HOW GOOGLE WORKS
Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg
John Murray
286 pages; Rs 650
Remember Google Books, the grand project to digitise all the books on earth? It began in 2002 when Co-Founder Larry Page was wondering if it was possible to make every book ever published searchable online.
Do you know how Mr Page initiated the project? Well, here is what he did not do. He did not call a meeting of senior management. He did not organise an offsite or create a dedicated project team with its own mission statement. And he did not hire a management consultant who could write a report on the way forward.
What he did do was to get hold of a digital camera, rig it to a tripod, point the camera down at the table, turn on a metronome (to pace his movements) and start snapping pictures. Someone had to turn the 300 pages of course. That someone was Marissa Mayer, then a Google product manager and now chief executive officer (CEO) of Yahoo. It took 40 minutes to complete. And over 30 million books are believed to have been scanned now (according to Wikipedia).
Heard of Google Street View and how it came to life ? Here goes. Co-Founder Sergey Brin took a drive around town with a camera and snapped a photo every few seconds. He then showed off the pictures in the next staff meeting to "rally support". More folks pitched in and soon it was a massive earth-wide exercise. Street View today covers over five million miles of roads.
That in many ways is How Google Works, a new, insightful and smartly restrained - as far as real secrets go - book on the search giant's functioning, written by Google insiders Eric Schmidt, earlier CEO and now chairman, and Jonathan Rosenberg, advisor to Google CEO Mr Page. So don't expect much criticism, except in passing.
Google is a great inventor, no doubt. But one big strength, at least as it emerges from the book, is continuous innovation. So like the book initiative, projects may begin with parts bought at Fry's (an electronics store near Mountain View, California), but then rapidly scale up to something users all over the world experience.
Also, unlike Apple, Google prefers to take its products to consumers as quickly as possible, believing in the adage, "the perfect is the enemy of the good". Which explains why products such as Google Glass have been around for a year but still not in full retail sales mode.
And the changes continue. There are some 500 improvements in Google's search engine annually. This includes stuff such as Google Instant, which tries to anticipate search results even as you are typing in the query and, thus, saving time and, presumably, brain power. Search and display advertising make up 95 per cent of Google's revenues, by the way.
The innovation in turn is a mix of the formal and informal. Some of Google's most interesting innovations appear not to emerge from, once again, strategy meetings. Often, it's a challenge a bunch of engineers who were not even connected to the original project decided to take up.
If you haven't guessed already, Google hates market research. The company is clear that it will only use technical insights. Quite likely this is a Valley thing. Though by Mr Schmidt's own admission, it's tough to recreate an Apple environment where so much genius flowed from one person. The last part are my words.
The success of most Google products is credited to a technical insights approach, and failure to the lack of it. "In 2009, when we reviewed our product line and started to see a pattern emerging: the best products had achieved their success based on technical factors, not business ones, whereas the less stellar ones lacked technical distinction," say the authors.
And there you have an admission of what's failed, too: iGoogle, Desktop, Notebook, Sidewiki, Knol, Health and even Reader. "They either lacked underlying technical insights from the outset, or the insights upon which they were based became dated as the Internet evolved. And of course, Google defaults to open source wherever feasible. The complete opposite of Apple whose mantra it is to control every aspect of the software-hardware equation."
With all this talk of innovation, who is Google's innovation officer ? Actually according to Google the very concept stinks. In Mr Schmidt's words, "Innovation stubbornly resists traditional, MBA-style management tactics. Unlike most other things in business, it cannot be owned, mandated or scheduled." And he quotes a colleague, "Innovative people do not need to be told to do it, they need to be allowed to do it."
All this boils down to people, the "smart creatives" as they are called in Google. Here is where this book is perhaps worth a clear buy, providing as it does, detailed workings of Google's hiring process. Did you know, for instance, there is a 30-minute limit on all job interviews? Or how Google says "no" and the process for doing it. Finally, how hiring is not a human resources manager's job alone. And nor is it hierarchical.
The authors say Google's founders have borrowed heavily from academia in the manner the organisation has been laid out. And for sure, Mr Page's stress on the freedom to think from first principles and real-world physics has been a key driver for success. Of course, the mountains of free food, endlessly lavished upon Googlers from Mountain View to Mumbai, must help, too.
