June 01, 2007

Robert Cringely has a fun article about Google and its policy of letting internal geniuses work on their own projects.

He says :


First there are those thousands of ideas and technologies that are being developed by Google employees in the 20 percent of their week devoted specifically for that purpose. That number of new ideas is far too high to be practical and too high even to be considered safe.

Say the Google Geniuses come up with 4,000 business ideas or technologies per year, which is probably around the current number. Let's guess that one percent of these ideas are truly great -- boffo ideas that one could easily build a company around. That's 40 world-beating ideas. And after the 40 absolutely top ideas, let's say there are another 360 ideas that are pretty darned good -- certainly good enough to pitch to the venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road. The remaining 3,600 ideas are, of course, crap, and can be forgotten by everyone except their inventors, whom I'll get back to in a minute.

Assuming Google executives have the insight to know which of their 4,000 proffered ideas are world-class, they then have to decide which 40 to pursue. Such an assumption is giving even Google too much credit, believe me. No matter how smart they are, issues of loyalty, prejudice, and the odd hangover will result in some less-good ideas making it through but mainly great ideas being eliminated. But this doesn't really matter because the larger question is: How many good ideas can Google pursue vigorously per year? The number isn't 40. It isn't even 20. The number of ideas that a company the size of Google can throw all its weight behind per year is about 10, of which five will probably not be the right ones.


I'm not so sure ... "too many good ideas" looks like the kind of problem that Google ought to know how to turn into an opportunity. (Maybe someone's already is using their 20% time in this direction?)

Firstly, "sort the good stuff from the rest" is Google's raison d’être. There must be dozens of variations on internal prediction markets / social routing networks / ranking algorithms which Google's internal community could use to discover the great ideas.

Second, Cringely's "the number of ideas that a company the size of Google can throw all its weight behind per year is about 10" smells suspiciously like "hit" based, rather than long-tail, thinking. This is a company that specializes in a) having smart, entrepreneurial people inside, and b) supporting large, liquid markets for micro-businesses (via AdSense, Google Checkout etc.) Why, having encouraged 4000 flowers to bloom, would it force them through a vicious filtering to become an official Google product? The answer to the problem of everyone has a product they want to launch ought to be "launch them all", with various degrees of Google official endorsement for those which the company wants to promote.

3 comments:

John Powers said...

"launch them all" brought a big smile to my face.

Robert Cringely makes the case for Google sowing the seeds of its own destruction and it would be interesting to hear what Google executives think. I would like to imagine that they're thinking along the lines you are.

Off topic, but I was looking at The Blue Planet Run Web site just before reading your post. The goal of the foundation is to secure clean drinking water for 200 million people by 2027 through fund raising associated with biannual runs. So there's a "What you can do button" and I noticed that under the category of "Become a Messenger" they award messenger points.

I suppose my reasoning for mentioning that in this post is wondering to what extent your excellent question: "Why the money?" you put forth in TCP/IP vs the Dollar is being asked at Google.

Peerospheric credits of one sort or another are quite ordinary now--people are used to them. The Blue Planet Foundation doesn't have to have thought out their Messenger Points so they can explain them in exquisite detail; they simply make inherent sense to people now.

Robert Cringely presumes "It's all about the money" and when it comes to business that still seems a pretty safe bet. But Google, it seems to me, has made a business from recognizing the inherent value of peerospheric participation. Systems which measure peerospheric participation are so common now. It seems to me that fact changes no only notions of business, but notions of money too.

Sorry for rambling on so, I just have the feeling that Robert Cringely is missing something important about Google as a business. One last link , again on a tangent. It's a NY Times piece on growing pains at Firefox, in particular the formation of a for-profit entity to deal with the tax consideration of the money the Mozilla Foundation receives from Google for their search box on the Firefox start page. There's also the situation that Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm has a for-profit status so it can invest in promising initiatives to do good. Old ways of thinking about business, which serve as a base for Cringely's premise, don't account for the murky arrangements of that TCP/IP vs the Dollar cause.

One reason it would be intersting to hear someone at Google's take on Cringely's premise is that Google as a corporation is in the forefront of this TCP/IP vs the Dollar platform war, even if they always take the side of the dollar.

John Powers said...

Craig Nevill-Manning at the Idea Festival via Ethan Zuckerman:

"And he addresses the secrets of Google corporate culture, mentioning that free food and free messages don’t hurt, but noting that the real benefit is from giving engineers 20% of their time to work on their independent projects, a process that’s led to products like GMail and Froogle."

Composing said...

Yep ... that's definitely worked out for them.