Google

By: Chuck SalterThu Feb 14, 2008 at 6:35 PM

Andy Rubin | photo by Russ Quackenbush

The faces and voices of the world's most innovative company.

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Larry Brilliant | photo by Russ Quackenbush

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Marissa Mayer | photo by Russ Quackenbush

Andy Rubin

Senior Director of Mobile Platforms

"When the company I cofounded was acquired by Google, I expected a process for everything, and that just isn't the case. What's the travel policy? Just don't overspend. Commonsense stuff. There are not a lot of rules and regulations.

We're building an open-source platform for mobile phones called Android. The strategy is to provide Web-style innovation and rapid development on the cell phone, which we think is still in prehistoric times. If you have people developing applications at home, one of them will create the next Facebook. That's the idea behind our mobile mashups. Third-party developers get data from one site and overlay it on something like a Google map. We want to deliver thousands of applications to your phone.

Google can't do everything. And we shouldn't. That's why we formed the Open Handset Alliance with more than 34 partners. Throwing software over the wall isn't going to work. You need handsets based on this software and carriers willing to ship them. I expected FUD: fear, uncertainty, and doubt. But we've seen some key competitors following us. So we know we're doing something right."

Tim Armstrong

President of Advertising and Commerce in North America

"I tell new employees, 'At Google, there are rocks and a stream. You either become a rock, and the stream goes around you, or you get in the stream and move things along and start adding value.' People here don't start with conclusions. They start with questions. If you're open-platform, respectful of others, and really driven to execute, you'll be successful."

Hal Varian

Chief Economist

"At the university [Varian is the former dean of UC Berkeley's School of Information], you'd work on one problem for months at a time. Here, I have a dozen problems I'm working on--auctions; forecasting; ad hoc statistical, econometric analysis such as how the mortgage crisis affects Google--and I get two weeks to work on them.

It's remarkable how well companies reflect the values of the people who founded them. You can see [Thomas] Watson's DNA in IBM 50 years later. You can see Bill Gates in Microsoft 25 years later. I think 20 years from now, you'll see Larry and Sergey [cofounders Page and Brin] and Eric [Schmidt, the CEO] in Google because they set the model: They're keen on innovation, they want analytic work, and they're nice guys."

Larry Brilliant

Executive Director of Google.Org

"No one has built a Google.org before, so we don't have the vocabulary for it. We think of ourselves as a hybrid philanthropy and an experiment. We're not a traditional 501(c)3. We're not primarily using tax-advantaged funds. We have $90 million in a foundation structure, but the majority of the value of the 3 million shares of Google stock and 1% of profits--which turns out to be $2 billion--is not restricted. We also have the resources of talented and socially engaged Googlers. That's our greatest asset.

Creating this from a white sheet of paper has been a classically Googly process. We started out doing VC-industry mapping and looking at the holes in what's the single most important thing to do on climate change, the prevention of communicable diseases, and poverty. We asked, 'Do we have anything to add?' We began with thousands of ideas from Googlers and others in the field and winnowed them down. We made it a straight-out competition: Show up on Monday armed with your data and your plan--where we'd give grants, where we'd make investments, the outcomes--and prove it. Then we got together and ranked each idea. Does it fit on the scale of changing the world? Does it fit Google?

I try to visit our projects in India and Africa and China once a year. I also spend a lot of time inside Google with the product groups hearing about new developments to see which ones apply to our work. One team told us they were going to announce $10 million in prizes for mobile apps, so we said, 'Let's make some that benefit poor people in the developing world. Public-health apps. Economic-development apps.' Now we have the developer community building apps for Google.org."

From Issue 123 | March 2008

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Recent Comments | 56 Total

February 20, 2008 at 5:01pm by Richard Lipscombe

It is true Googlers tell great stories even though they are repetitive - but then they do have great achievements to talk about and so this thing is a feel good advertisement for Google. Nevertheless there is a real issue lurking for the future of innovation at Google - it is simply that the Googleplex has become a limiting factor for innovation. The C21st is all about networked or distributed models for business and their innovators. Let us hope therefore that Google projects in India, China, New York, Ireland, etc come to rapidly outpace and outstrip the innovations homegrown in Mountain View. By 2012 my innovation for Google would be to have the Googleplex concentrating on running and innovating passive revenue models while the engineering and product development is done in clusters offshore or out of the State of California...