9 ms·

Google’s product strategy: Make two of everything

152 points by pandatigox 11y ago

ridiculous_fish 11y ago
During my time at Google, I definitely had the experience of "my" product being killed in preference to a competing product. In one case, I did not even know that the competing product existed until the public press release. What was most frustrating is that the decisions did not seem to be motivated by product superiority. The "winner" was not a better product, or at least this was not demonstrated. Instead the decisions were driven by whichever product better aligned with the internal political winds this week, such as the tension between the Nexus partner model vs the Pixel in-house model. These "strategy shifts" were often preceded by senior leadership shakeups, which were themselves frequent. It was hard to escape the conclusion that the quality of my work was irrelevant. It was demoralizing.
- gargarplex 11y ago
  You're one of the most prolific and impressive programmers around. I'm sure you could have your choice of product manager...
  - onedev 11y ago
    who is he/she?
    - gargarplex 11y ago
      A true programmer's programmer. The author of the fish shell.
    - smcl 11y ago
      Take a look at http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/will-it-optimize.html http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/will-it-optimize.html and more posts on that blog, some very interesting stuff there.
  - threeseed 11y ago
    Office politics unfortunately often wins over talent and results. And it's very hard for most people to recognise why certain things are happening within a company if you aren't immersed in the politics on a day to day basis.
- jackgavigan 11y ago
  Is it true that, at Google, product managers have to convince engineers to work on their product? For context, this answer on Quora[1] suggests that the product team does not report to the product manager and don't have to do anything they say, so the product manager has to convince people if she wants to get things done. 1: https://www.quora.com/What-makes-someone-a-great-product-manager-at-Google/answer/Edward-Ho-1 https://www.quora.com/What-makes-someone-a-great-product-man...
  - timdierks 11y ago
    Everyone is a volunteer. Not just at Google, but in many other situations as well. At Google, pretty much any of the engineers can go and get a job at another company whenever they want. So they tend to have access to internal mobility; Google would rather let them fill a different job at the company than have them quit. Thus, managers (either engineering managers or product managers) don't have a lot of coercive capability. The path to success is to not be a manager who forces people to do your bidding, it is to be a leader who persuades your colleagues of your vision. At times the tool of command can be used, but it's best used lightly. My goal is to be service-oriented: my job as a manager is to help my engineers be super-successful, and one of the ways I try to do that is by finding paths for the organization to build great software and leading my team and other teams to cooperating to build it.
    - jackgavigan 11y ago
      What you've said is all great and admirable but it's also a bit aspirational and idealistic, and I'm left wondering: How do decisions get made? For example, let's say there's a list of ideas and suggestions for new functionality and fixes for a product - How does it get prioritised? By consensus? I can't help thinking that there's a risk that the priorities end up being the stuff that the engineers are most interested in working on - i.e. interesting problems and challenges get picked up enthusiastically, while boring, tedious bugs or usability fixes languish unresolved because nobody's particularly interested or enthused in spending time on them, when there's far more interesting/fun stuff to do.
burd691 11y ago
What about search?!
- nostrademons 11y ago
  Shortly before I joined in 2009, Google had embarked on a project to rewrite Search from the ground up. It was canceled after a couple years, and in many cases the work of individual subteams was folded into the main search engine. Search also periodically rewrites parts of the search stack. Caffeine [1] was a complete rewrite of the indexing system, Hummingbird [2] is a near-complete rewrite of the ranking algorithm, Panda [3] and Penguin [4] were partial rewrites of the ranking algorithm, the serving system continually gets rewritten, and we redid the visual design every year starting in 2010 [5][6][7][8]. You'll notice that there was no 2012 redesign; it was canceled. That's what happens when the "new" search isn't better than the "old" search. [1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hummingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hummingbird [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Penguin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Penguin [5] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis-googles-new-look.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis-... [6] http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-how-larry-page-engineered-beautiful-revolution http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-ho... [7] http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-new-unified-design-for-mobile-devices-172991 http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-new-unified-desi... [8] https://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introduction.html https://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introduct...
