Nice piece by LA Times’ Chris Gaither on Brin’s latest call to engineeers at the ‘plex: Stop throwing so much pasta against the wall, I can’t take it!
This may come from Sergey’s inability to spend any more time in the Japanese shaking chair (see link for why).
From the piece:
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In another sign of Google Inc.’s growth from start-up to corporate behemoth, the company’s top executives said Thursday that they had begun telling engineers to stop launching so many new services and instead focus on making existing ones work together better.
The shift is a major departure from Google’s previous strategy of launching new services rapid-fire and highlights the 8-year-old company’s struggle to stay focused during swift growth.
Co-founder Sergey Brin is leading a companywide initiative called “Features, not products.” He said the campaign started this summer when Google executives realized that myriad product releases were confusing their users.
“It’s worse than that,” said Brin, Google’s president of technology. “It’s that I was getting lost in the sheer volume of the products that we were releasing.”
I hope that does not mean curtailing the creativity of fellow scientists at Google…
I really don’t buy this. This is being said for two reasons: PR so everyone knows google is getting focused or to throw off competitors.
Kamal: I would hope it is exactly the opposite. I would hope that by curtailing their spin into pointless engineering micro-product oblivion, Google actually increases the creativity of their scientists… by giving them more time to actually do research instead of having to release some new product every six months.
One of my biggest problems with Google, for years now, is that they are not able to see the value in longer-term research. I hope these Brin quotes are evidence of a shift in thinking.
Brin’s quote towards the end makes me laugh. I was beginning to wonder what the deal was, myself. But while Google’s dance (no pun intended) in technology was beginning to become rather erratic, even for Google, I strongly believe a large part of Google’s popularity is exactly because of their “build it first, then we’ll see if we can monetize it later.” mindset.
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