5 ms·
Is it just me? This list seems too short. Google is (as far as I can tell from outside) a great company in many respects, but their Achilles heel is their obses
by mcherm 15y ago
Is it just me? This list seems too short. Google is (as far as I can tell from outside) a great company in many respects, but their Achilles heel is their obsession with secrecy. It has some advantages, but I fear they may be outweighed by the disadvantages which include lack of early feedback on usability and a susceptibility to NIH syndrome.
- DanielRibeiro 15y agoWell, the full list makes it seem a lot bigger: http://research.google.com/pubs/papers_by_year.html http://research.google.com/pubs/papers_by_year.html But considering they have over 25k employees, it may not seem a lot. But given the depth and quality of such publications, I think it is quite a fair number.
- ma2rten 15y agoThat is also not a complete list.
- pgbovine 15y ago[I'm not a Google employee, but I am a Ph.D. student who has gone through the academic publishing process a few times ...] Publishing in academic conferences is not the only way to be "non-secret", nor is it the fastest way to get early feedback on usability and systems design issues. In fact, it's a pretty slow way to get feedback. The sorts of conferences that Googlers submit papers to have an acceptance rate of 10% to 25%, which means that most papers get rejected; moreover, it takes a ton of effort to write up and present a paper to an academic audience using writing conventions that are very different than those required to write engineering design documents. Given those low rates of publication "success", it's not surprising that Googlers put their efforts elsewhere.