  - boomzilla 11y ago
    Can you disclose how much "better" for such rewrites? And what metrics were measured? I guess there is a conflict between CTRs on organic results and ads, so one has to be picked (or maybe a combo of the two). And what the magnitudes of the improvements? a few percentage or a few bp?
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Old inside joke at Google, you know your project is "important" with two or three other groups are working on exactly the same thing. When I was there, it was debated whether or not this selected for the right attributes (it tends to reward groups that execute fast versus ones that execute well). It did not help that some times when they didn't do that (just let one group build it) they didn't always get the result they wanted either.
- jsnell 11y ago
  The worst offenders were probably workflow / pipelining systems; just about everyone needed to write sequences of mapreduces, and thought that the existing solutions weren't a perfect fit. IIRC there were at one point over a dozen different workflow systems in use and advertised to at least some degree to other groups, which made picking one even harder due to the paradox of choice. The solution was of course to write a new one.
  - thechao 11y ago
    When I studied library design, the situation you described was the basic indicator of "domain misunderstanding": no one understands the domain well enough to produce a suitable abstraction. If the problem persists for a couple of decades, it might imply that domains have been improperly mixed.
- n0us 11y ago
  This explains the vast inconsistencies in quality of Google's products and also the feeling I get that none of them ever quite work together the way you would expect.
vladikoff 11y ago
Article from 2014 - "Oct 17, 2014 5:00am PDT"
dkarapetyan 11y ago
This isn't a google strategy. This is a generic Big Corp. strategy. The same thing happens at eBay, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc. It's not a good thing. It is usually an indication that the higher ups don't trust each other or are trying to one up each other for the year end bonus round. It is just a wasteful strategy overall and only happens at places that can afford it.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  It's usually encouraged by the even-higher-up, i.e. the CEO. It's actually fairly rational from his perspective: he has more options, he can cover more of the market, he insures against product failure, and his reports can't get complacent. Yes, it's wasteful, and yes, it's demoralizing as hell when you're the ordinary employee whose product just got canceled. But then, you should understand (at least at some level) that your work is meaningless when you go join a big company: the reason they're big is because their product is already "good enough" for millions of people.
  - gohrt 11y ago
    It's not different at a small company. At a small company you have "pivots" or "going out of business" or "competition from another company", instead of "competition from another team"
    - nostrademons 11y ago
      Almost makes you think that the part that's wrong is the narrative that we're sold as kids, y'know "Work hard and good things will happen to you." It's more like "Work hard and there is a ~2-3% chance good things will happen to you, but if you don't work hard there's a 0% chance good things will happen to you."
      - dorgo 11y ago
        Be clever and good things will happen to you.
rconti 11y ago
Well, now we know what happened to all of the previously-good Google products. I hate to complain about free products, but will make an exception for Google, which constantly removes features and usability as if a PM's bonus depends on it. Give me back my color-coded GMail threads, ability to edit the subject without multiple clicks, and view features not hidden by submenus. And that's just GMail, and that's just off the top of my head.
- tracker1 11y ago
  LOL.. I switched to Hangouts (from Voice) for my SMS, voicemail and messaging... on my phone, it works pretty nicely... on the desktop actually sending an SMS from my GV number to a contact is nearly impossibly without entering the phone number by hand.
  - 72deluxe 11y ago
    Not available for me in the UK.
  - icelancer 11y ago
    >on the desktop actually sending an SMS from my GV number to a contact is nearly impossibly without entering the phone number by hand. Yes, this is absolutely ridiculous. I have to look up the phone number using Google Voice plugin (which is nothing but a directory search now since Hangouts disables it), copy/paste the number into Hangouts, and SMS/call from there. It is completely unacceptable.
- vidarh 11y ago
  I keep seriously wanting to write a webmail client again... Inbox is great in many ways, but it's also taken so many wrong steps, such as making it harder to see timestamp etc. and obscuring subjects.
hartator 11y ago
They forgot Picasa vs Google Photo!
- sebastianavina 11y ago
  and youtube vs google video
  - danieldk 11y ago
    This is mentioned at the end. However, Youtube was acquired and at the time Google Video already existed. Given the traction that Youtube already had, it's no wonder that they purchased Youtube regardless having their own video service.
- Digit-Al 11y ago
  They put Eclipse vs Android Studio, but Eclipse is not a Google product.
  - thescrewdriver 11y ago
    At first glance I read that as "...but Eclipse is not a great product" Android Studio is based on IntelliJ which is a far more polished IDE.
  - Grazester 11y ago
