Posted on Wednesday 16 November 2005 - Popularity: unranked
Not too long ago, Google was almost anyone’s favorite web company, but as with every other company that gets huge, some people start to fear the new giant and Google is definitely one with $6 billion a year in revenue and $7.6 billion in cash. However, Google managed to stay special even now as they became a real giant and that’s mostly because of their developer philosophy:
Google prides itself on hiring only the truly brilliant (and the unabashedly arrogant, rivals say) and believes the crowd always outsmarts anyone inside it. It shares all the information it can with as many employees as possible, encouraging debate but insisting on like-minded cooperation. It also pursues a rapid-fire food-fight strategy that throws out ideas as fast as possible, to see what sticks.
Brin and Page have created a corporate organism that tackles most big projects in small, tightly focused teams, setting them up in an instant and breaking them down weeks later without remorse. “Their view is that there is much greater progress if you have many small teams going out at once,” Schmidt says. The mission overall: to collect “all the world’s information” and make it accessible to everyone. “It’s a cause.”
Hundreds of projects go on at the same time. Most teams throw out new software in six weeks or less and look at how users respond hours later. With 82 million visitors and 2.3 billion searches in a month, Google can try a new user interface or some other wrinkle on just 0.1% of its users and get massive feedback, letting it decide a project’s fate in weeks.
For Google, a beta release isn’t a marketing strategy as some called them, it’s a direct result of their developer philosophy. The following Forbes article takes a deep look inside Google and shows you why they manage to get new and interesting web services and software out almost weekly.
