“Incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time”

“Larry Page: I worry that something has gone seriously wrong with the way we run companies. If you read the media coverage of our company, or of the technology industry in general, it’s always about the competition. The stories are written as if they are covering a sporting event. But it’s hard to find actual examples of really amazing things that happened solely due to competition. How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing? That’s why most companies decay slowly over time. They tend to do approximately what they did before, with a few minor changes. It’s natural for people to want to work on things that they know aren’t going to fail. But incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time. Especially in technology, where you know there’s going to be non-incremental change.”


Quite a good and rare interview of Larry Page by Wired’s Steven Levy. You can read the entire interview here.

Source: Wired

Don’t be evil - but then you have to compete

Today I read this amazing piece by Gizmodo’s Mat Honan on why Google has lost its way.  It is almost a must read. And then I read a bit more. I do that often when I find something that interests me to find out what others have to say about it.

And yes lately, Google has faced a lot of criticism for deviating from its core values. Maybe. 

True. Maybe Google was this wonderful company who gave you the answers that you needed when you searched for them. But that was a decade ago. Times have changed. So has technology and with it has changed services that people use and the way they use it. 

It was a bit different earlier. People would use the web to give or take information and Google could read through the data and provide relevant results. But that has changed. In an application led social world, things are within a walled garden. Search is not always factual, but also deeply personal. How can Google find the information which I share with my closest friends or  information about things I like, within an app interface and thereby create the relevance by indexing all the backlinks to give me better results? And if they cannot find the information how long can they remain relevant and solely dependent on search?

Am no expert, but here is a small pointer. When I use Google search today, I sometimes need to go through multiple links to find out the exact information that I need. When I use Facebook to search a friend the result is much more finite. When I search twitter using a hashtag, the results are very very finite. My search relevancy on Google is getting lesser and lesser by the day and it will decrease even more. If I need to search an app for my iPhone, I have no other choice but to use the iTunes search option which is awful, but I still don’t have a choice. 

Hence Google is trying to take on mobile and social. But their eco-system is not mobile or social.  Their foundation was the web. So they are trying to create an eco-system which lets them PIVOT. From just being a search company to something more. This is a very hard challenge since early movers have filled the vacuum and consumers are already entrenched with them. To dislodge that you need a superior product and Google has failed till now in delivering that hands down better product for social or mobile.

It is here that the criticism is getting harsher by the day. 

Products like Gplus, or Search Plus Your World, are Google’s effort at staying relevant and doing the pivot. And it has got people up in arms. 

Suddenly the “Don’t be Evil” company is being seen upon as Evil, since it has deviated from its core value and is misplacing the trust of its users by thrusting search results which are not relevant or don’t give the best information.

But my point is, every other company has done it to survive and to stay relevant. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are just doing what they need to do to redefine Google for the next decade, where it will be known for things more than search. Because if they don’t, Google won’t really have relevance just as a standalone search company.

Apple is no longer a company which makes only PCs. Amazon is no longer a company that sells things online. They had to change. To compete. To stay relevant. The thing is that they moved a bit faster and captured a niche which they built upon and capitalized on. Google missed the bus, then failed  and are now trying hard to redefine a niche other than search.

And many of the changes that the other organizations have pushed are also Evil. Patents, proprietary software, OS platforms, distribution processes, they have pushed the boundary on each so that they safeguard their own interests. But no one is calling them evil. 

Example: Yahoo is evil because they have sued Facebook over a particular patent, but Facebook is not evil even though they don’t allow anyone else to access their data- while they happily mine other web network data to find relevant connections? 

There are few companies whose value or vision statement mean anything to me. Take these words- trust, integrity, commitment, innovation, open, honest - do a permutation and use them in different ways and it will define the mission statement for majority of organizations. I say this from personal experience of managing PR/marketing for multiple large organizations. 

So why bother? But brands do bother. Don’t be Evil is a very different vision statement from the regular boiler plate “about” documents. 

Right now as they make a desperate attempt to transform who they were and find out who they want to be or can be, for the next ten years, their efforts are being branded as EVIL. But is it really “Evil” or evolving.

To me its just a process of evolution.

Personally I want a technology landscape where Google is part of the innovation culture, surprising us with beautiful products. Just like they did when they launched Search. I still love it and use it.