    No this is Google simply replacing Eclipse with a superior product and was slowly transitioning people to it. Did you really expect Google to drop Android development support for Eclipse overnight?
gooooooganon 11y ago
There is no strategy. The thought of Google having a central product management strategy -- and successfully executing it across many teams -- is hilarious to people who work there. It's chaos that outsiders try to read into. This is a consequence of bad internal economics and incentives. Google PMs and engineers are incentivized to create new products and ship them by quarterly deadlines (perf/promo cycles) rather than align their teams towards a cohesive user experience. Thinking this way would occasionally cause teams to, gasp, not build a product they wanted to build. Everyone needs to ship something, ideally something new. After all, you don't get promoted for deciding not to build something. I've seen awful products/implementations go out the door and get killed or reimplemented soon thereafter. And people still list these as "achievements" on promotion packets (and they get promoted despite the product failing!). The company is kind of trying to address this by changing promotion criteria, but it's culturally ingrained and won't change for some time.
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  Informative, thanks. Is this why Google announces sweeping changes every year at i/o and redesigns the Android UI every single year? eg. use the dedicated search button on the phone, btw this button no longer exists, respond to the menu button, btw this button no longer exists, put menus at the top, put menus at the bottom, use hamburger menus, don't use them, use swipe navigation, use swipe navigation if it fits with your app, do things to ENCHANT and DELIGHT the user. According to the UI guidelines, clicking a button should cause the user to burst into tears of joy due to the delightful experience they have just had. Is it because they need to appear to be producing new things all the time? If so, it'd also explain why some products get released to much fanfare (and applause from the BBC Technology news team it seems) and then get no updates, maintenance and get binned a few years later. (Many examples of this). The most annoying of these was the Talk replacement for Android (Hangouts) which got rid of features of Talk and still has an abysmal tablet interface and general bugginess ("Did you not get my call???" "No"). I am not meaning to be overly critical, but the constant change for the sake of change is wearying. I have been using Android since the G1 and every i/o they have redesigned the interface. The examples of "bad UI" and "bad text" are all from their own older versions of Android. It makes you wish they'd make their mind up.
pftom 11y ago
It's just a waste of productivity. Not a strategy.
- Symmetry 11y ago
  Back in the day people explained the USSR's superior economic performance (according to the public data at the time) as being due to the USSR not wasting resources on competition like capitalist countries did. If you assume the planner knows the right thing to do is that's actually a perfectly valid argument. It's actually pretty heartening to see the people leading Google don't believe this about themselves, though, because people who think that usually aren't correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > It's just a waste of productivity. Not a strategy. Whether or not its Google's actual strategy, multiple parallel development efforts with different profiles (e.g., risk, timeline, etc.) is certainly a strategy, and one recognized in many works on lean software development. If something is important enough to your broader business strategy, not hedging by taking multiple approaches, while devoting resources that could be expended doing that on other, less critical, efforts, may be the real waste of productivity.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
agentPrefect 11y ago
I must admit - this is kind of why I started moving AWAY from Google. You just don't have any guarantee that the product you're using won't be shelved in leu of a "better" (newer) solution.
porter 11y ago
Eric Schmidt used to say: "Our goal is to have more at-bats per unit of time and effort than anyone else in the world."
ctdonath 11y ago
I recall Apple's norm is running a half-dozen competing designs at once, choosing the best and killing the rest come delivery date.
bane 11y ago
Yay, more wood behind fewer products! And no wood behind things people actually want or use! And the wood behind the ones we liked ended up all warped and weird!
BurningFrog 11y ago
One reason that small companies so often beat big ones is that if you have 10 startup teams competing agains one big company team, one of the 10 will probably make the winning product. So a big company that is open to doing 2-3 similar things at once should be more likely to produce winners. That said, as an ex Googler, I agree with others here that this is probably more an accident of internal dysfunction than a brilliant strategy. It might still work though.
amelius 11y ago
> A report from The Economic Times of India says that Google is working on a fifth instant messaging program. This one reportedly won't require a Google account and will be aimed at Whatsapp. And how will Google be able to get onto the Whatsapp network and use their proprietary protocols?
- xienze 11y ago
  I think they mean the new app is "aimed at [surpassing] WhatsApp", not that they're building a clone that runs on the WhatsApp network.

