Linking to competitors, cramped offices, and accidentally creating Instagram - Unpacking Google’s playbook
How Google Works? Here's the lowdown.
“It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”- John Wooden
To talk about the greatness of Google in building a massively successful business in this internet-crazed age is to mention to an adult that the colour of the sky is blue. However, despite all the tomes written about the internet giant (Amazon lists more than 20,000 titles mentioning Google), it’s impossible to still truly capture the essence of this company.
Is it the same company that built hugely successful Orkut but shuddered to even compete with Facebook? Is Google the company that censured itself in China or the company that cited its liberal ideas when it decided to exit the world’s most populous nation? Is Google an innovator like no other that brought the world closer or just a conniving entity that looks to obfuscate more than it reveals about itself?
The problem with Google is that it’s inherently complex and contradictory. Its executives speak the language of innovation, breaking things, and startup culture but its practices are closer to that of an old steel mill corporation that preys on competitors, is extremely top-heavy, and often tries to dominate the market by buying off any challenger before they know what hit’em.
As Google stands on a crossroads today having built the most profitable advertising business in the world, it stares at two options - whether to continue selling ads or to sell a subscription to itself. The shift has already started. Google will soon launch a subscription to its hugely popular Photos app, it’s made YouTube TV more expensive in the US.
It continues to find ways to make as many people be hooked to its devices (Chromebook, smart home devices), subscriptions (YouTube, Photos), or its services (Cloud) as its advertising revenue could dwindle in the coming years – something Google admitted in an SEC filing as a serious business risk.
How, then, we must think of Google? Is it a profit-generating machine at its core or a template for success in the innovation age?
If former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former VP of Product Jonathan Rosenburg are to be believed, Google is both and something much more nebulous. In How Google Works, a book that spans the company’s early history to its blunders, the co-authors create a narrative that’s almost too good to be true (btw, so is Google’s stock performance). While offering an inside into Google’s functioning, they serve up the same contradictions and try to make sense of them into a cohesive narrative albeit with a perfect 20/20 hindsight.
By the end of the book, even in the highly unlikely event that one isn’t convinced that Google is star-spangled awesome, the readers are likely to take away a lot of wisdom that can only come from decades of being at the cutting edge of innovation and creating things that are bigger than one’s ever dreamed of.
Without pontificating much more and pretending to be a management guru, I will leave you with some of the most insightful tidbits from the book that can probably help you build your own playbook – even if your playbook is titled ‘How not to be Google’!
On dreaming big
The first step to building a rocket is to dream about the surface of Mars and the kind of flag your colony would have. Creating things of unimaginable nature requires ambition of an unprecedented scale. Here are Google executives on the importance of ambition:
One night I had a dream (literally) and woke up thinking … what if you could download the whole Web and just keep the links? So I grabbed a pen and scribbled down the details to figure out whether it was really possible. The idea of building a search engine wasn’t even on my radar at the time. It was only later that Sergey and I realized ranking web pages by their links could generate much better search results. Gmail started out as a pipe dream too. And when Andy Rubin started Android a decade ago, most people thought aligning the mobile industry around an open-source operating system was nuts.
It’s why we’ve put so much energy into hiring independent thinkers at Google and setting big goals. Because if you hire the right people and have big enough dreams, you’ll usually get there. And even if you fail, you’ll probably learn something important.
The math works: If you do something 1.3X every quarter, you’ll hit 10X within three years.
Examples of roof shots (as opposed to loftier moonshots) include Google search, which launches around five hundred improvements every year, and our powerful and efficient data centers, which started as a pile of machines in the cages of an external hosting service. When you look at how great search is now, and at the amazing efficiency of the data centers that power it, these developments can seem like moonshots, because they are well over ten times better than when we started. But they didn’t get that way through a few giant leaps. Rather, it was lots of small steps that built them.
Go out there and have huge dreams, then show up to work the next morning and relentlessly incrementally achieve them.
On good marketing failing bad products faster
As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, says: “In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”
With so much information and so many good choices, it’s harder for an incumbent, crummy restaurant (chain or not) to survive, regardless of the size of its marketing budget, and easier for a new, high-quality place to gain a word-of-mouth foothold.
