Google : Startup Culture, Innovation & Business Growth

Google’s voluntary projects are well known in the industry – We earlier covered Joe Beda’s perspective about the nature of these projects – he clarified that while you don't know if the time is being used wisely. You want the engineer to do what he/she thinks is the next big thing, not what management thinks. Most people want to do the next cool think that will fire people up both inside and outside the company and may end up making Google money. The fact that needed to be highlighted then was that Google hires the best talent - google's recruitment criteria and method of selection is indeed legendary. Businessweek profiles Marissa Mayer as a powerful force inside the high-flying company. She has the clout,power and influence as a champion of innovation inside google. Mayer has her hands on virtually everything the average Google user sees - from the look of its Web pages to new software for searching your hard drive. And she helps decide which new initiatives get the attention of the company's founders and which don't. With Google’s stated mission is to "organize the world's information" - only in recent months has the staggering scope of their ambition come into full relief. Google is moving to digitize the world's libraries, to offer all comers free voice calls, to provide satellite images of the world, and perhaps to give away wireless broadband service to millions of people. Google really seems to believe it can make every bit of information available to anyone anywhere, and direct all those bits - whether text, audio, or video - through its computers before they hit users' brains. Businessweek provides a peep into her style of working - An ideas mailing list is open to anyone at Google who wants to post a proposal. Mayer figures out how to make sure good ideas bubble to the surface and get the attention they need. The task is becoming more complex as Google grows fast. Office hours are just one way in which Mayer connects with inventive engineers and managers. Another is Google's ideas mailing list, the e-mail thread to which anyone can submit or comment on an idea. At times, the thread more resembles a form of techie Darwinism. Google newcomers, who proffer an especially obvious suggestion (“Why don’t we search blogs”?), or something off-topic like how to arrange the cafeteria tables, often suffer withering rebukes. "It's about 50% new ideas, 50% indoctrination of new employees," says Mayer. What she thinks will be essential for continued innovation is for Google to keep its sense of fearlessness. "I like to launch (products) early and often. That has become my mantra," she says.
My Take:Businessweek has done disservice to Google by writing such a trivial article on the inside workings of Google. Google is really onto something big as this one listing key work within Google shows. Google's startup culture would find this process too boring - as an engineering led company and with a constellation of talent, Google sure must have a more rigorous mechanism and definitely a much more sound plan to conquer the world. The very fact that Google's announcements shows a method proves contrary to the marketing claims made in the article. If on the other hand, if this is what is really happening inside google( which i hope not), it would clearly undermine google's ability to sustain its leadership and support the 88 billion marketcap. I think in the past, Xerox used to have more rigorous process in actualizing ideas – though they could never reach the results to the market – fast enough. Apple’s early days may showed similar traits.