152 points by pandatigox 11y ago

During my time at Google, I definitely had the experience of "my" product being killed in preference to a competing product. In one case, I did not even know that the competing product existed until the public press release. What was most frustrating is that the decisions did not seem to be motivated by product superiority. The "winner" was not a better product, or at least this was not demonstrated. Instead the decisions were driven by whichever product better aligned with the internal political winds this week, such as the tension between the Nexus partner model vs the Pixel in-house model. These "strategy shifts" were often preceded by senior leadership shakeups, which were themselves frequent. It was hard to escape the conclusion that the quality of my work was irrelevant. It was demoralizing.

gargarplex 11y ago
You're one of the most prolific and impressive programmers around. I'm sure you could have your choice of product manager...
- onedev 11y ago
  who is he/she?
  - gargarplex 11y ago
    A true programmer's programmer. The author of the fish shell.
  - smcl 11y ago
    Take a look at http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/will-it-optimize.html http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/will-it-optimize.html and more posts on that blog, some very interesting stuff there.
- threeseed 11y ago
  Office politics unfortunately often wins over talent and results. And it's very hard for most people to recognise why certain things are happening within a company if you aren't immersed in the politics on a day to day basis.
jackgavigan 11y ago
Is it true that, at Google, product managers have to convince engineers to work on their product? For context, this answer on Quora[1] suggests that the product team does not report to the product manager and don't have to do anything they say, so the product manager has to convince people if she wants to get things done. 1: https://www.quora.com/What-makes-someone-a-great-product-manager-at-Google/answer/Edward-Ho-1 https://www.quora.com/What-makes-someone-a-great-product-man...
- timdierks 11y ago
  Everyone is a volunteer. Not just at Google, but in many other situations as well. At Google, pretty much any of the engineers can go and get a job at another company whenever they want. So they tend to have access to internal mobility; Google would rather let them fill a different job at the company than have them quit. Thus, managers (either engineering managers or product managers) don't have a lot of coercive capability. The path to success is to not be a manager who forces people to do your bidding, it is to be a leader who persuades your colleagues of your vision. At times the tool of command can be used, but it's best used lightly. My goal is to be service-oriented: my job as a manager is to help my engineers be super-successful, and one of the ways I try to do that is by finding paths for the organization to build great software and leading my team and other teams to cooperating to build it.
  - jackgavigan 11y ago
    What you've said is all great and admirable but it's also a bit aspirational and idealistic, and I'm left wondering: How do decisions get made? For example, let's say there's a list of ideas and suggestions for new functionality and fixes for a product - How does it get prioritised? By consensus? I can't help thinking that there's a risk that the priorities end up being the stuff that the engineers are most interested in working on - i.e. interesting problems and challenges get picked up enthusiastically, while boring, tedious bugs or usability fixes languish unresolved because nobody's particularly interested or enthused in spending time on them, when there's far more interesting/fun stuff to do.

burd691 11y ago

What about search?!

nostrademons 11y ago
Shortly before I joined in 2009, Google had embarked on a project to rewrite Search from the ground up. It was canceled after a couple years, and in many cases the work of individual subteams was folded into the main search engine. Search also periodically rewrites parts of the search stack. Caffeine [1] was a complete rewrite of the indexing system, Hummingbird [2] is a near-complete rewrite of the ranking algorithm, Panda [3] and Penguin [4] were partial rewrites of the ranking algorithm, the serving system continually gets rewritten, and we redid the visual design every year starting in 2010 [5][6][7][8]. You'll notice that there was no 2012 redesign; it was canceled. That's what happens when the "new" search isn't better than the "old" search. [1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hummingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hummingbird [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Penguin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Penguin [5] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis-googles-new-look.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis-... [6] http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-how-larry-page-engineered-beautiful-revolution http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-ho... [7] http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-new-unified-design-for-mobile-devices-172991 http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-new-unified-desi... [8] https://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introduction.html https://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introduct...
- boomzilla 11y ago
  Can you disclose how much "better" for such rewrites? And what metrics were measured? I guess there is a conflict between CTRs on organic results and ads, so one has to be picked (or maybe a combo of the two). And what the magnitudes of the improvements? a few percentage or a few bp?

