem that you think it's 99.9% true, so missing that 0.1% is a huge exaggeration.
    - cromwellian 9y ago
      I don't think it's true, but in every company that is growing it's existing product lines YoY without burning them to the ground, it will asymptotically approach this. Do I believe it? No. There are large numbers of people working on completely new, crazy ideas, and just like the startup community, 97% of them will fail utterly. The number of new machine learning oriented things has grown exponentially. But how much innovation do you need in order to prove you're company is innovating? Justin the last 2 years: Google Photos, clearly innovative, bringing ConvNet's to everyone to reduce the pain of photo management. Tensorflow, now the dominant platform for ML Kubernetes, now the dominant platform for container management, and from experience of systems invented internally SmartReply system (first launched on Inbox, now ending up in many Google products) Tango, eventually rolled into ARCore Neural Machine Translation launched on Google Translate Loads of Google Maps stuff, mostly invisible to people, except for the keen eye (https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/ https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/) GCam in Pixel2. A ton of research and innovation is behind the low light and portrait segmentation in this Waymo Cloud TPUs AutoML WaveNet/Tacotron2 Instant Apps Spanner Those are just the small list of public ones. Yegge worked on internal dev infrastructure, I work on Gmail. Both are maintaining important needs. Someone has to do it. I'd say Google has the opposite problem than what Yegge posed, and that's not enough focus on excellence in maintaining what people are already using. The thing is, if you want to work on disruptive stuff, with maximum risk taking, and no politics, you go found a small startup and get seed capital. And even then, a huge number of startups are merely clones of existing businesses. "Uber for X", "Slack for Y", "Blockchain for Z". Innovation, disruption, and copying are a continuum, and all too often rants take an extremist position and try categorize things in one of the other.

stcredzero 9y ago

you'll say it's innovation, but in reality, probably 0.1% of the employees got to work on it. This is irrelevant. So long as the new innovative product succeeds and is allowed to cannibalize the existing products, the company stays on top, riding the new wave. Even Steve Jobs said he only worked on three disruptive innovative products: The Apple 2, the original Mac, and the iPhone, and those were spaced out by very long periods. It's not relevant that there were only 3 products spaced out by a lot of time. The significant point is that someone was allowed to do the disruptive innovation, and that the new products were allowed to cannibalize the existing products to some extent.

cromwellian 9y ago
And you believe no one at Google is being allowed to work on disruptive innovation, not even 0.1% of employees? The point is, Apple, Google, FB, Amazon, Microsoft, et al are all trying to find the next big disruptive thing. They all invest billions in R&D, but they also have to run their main cash cow businesses. In every company, there's going to be politics, risk aversion, and symbiotic copying with competitors. This is no different at Google, Amazon, or Apple. And for the rank and file employees who aren't working in R&D or on super-secret disruptions, things will seem fairly pedestrian. Yegge's claim that Google is 100% focused on competitors is a vast exaggeration.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  And you believe no one at Google is being allowed to work on disruptive innovation, not even 0.1% of employees? No. But I'm not so sure that Google knows how to get the new thing to successfully cannibalize the current product line. And for the rank and file employees who aren't working in R&D or on super-secret disruptions, things will seem fairly pedestrian. You are telling me this as if I disagreed with it? Why? Yegge's claim that Google is 100% focused on competitors is a vast exaggeration. From what you've written, it would seem that you think it's 99.9% true, so missing that 0.1% is a huge exaggeration.
  - cromwellian 9y ago
    I don't think it's true, but in every company that is growing it's existing product lines YoY without burning them to the ground, it will asymptotically approach this. Do I believe it? No. There are large numbers of people working on completely new, crazy ideas, and just like the startup community, 97% of them will fail utterly. The number of new machine learning oriented things has grown exponentially. But how much innovation do you need in order to prove you're company is innovating? Justin the last 2 years: Google Photos, clearly innovative, bringing ConvNet's to everyone to reduce the pain of photo management. Tensorflow, now the dominant platform for ML Kubernetes, now the dominant platform for container management, and from experience of systems invented internally SmartReply system (first launched on Inbox, now ending up in many Google products) Tango, eventually rolled into ARCore Neural Machine Translation launched on Google Translate Loads of Google Maps stuff, mostly invisible to people, except for the keen eye (https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/ https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/) GCam in Pixel2. A ton of research and innovation is behind the low light and portrait segmentation in this Waymo Cloud TPUs AutoML WaveNet/Tacotron2 Instant Apps Spanner Those are just the small list of public ones. Yegge worked on internal dev infrastructure, I work on Gmail. Both are maintaining important needs. Someone has to do it. I'd say Google has the opposite problem than what Yegge posed, and that's not enough focus on excellence in maintaining what people are already using. The thing is, if you want to work on disruptive stuff, with maximum risk taking, and no politics, you go found a small startup and get seed capital. And even then, a huge number of startups are merely clones of existing businesses. "Uber for X", "Slack for Y", "Blockchain for Z". Innovation, disruption, and copying are a continuum, and all too often rants take an extremist position and try categorize things in one of the other.