Not defending Google, but this is dangerous myopia:
> Those are the kinds of mistakes that kill most companies.
All companies make big mistakes and burn lots of money on failed projects. The difference between a medium-sized company and a huge company is that a huge one can absorb the cost of failure, shrug and carry on. Medium-sized one will indeed die.
The difference between a large company and a huge company is that while both can survive the cost of a failed megaproject, for a large company the failure is probably enough to warrant a rethink and change in strategy. A huge company knows (from their aggregate financial metrics, of course) that what they are doing is right and proper, and will take the failure as just one more datapoint.
The moral is that there is no moral. (Or if we're talking business, morals.) Wild success begets arrogance, which begets organisational cargo-culting.
I'm not sure what the debate is. I'm all for changing strategies. My claim is that they don't have data on success from engineering. As evidenced by every pivot they have done being driven as much from marketing as technical.
Chrome, as an example, had a ton of marketing push behind it. Still some solid engineering, but not really any better than Firefox. Wasn't really any better than edge, but ms decided to drop the push for their own tech.
So, my question is what engineering successes do they have to back up their data on what will succeed?
I think you could pull in some of the ml work they are doing. Not sure how much data they actually have there, though.
> Those are the kinds of mistakes that kill most companies.
All companies make big mistakes and burn lots of money on failed projects. The difference between a medium-sized company and a huge company is that a huge one can absorb the cost of failure, shrug and carry on. Medium-sized one will indeed die.
The difference between a large company and a huge company is that while both can survive the cost of a failed megaproject, for a large company the failure is probably enough to warrant a rethink and change in strategy. A huge company knows (from their aggregate financial metrics, of course) that what they are doing is right and proper, and will take the failure as just one more datapoint.
The moral is that there is no moral. (Or if we're talking business, morals.) Wild success begets arrogance, which begets organisational cargo-culting.