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I'm conflicted by the world "innovation" just as I am about describing products as "revolutionary". Like if I have to sit through another iPhoen announcement to
by cletus 9y ago
I'm conflicted by the world "innovation" just as I am about describing products as "revolutionary". Like if I have to sit through another iPhoen announcement to hear some "journalist" bemoan that the iPhone N+1 is "evolutionary not revolutionary" I'm seriously going to go berserk.
The problem with "innovation" is it's actually kinda hard to define and somewhat subjective. Steve goes into this.
I'm not sure I entirely agree about his point about Google making competitors though. I actually think that's worse than it used to be. The height of it was Google Offers (anyone remember that?) that was a response to Groupon, allegedly when buyout talks failed (I have no inside knowledge of this; just what I read here and elsewhere).
To echo Steve's point, I do kinda wonder if there are too many engineers at Google now. Or, more accurately, more than is required for what they do to do. The problem with that is they'll find work for themselves to do, good idea or not, part of a coherent strategy or not.
Generally speaking (rather than Google specifically), the danger with this kind of situation with large companies is decisions tend to then become political rather than merit-based and also you tend to end up in situations of endless internal reorgs, which seems to be a defense mechanism by middle management (in that a given org structure can't succeed or, more importantly, fail if it's never given long enough before the next reorg).
Disclaimer: Xoogler.
- EmployedRussian 9y ago> The problem with that is they'll find work for themselves to do, good idea or not, part of a coherent strategy or not. Isn't that exactly how Gmail came to be?
- vanderZwan 9y ago> To echo Steve's point, I do kinda wonder if there are too many engineers at Google now. Or, more accurately, more than is required for what they do to do. The problem with that is they'll find work for themselves to do, good idea or not, part of a coherent strategy or not. You might be interested in Andrew Norman Wilson's take on Google's Culture: Workers Leaving the Googleplex from 2011. It's been discussed here before[0][1]. I first saw this as a live performance, which was 30 minutes with a lot more social commentary. In that performance he compared the strange cultural division within Google to the Alpha/Beta/Gamma/Delta/Epsilon division of society in Brave New World[2]. Your comment reminded me of that, but I don't know if this recording includes it. [0] http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/WorkersGoogleplex.html http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/WorkersGoogleplex.html [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500082 [2] https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090605154008AAqnjOK https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090605154008A...
- mrep 9y agoThe whole revolutionary versus evolutionary argument is so dumb because it's so subjective. In fact, I think I'm going to start flagging comments that complain about it as inducing flame wars because that's pretty much what it becomes.
- remir 9y agoGoogle could be more focused, but for that, you have to say NO to a lot of things and perhaps Google feels like this would create frustration among its most creative talents, so they're willing to ship multiple duplicates of the same thing to give them a sense of freedom to keep them motivated to work there. The result of this is multiple messaging apps, multiple framework, etc...
- digi_owl 9y agoIn other words, they could use a bunch of Torvalds clones to tell the "snowflakes" off.