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.”