After listening to the Google Story by David.A.Vise and Mark Malseed from audible.com, I was convinced that nobody could've ever imagined the power of internet, as much as Larry and Sergei, the young founders of the company. Starting with a small idea of helping the university campus with a way to wade through hundreds of research papers and the like, Google grew powerful enough to search billions of web pages within no time and it was no small achievement. Not only is the search done for keywords, but an intelligent search is employed that fundamentally** looks for references to the resultant page from other web pages. The search is primarily made possible by the very large hardware resources at the Google labs. But, Google didn't stop at this. It continued to create excellent solutions for many diverse problems. The very high calibre of work done at the Google, caused a brain-drain from the likes of Microsoft. So, the very people who created the revolution at Microsoft, begain to contribute to the revolution led by Google.
What exactly is this revolution? To understand this, we will take a peek at the products and technologies developed at the Google. The right mix of innovation and strategy is the reason for the enormous growth of Google. It actively encourages its employees to spend 20% of their work time on their pet projects. These 'pet projects' of its employees are evaluated and once found suitable, the launch is made onto the Google lab pages. This is based on my assumption about the way Google works, but I am sure it won't be too different from the reality. The reason for my assumption is that there are too many products, so diverse in nature at the Google labs. I haven't seen any other company as powerful and popular as Google, adopting the same strategy for product development. Google is very innovative in its approach, not only in its solutions for problems, but in the identification of the problems as well (perhaps to a higher degree). They work with an end in mind, but they do a thorough job of that. This, I believe, is the single-most reason why Google is where it is today. It recognizes the importance of people to build up the reputation, the business of it as many other companies claim to do on their own, but fail to live fully up to it. Google's strategy is unique and three-pronged as I see it. Firstly, it promotes innovativeness within the company and keeps up with top-notch technology. This continues to attract the brightest minds of the industry into the Google. This strategy has a ripple effect and the growth is spiral. Secondly, this strategy, which gives freedom to experiment and innovate to the 'Googlians', causes its own business to flourish and profits (which come primarily through advertising) to grow leaps and bounds. Thirdly, and most importantly, Google encourages 'public' participation by way of open-source technologies. For those who may not know, Firefox (see my post on this open-source browser a few months back) is liberally supported by Google. It is possible that Google had a hidden agenda to beat Microsoft with this strategy. But, it shouldn't matter to the world, as long as things are for good, which is really what I see now! I believe, all this are positive indicators of a revolution under way, which I call the 'Internet revolution - the Google way'...
**The real algorithm used by the google search engine is quite complex and discussions about this can be found in sources elsewhere in the net; and don't make a mistake - search using google!
No comments:
Post a Comment