Larry Page's Google 3.0The company co-founder and his star deputies are trying to root out bureaucracy and rediscover the nimble moves of youth
Very good article on discussing the challenge of a very successful company change to maintain their growth
"Every Monday afternoon at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., more than a dozen of Google's (GOOG) top executives gather in the company's boardroom….The unstated goal is to save the search giant from the ossification that can paralyze large corporations. It won't be easy, because Google is a tech conglomerate, an assemblage of parts that sometimes work at cross-purposes….
….Although Google recently reported that fourth-quarter profits jumped 29 percent over the previous year, its stock rose only 13.7 percent over the past 12 months, disappointing investors and lagging the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index. Google is being outpaced by rivals such as Facebook in social networking. In 2010, Facebook served up more display ads than either Google or Yahoo! (YHOO)—and was visited by more U.S. Internet users. And Apple (AAPL) is setting the pace in mobile computing, with beloved products that use a proprietary operating system that can be closed off to Google's services if the company so chooses.
On top of all that, there are antitrust inquiries in Washington and Europe, the defection of some top Google executives for opportunities elsewhere, and perhaps the most serious rap against the company: that its loosely organized structure is growing unwieldy and counterproductive.
The creative chaos inside Google's halls—a decentralized jungle of innovation, as one prominent venture capitalist puts it—once empowered employees to make bold moves, such as creating Gmail, the search-based e-mail system. Other than Android, the culture has recently produced a string of flops, such as Google Buzz, a Twitter clone, and Google Wave, a wonky service that let people collaborate online.
No comments:
Post a Comment