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Old inside joke at Google, you know your project is "important" with two or three other groups are working on exactly the same thing. When I was there, it was debated whether or not this selected for the right attributes (it tends to reward groups that execute fast versus ones that execute well). It did not help that some times when they didn't do that (just let one group build it) they didn't always get the result they wanted either.

jsnell 11y ago
The worst offenders were probably workflow / pipelining systems; just about everyone needed to write sequences of mapreduces, and thought that the existing solutions weren't a perfect fit. IIRC there were at one point over a dozen different workflow systems in use and advertised to at least some degree to other groups, which made picking one even harder due to the paradox of choice. The solution was of course to write a new one.
- thechao 11y ago
  When I studied library design, the situation you described was the basic indicator of "domain misunderstanding": no one understands the domain well enough to produce a suitable abstraction. If the problem persists for a couple of decades, it might imply that domains have been improperly mixed.
n0us 11y ago
This explains the vast inconsistencies in quality of Google's products and also the feeling I get that none of them ever quite work together the way you would expect.

vladikoff 11y ago

Article from 2014 - "Oct 17, 2014 5:00am PDT"

dkarapetyan 11y ago

This isn't a google strategy. This is a generic Big Corp. strategy. The same thing happens at eBay, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc. It's not a good thing. It is usually an indication that the higher ups don't trust each other or are trying to one up each other for the year end bonus round. It is just a wasteful strategy overall and only happens at places that can afford it.

nostrademons 11y ago
It's usually encouraged by the even-higher-up, i.e. the CEO. It's actually fairly rational from his perspective: he has more options, he can cover more of the market, he insures against product failure, and his reports can't get complacent. Yes, it's wasteful, and yes, it's demoralizing as hell when you're the ordinary employee whose product just got canceled. But then, you should understand (at least at some level) that your work is meaningless when you go join a big company: the reason they're big is because their product is already "good enough" for millions of people.
- gohrt 11y ago
  It's not different at a small company. At a small company you have "pivots" or "going out of business" or "competition from another company", instead of "competition from another team"
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    Almost makes you think that the part that's wrong is the narrative that we're sold as kids, y'know "Work hard and good things will happen to you." It's more like "Work hard and there is a ~2-3% chance good things will happen to you, but if you don't work hard there's a 0% chance good things will happen to you."
    - dorgo 11y ago
      Be clever and good things will happen to you.

rconti 11y ago

Well, now we know what happened to all of the previously-good Google products. I hate to complain about free products, but will make an exception for Google, which constantly removes features and usability as if a PM's bonus depends on it. Give me back my color-coded GMail threads, ability to edit the subject without multiple clicks, and view features not hidden by submenus. And that's just GMail, and that's just off the top of my head.

tracker1 11y ago
LOL.. I switched to Hangouts (from Voice) for my SMS, voicemail and messaging... on my phone, it works pretty nicely... on the desktop actually sending an SMS from my GV number to a contact is nearly impossibly without entering the phone number by hand.
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  Not available for me in the UK.
- icelancer 11y ago
  >on the desktop actually sending an SMS from my GV number to a contact is nearly impossibly without entering the phone number by hand. Yes, this is absolutely ridiculous. I have to look up the phone number using Google Voice plugin (which is nothing but a directory search now since Hangouts disables it), copy/paste the number into Hangouts, and SMS/call from there. It is completely unacceptable.
vidarh 11y ago
I keep seriously wanting to write a webmail client again... Inbox is great in many ways, but it's also taken so many wrong steps, such as making it harder to see timestamp etc. and obscuring subjects.

hartator 11y ago

They forgot Picasa vs Google Photo!

sebastianavina 11y ago
and youtube vs google video
- danieldk 11y ago
  This is mentioned at the end. However, Youtube was acquired and at the time Google Video already existed. Given the traction that Youtube already had, it's no wonder that they purchased Youtube regardless having their own video service.
Digit-Al 11y ago
They put Eclipse vs Android Studio, but Eclipse is not a Google product.
- thescrewdriver 11y ago
  At first glance I read that as "...but Eclipse is not a great product" Android Studio is based on IntelliJ which is a far more polished IDE.
- Grazester 11y ago
  No this is Google simply replacing Eclipse with a superior product and was slowly transitioning people to it. Did you really expect Google to drop Android development support for Eclipse overnight?

