I once had a coworker who used to work at Intel tell me that when a company or product has no competition, it's time to find somewhere else to work, because only bad things will happen to that company's culture.
I kinda suspect that companies in this position are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they foster internal competition, then the place becomes overly political, nobody cooperates, it becomes miserable to work there, and all the good people leave. If they don't, then there's no sense of urgency, everybody goes off and does their own pet project, people waste time on silly stuff, folks who pay attention to external customer needs can't get the necessary internal buy-in, and all the good people leave.
Eventually competition springs up externally, but by then the organization may have ossified so much that it's incapable of responding to it.
It almost makes you think a good idea might be to fund high performing employees to form their own companies to compete with you. Basically incubate your own competitors, but hold a minority stake in their companies.
cisco seems to do that: they allow internal employees to create startups, fund them and acquire a large stake, then if they succeed, fully acquire the companies. There's a cute name for it; something like fold-in innovation? I forget.
Google's innovations all come from entering new markets and competing with other businesses. GMail competed with HotMail and Yahoo!Mail, Maps competed against MapQuest, Chrome competed against Firefox and IE, Android competes against iOS. Offers competes against Groupon, Wallet competes against Paypal/Square/Stripe. Google products that have not had solid competition (Glass, Wave, Groups, Knol, GoogleBase) or that have competition but don't have the management buy-in and flexibility needed to win against that competition (Orkut, Video, Jaiku, Dodgeball, Buzz, Reader & Blogger in their later years) have not tended to do as well.
Google Search languished for many years (roughly 2004-2009) while Google invented all these other products. Then Bing launched in 2009, and there was a period of rapid innovation from 2009-2011 that gave us Search Options, one unified search across all corpora, 2 visual redesigns, realtime search, Instant, Authorship, Search Plus Your World, and Knowledge/Answer Cards. Then things slowed down again in 2012 when everyone realized Bing was a joke. I personally witnessed - to both my benefit and my detriment - both extremes I mentioned in my original post.
My guess is that Google is still much too young a company to esperience any of the issues. Maybe once the founders are out for good, and we see more tradtional MBA-style leadership, the traditional illnesses will start emerging too.
Up to now Google has avoided the problem by consistently biting off more than it can chew, landing some borderline-success and improving on from there. This is what they did with search, advertising, book digitalization, online videos, etc. In short, there wasn't much need for internal competition, since they were actively looking for new challenges from the outside.
It's great that they're doing all of this, but I'm curious whether at some point (a few decades from now) they'll eventually decide that all the effort isn't really worth it and focus only on the high-margin stuff.
Really? They seem to have slowed a lot in recent years, and a lot of their most innovative stuff is coming from acquisitions rather than internally. They had some good ideas that kept them better a bit longer (catering, 20% time - which I hear is now much less solid than it once was), but they now look rather like a bigger Cisco.
I'd expect the best people to leave soon or have left already (we already see a lot less enthusiasm about working there than there used to be), and Google to decline like any other big company.
Maybe. But as far as I know, Chrome was a 20% project originally, not an acquisition. And then you have stuff like Spanner, which came out relatively recently, or Speedy. They still make new, interesting technologies, even if a lot of it is not on the radar of ordinary consumers.
Chrome had full time engineers fairly quickly. Externally I saw Google pull back resources that were working full time on Firefox and hired several engineers that were Mozilla experts Ben G., Doron, WTC.
No doubt, but there is nothing wrong with that picture. Why wouldn't you do that if an engineer came in with a prototype and a compelling reason why his/her pet project should be important to the company?
Google Fiber, the Internet on hot air balloons and driverless cars are all fairly innovative projects with no known competitors. There's also the secret project that Andy Rubin's team is working on and who knows what else we don't know about brewing at GoogleX.
How on earth is Google Fiber an innovation? Please explain. Fibre Internet and Gigabit internet can be had for years across many cities of the world (Hong Kong, Singapore, Istanbul) and even in select cities in the US. What was the innovation done there?
The Hot Air Balloons are a bit of a gimmick, but definitely innovative and new as is the driverless car project which could have tremendous impact on transportation of the future.
I kinda suspect that companies in this position are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they foster internal competition, then the place becomes overly political, nobody cooperates, it becomes miserable to work there, and all the good people leave. If they don't, then there's no sense of urgency, everybody goes off and does their own pet project, people waste time on silly stuff, folks who pay attention to external customer needs can't get the necessary internal buy-in, and all the good people leave.
Eventually competition springs up externally, but by then the organization may have ossified so much that it's incapable of responding to it.