And the customer has a voice; provide a bad product or lousy service at your peril.
Have you ever heard of Google Notebook? How about Knol? iGoogle? Wave? Buzz? PigeonRank? These were all Google products that, while they had some merit, never caught on with users. They weren’t good enough, and so they died a deserved death.
The tailwind of Google’s marketing and PR engine and the brand wasn’t nearly strong enough to overcome a headwind of mediocrity.
On helping create Instagram
Once, Salar Kamangar was impressed with one of our young marketing associates and wanted to transfer said young man into the APM program. Unfortunately, the APM program only accepted candidates with degrees in computer science, which this associate didn’t have.
Although Salar argued that the young associate was a self-taught programmer and had a “history of working closely with engineers and shipping things,” several influential execs, including Jonathan, steadfastly refused to expand the aperture and denied the transfer.
The young marketing associate, Kevin Systrom, eventually left Google. He co-founded a company called Instagram, which he later sold to Facebook for a billion dollars.109 You’re welcome, Kevin!
On cramped offices and limited budgets
A lack of resources forces ingenuity.
In 2002, Larry Page began wondering if it was possible to make every book ever published searchable online—not just the most popular titles or some other subset, but every single book. (We later calculated there were precisely 129,864,880 different book titles in the world.)
As the co-founder, Larry could have assigned a team of engineers to the problem and given them a nice budget. Instead, he got a digital camera, rigged it to a tripod, and set the contraption up on a table in his office. He pointed the camera down at the table, turned on a metronome to pace his movements, and started snapping pictures while Marissa Mayer turned the pages.
Based on this crude prototype, they were able to estimate what it took to digitize a book and made some calculations that the audacious project was indeed feasible. Google Books was born.
Sergey later employed a similar approach to see if Google’s Street View project was feasible. He took a drive around town with a camera and snapped a photo every few seconds. He showed off the pictures in Eric’s next staff meeting to rally support for what is now called Street View. Today Street View covers over five million miles of roads.
But the facilities-first culture needs to be killed, shot dead before it gains an insidious foothold in the building. Offices should be designed to maximize energy and interactions, not for isolation and status. Smart creatives thrive on interacting with each other. The mixture you get when you cram them together is combustible, so a top priority must be to keep them crowded.
On linking to Yahoo
To grow its search platform in the late ’90s, Google focused on one thing: being great at search, which we measured along five axes—speed (fast is always better than slow), accuracy (how relevant are the results to the user’s query?), ease of use (can everyone’s grandparents use Google?), comprehensiveness (are we searching the entire Internet?), and freshness (how fresh are the results?).
The company was so intent on getting users the right answers, that Google search results often included links to Yahoo, AltaVista, and Ask Jeeves at the bottom of the page so users could easily try those sites if they didn’t like Google’s results.
Finally, let’s hear why we approach our careers all wrong
In business, and particularly in high tech, it’s not enough to be great at what you do, you have to catch at least one really big wave and ride it all the way into shore.
When people are right out of school, they tend to prioritize company first, then job, then industry. But at this point in their career that is exactly the wrong order.
The right industry is paramount because while you will likely switch companies several times in your career, it is much harder to switch industries. Think of the industry as the place you surf (in Northern California the most rad waves are at Mavericks, dude) and the company as the wave you catch. You always want to be in the place with the biggest and best waves.
If you choose the wrong company or you have bad luck with an aggro boss who drops in on your first wave, you’ll still have a killer time if you’re surfing in an industry with bodacious waves. (Alright, Mr. Spicoli, that’s enough surfer lingo.)
Conversely, if you choose the wrong industry early in your career, then growth opportunities within your company will be limited. Your boss won’t move, and you’ll be stuck without much leverage when you’re ready to look for jobs at other companies.
Conclusion
If you made it till here, give yourself a pat on the back and Google ‘askew’ (without the quotes). Also, please consider taking a moment to share this piece with others in your network and write to me about the most interesting internet fact you know?
All credits for book excerpts: Schmidt, Eric. How Google Works. John Murray Press. Kindle Edition. Buy it here.