So you think Google ships code fast? How do you know? There are a lot of services Google tries to build that never see the light of day. And there are yet othe

So you think Google ships code fast? How do you know? There are a lot of services Google tries to build that never see the light of day. And there are yet others that took a year or more to be released even as beta. There are some projects that seem to have gone from concept to launch in a few months, but I'd say those are usually the exception. Also: there is a lot of necessary process that comes with launching a Google service. Version 0.1 for a startup can be buggy, embarassing, ugly, contain security bugs, or be non-scalable. In fact, you might go all the way to acquisition and still have all these problems. Pretty much anything on *.google.com has to be ready for Digg on day one. I will say that there are many teams at Google that deliver quality, polished software faster than almost any other company. But that's more like winning marathons rather than sprints.