gooooooganon 11y ago

There is no strategy. The thought of Google having a central product management strategy -- and successfully executing it across many teams -- is hilarious to people who work there. It's chaos that outsiders try to read into. This is a consequence of bad internal economics and incentives. Google PMs and engineers are incentivized to create new products and ship them by quarterly deadlines (perf/promo cycles) rather than align their teams towards a cohesive user experience. Thinking this way would occasionally cause teams to, gasp, not build a product they wanted to build. Everyone needs to ship something, ideally something new. After all, you don't get promoted for deciding not to build something. I've seen awful products/implementations go out the door and get killed or reimplemented soon thereafter. And people still list these as "achievements" on promotion packets (and they get promoted despite the product failing!). The company is kind of trying to address this by changing promotion criteria, but it's culturally ingrained and won't change for some time.

72deluxe 11y ago
Informative, thanks. Is this why Google announces sweeping changes every year at i/o and redesigns the Android UI every single year? eg. use the dedicated search button on the phone, btw this button no longer exists, respond to the menu button, btw this button no longer exists, put menus at the top, put menus at the bottom, use hamburger menus, don't use them, use swipe navigation, use swipe navigation if it fits with your app, do things to ENCHANT and DELIGHT the user. According to the UI guidelines, clicking a button should cause the user to burst into tears of joy due to the delightful experience they have just had. Is it because they need to appear to be producing new things all the time? If so, it'd also explain why some products get released to much fanfare (and applause from the BBC Technology news team it seems) and then get no updates, maintenance and get binned a few years later. (Many examples of this). The most annoying of these was the Talk replacement for Android (Hangouts) which got rid of features of Talk and still has an abysmal tablet interface and general bugginess ("Did you not get my call???" "No"). I am not meaning to be overly critical, but the constant change for the sake of change is wearying. I have been using Android since the G1 and every i/o they have redesigned the interface. The examples of "bad UI" and "bad text" are all from their own older versions of Android. It makes you wish they'd make their mind up.

pftom 11y ago

It's just a waste of productivity. Not a strategy.

Symmetry 11y ago
Back in the day people explained the USSR's superior economic performance (according to the public data at the time) as being due to the USSR not wasting resources on competition like capitalist countries did. If you assume the planner knows the right thing to do is that's actually a perfectly valid argument. It's actually pretty heartening to see the people leading Google don't believe this about themselves, though, because people who think that usually aren't correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect
dragonwriter 11y ago
> It's just a waste of productivity. Not a strategy. Whether or not its Google's actual strategy, multiple parallel development efforts with different profiles (e.g., risk, timeline, etc.) is certainly a strategy, and one recognized in many works on lean software development. If something is important enough to your broader business strategy, not hedging by taking multiple approaches, while devoting resources that could be expended doing that on other, less critical, efforts, may be the real waste of productivity.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

agentPrefect 11y ago

I must admit - this is kind of why I started moving AWAY from Google. You just don't have any guarantee that the product you're using won't be shelved in leu of a "better" (newer) solution.

porter 11y ago

Eric Schmidt used to say: "Our goal is to have more at-bats per unit of time and effort than anyone else in the world."

ctdonath 11y ago

I recall Apple's norm is running a half-dozen competing designs at once, choosing the best and killing the rest come delivery date.

bane 11y ago

Yay, more wood behind fewer products! And no wood behind things people actually want or use! And the wood behind the ones we liked ended up all warped and weird!

BurningFrog 11y ago

One reason that small companies so often beat big ones is that if you have 10 startup teams competing agains one big company team, one of the 10 will probably make the winning product. So a big company that is open to doing 2-3 similar things at once should be more likely to produce winners. That said, as an ex Googler, I agree with others here that this is probably more an accident of internal dysfunction than a brilliant strategy. It might still work though.

amelius 11y ago

> A report from The Economic Times of India says that Google is working on a fifth instant messaging program. This one reportedly won't require a Google account and will be aimed at Whatsapp. And how will Google be able to get onto the Whatsapp network and use their proprietary protocols?

xienze 11y ago
I think they mean the new app is "aimed at [surpassing] WhatsApp", not that they're building a clone that runs on the WhatsApp network.