"First off, the authors are confusing causation and correlation. Schmidt points out a series of characteristics of Google as a company and presents them as the

"First off, the authors are confusing causation and correlation. Schmidt points out a series of characteristics of Google as a company and presents them as the reasons for Google’s success, but in my opinion, they are all consequences of Google’s success. For example the authors write: “Their plan for creating that great search engine, and all the other great services was equally simple: Hire as many talented software engineers as possible, and give them freedom.” Well, this worked because the search was already successful enough to fund that freedom. [...] The key is market dominance. If you have a de facto position of a monopoly in your market, money pours in, and you can afford to give your employees even more than 20 percent of their time free." This is itself backwards, yes? ISTR that http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-03-n78.html http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-03-n78.html AdWords — and thus the profitability of Google's search business, if (arguably) not the search monopoly itself — was the product of early Google's 20% time and employee freedom, rather than the other way round. (Oh, and they got GMail into the bargain.) Similarly for: "I would love to see one single company that isn’t dominating a market with no cash cow in-flow that can succeed without strict discipline, sharp focus, hard work, and hands-on management." I thought that Google's 20% time was modelled after practises at 3M and Hewlett-Packard? I have no doubt that in their day these were companies that enjoyed comfortably high margins on many of their products, but from my limited knowledge I don't have the impression that they were monopolists sitting on their laurels from one of two huge hits. (As Xerox apparently was.) I also don't know how reasonable it would be to claim that private-project time didn't contribute anything to the bottom line of these companies either: 3M itself tends to claim that the Post-It note was a product of its 15% time http://solutions.3m.com/innovation/en_US/stories/time-to-think http://solutions.3m.com/innovation/en_US/stories/time-to-thi... . Accordingly I'm unsure why this article has been voted to the top of HN. None of which is to say that How Google Works is a model of candour and insight, or to suggest that Google has no problems with how it handles innovation, of course.